E5: Food & Femininity (with Dr. Kate Cairns)

[Music] Hello and welcome to Races Sandwich, a podcast that looks at the intersection between race, food, gender and class. I'm your co-host, Zahir Jon Muhammad. And I'm your co-host, Solay Ho. So we made it to episode 5. 5 is a good number. It's a strong number. And we actually have more episodes out now than we have stickers left, which is good. Yeah, we made it rain last night at our launch party. Yeah, so we had a fabulous launch party. Thank you to all those who came out in Portland at Kim Jong-Gri-Lin. His location over in the southeast of Portland. It's a fabulous green barbecue place. Yeah, big ups to Han for hosting. We just overwhelmed his kitchen, I think. But yeah, the patio was full. Everything was full and seems like everyone loved the food. So thank you, Han. [Music] So another thing going on in the world of food is this really amazing story about protesters showing up in Chinatown, New York, over a dog meat festival. It's actually happening in China. So they're showing up in Chinatown, outraged about something that Chinese people are doing. So the funny part about this is that I mean, it's in the festivals in China. But they think that there's like the Chinese people in Chinatown have a direct line to the people in this rural village in China who are holding this dog meat festival. It's amazing. Wait, wait, hold on a second. Are you saying that all Chinese people aren't on a single WhatsApp group? Well, they might all be on Weibo or something, but no. It's this great article on Reappropriate that we posted, we reposted it on our Facebook page. This is really good quote from there that I thought was really poignant. Animal rights activists rarely confront or even acknowledge how their actions blur the lines between a reasonable conversation about animal rights and historic anti-Asian stereotypes. This is not just a conversation about the ethical treatment of dogs. This is also a conversation about race, ethnicity, privilege, and stereotypes. For centuries, anti-Asian stereotypes have included portrayals of Chinese as barbaric consumers of dirty and unimaginable food sources. So the stereotype of the he, the Chinese, typically associated Chinese immigrants with the frequent eating of rat or dog as evidence of their cultural and moral inferiority to whiteness, yeah, that was the quote. And so dog meat has always been such a flashpoint as far as anti-Asian, you know, orientalist sort of ideas, especially, I mean, I heard a lot about that growing up too. Yeah, I mean, like, I know like, Suley and I were both fans of the late writer Edward Said and one of the things that he talks about is like in a lot of orientalist depictions of other, of other cultures, there's a sense of like rendering them through the lens of disgust. Like, oh my god, looking that, look at what they do over there. It's so disgusting. And one of the things that I would actually love to do at some point is to write some satirical restaurant reviews of quote, unquote, American food. Okay. Because sometimes like when I travel and people talk about why do Americans do this or that, you know, and so it's like, what disgusts people about what Americans eat? I want to know. Hot dogs, for example. Oh, that's fair. I always get questions about hot dogs when I go travel. People are like, so why are you the hot dogs? What exactly is in a hot dog? And I always say, I don't really, yet I know it's a mixture of miscellaneous stuff. Yeah, at my elementary school, we would joke that the hot dogs were made of raccoons. Tasted like it. In the first few episodes, we tackled race and food. But in, in, in for me, our podcast, we were, we were also very interested in tackling gender and class. And for me, as someone who's never worked in a kitchen, when I met Soleil, I was pretty blown away by some of the things that she said. And I know this is my own naivety of like how female chefs are, for example, pushed into doing pastry, whereas male chefs aren't. Or the gendered ways in which we talk about female chefs. And so I became really fascinated and I started searching online for ways in which I could learn more about food and feminism and food and femininity. We ended up describing this wonderful person via Twitter named Kate Carnes, who's a professor at Rutgers, who wrote a co-authored book called Food and Femininity. Kate is also our first phone interview as well too. And we're really excited to start interviewing guests via the phone because that opens us up to a wider possibility of interviewing guests across the country. Yeah, this is an episode of firsts. She's also our first white guest. And I'm mentioning that just because we mentioned the race of everyone else on our show. And I feel like it's very politically important to mention whiteness. And we thank her for coming on. You know, I sort of have a bit of a soft spot for academic literature because I think there's such exciting discussions happening in academia. And often times we don't access that literature. I'm happy that we're interviewing our first professor just a week after my partner. Claire got her PhD, so shout out to my partner. So this conversation with Kate was really illuminating in a lot of different ways, right? Her view on food and femininity extends beyond the kitchen and into consumerism, into rhetoric about what it means to nurture and provide for a family or a partner for yourself. And we talked, we even talked a little bit about masculinity. We talked about sort of the ways in which foodie culture seemed more egalitarian, but was still very segregated as far as the psychology of it and who cooks what and how often and all the labor differentials within those relationships. So it was really fascinating and I hope you enjoyed this conversation as much as we did. You're exploring, I guess, not just women's relationship to food, but the relationship between food and femininity. And so when we say femininity, we're referring to kind of cultural ideas about how to be an act feminine and how to signal a feminine gender identity to others. So I think it's a particularly interesting time right now because food is seen as really kind of tip or hot and you turn on the TV and you'll see people from a range of gender identities cooking on the food network, you know, often we see men who are identifying as foodies and so it might seem like the idea that food and femininity are connected is kind of old fashioned or a thing of the past. And so what we want to argue in our research is that actually there continues to be a very strong association between food and femininity and our kind of collective imagination. So how we imagine what it is to be feminine is often really connected to food and particularly expressing care through food. And so even if we've kind of gone beyond a sort of explicitly gendered ideology that says like women belong in the kitchen or something like this, we still see that women sense of themselves and also how they're perceived by others are often very tied to food. So for instance things like being a caring mother or being health conscious or an ethically minded consumer can often be expressed through our food. And what this also means is that being seen to quote unquote fail at that performance of femininity can be evaluated through food. So if you think about for instance one of the places where we can see this most intensely is around feeding children. And if kids are seen to come to school for instance with what's thought to be not a healthy or nutritionally balanced lunch, then who is often seen to be responsible for that quote unquote failure, right? So we still imagine that there it should be a caring mother behind the provision of nutritious pasty wholesome food for kids. So we can also see it in terms of who is expected to be trying the latest juice cleanse or you know adopting a vegan diet in order to promote animal welfare or environmental well-being. Those things are still I think very intricately associated with femininity. To be very clear that doesn't mean that men aren't engaging in those practices or there aren't men who express care through food or enjoy cooking etc. etc. but rather that they're sense of masculinity right there's sense of themselves as a gendered person isn't usually evaluated so harshly through those activities. So I know you interviewed 129 people for research in this book. What was the most surprising thing you learned by talking to all these people about their relationships to food? So one thing I guess to say is that I think it's important when we talk about food and femininity is that there are multiple ways that food and femininity are connected and of course women don't all relate to food in the same way right. So for instance I think about one woman who said you know when I open up my fridge and I see that it's full I feel like I'm a good mom. Another who said food is culture it's your roots you know and she said if I like you I'll cook for you right. Another woman who is a food activist and was involved in community food security work talk about food as a kind of of vessel for hope and for change, right, a site of transformation. So I'm not saying this is the most surprising part, but rather I just want to kind of emphasize the diverse ways in which food can be a site for performing femininity, right? It's not a kind of two-dimensional or narrow connection between gender and food. I would say that one of the most striking things was that because the stakes are so high, I think, around femininity and food is that we found that this was a really potent site of emotion. So there could be such emotional rewards derived from feeling like you had achieved success. You integrated spinach into your lasagna that you were making and your kids thought it was delicious, right? And so that felt a special in making something that was both tasty and healthy. Or you managed to cook a locally sourced meal from scratch, and so that felt like ethically mindful. But in addition to those periodic rewards, we found a pervasive kind of sense of stress and uncertainty around feeling like you were able to achieve this standard that were set out for you. Particularly in relation to mothering, you know that even women with immense amounts of resources, immense amounts of privilege in terms of class and racial privilege still sometimes worried that they were kind of feeling at food work, right? Not researching enough about what was the healthiest or safest options for their kids or not doing enough to teach their children about where their food came from. So there was this kind of real threat of failure, I think, all the time. I think I was surprised at the fact that we saw that, you know, of course these standards are out of reach for many women that don't have access to the time and money and other kinds of resources required to make organic baby food from scratch. But the fact that also women with access to lots of privilege also felt kind of stressed and anxious about these standards. I think was really striking and it sort of points to the ridiculous bar that we've set for achieving ideas about food and femininity. You know, I wasn't surprised to find that many women were concerned about the kind of harsh judgments of being a quote unquote "bad mom," right? So there, we see this come through a lot in the media. It's often very classed ideas about low-income women not feeding their children, you know, making the best food choices. And in this way that's very stigmatizing and often not paying attention to collective issues like, you know, could we have better state support for low-income folks to have access to healthy food, for instance. But what I was surprised by was that there was also this sense of being judged harshly if you cared too much. So if you were the quote unquote "obsessive helicopter mom," or if you were the health net who, you know, would only drink green juices. So women would say things to us like, you know, well, I try to eat healthily, but of course, like, I'm not crazy about it or I'm not obsessed with it. So I'll have a piece of birthday cake if I go to a party or they'll say, I want my kids to eat organic, but, you know, I'm not going to freak out if they have something that's not organic at their friend's house. And so there is this kind of balancing act that, again, I think points to these very difficult standards to achieve where it's not only about not doing enough, but being seen to do too much is also something that women can be judged harshly for. Right, wow, yeah. I mean, so much of what you just said was really resonant with me just in terms of like my own kind of upbringing and thoughts about what eating too much, eating not enough, and just like, you just feel like you're on a tightrope, right? Like constantly, I don't even have children, and I just like, I'm already like shaking with things. So I'm really curious also just about, you know, within those standards, within the sort of straight jacket that women have kind of found themselves in, like, have there been any sort of mode, like, effective modes of resistance or responses from women historically in your research. Yeah, absolutely. I think I always want to emphasis when I talk about these, the research, because I think I want to focus a lot on, you know, I want to highlight the persistent gendered pressures and inequalities, but also it's important to say that many of the women that we spoke with were reflecting critically on these very issues, right? So they had a sense that these standards were impossible to achieve or that they were elitist, and, you know, they would sometimes kind of laugh at things that they were reading, like, in parenting books, like one woman said, you know, she told us a line of a parenting book that said that everybody you eat when you're pregnant, you should be thinking about how it's affecting your perfect baby. Oh, God. She was like, you know, as far as I'm concerned, that book should be banned. And another woman who said, you know, she had to stop reading food magazines, because she couldn't stand to read another article about how hormones in meat were affecting girls' development. And so there was a kind of critical reflexivity or critical distance in the way that they were interpreting these pressures at the same time that that level of critique didn't allow them to totally disengage, right? Like I mean, Chile, it's like exactly what you were saying. You are obviously someone who's thought about these issues a lot, but still having these conversations that can generate anxiety and you relate to these feelings, right? So even if we have a kind of critical consciousness or a critique, that doesn't mean that we can just sort of let go of the pressures that we find ourselves in. So in terms of resistance, there was the kind of, yeah, everyday resistance of being like, I'm not going to read any more of those parenting magazines or I'm going to let go of some of the standards that I set for myself before I had kids. But then we also did interview several women who were involved in collective food activism. And so we're doing work around, for instance, community food security work where if we're approaching these issues collectively rather than an issue of individual women's responsibility, then we can challenge some of these unachievable pressures placed on women, right? If we start to think about, for instance, the environmental health risks that could potentially be coming with the chemicals in our food, if we think about that as a collective issue to be addressed through state regulation of industry, for instance, that's very different from saying that individual women need to be practicing very conscientious consumption practices and making sure they're buying expensive ingredients in order to protect their children, right? So I think that that kind of collective food organizing is one of the ways that we are now seeing, encouraging forms of resistance to these kinds of pressures. This question is actually from, just to make the connection, this question is from Sarah Merck from Bitch Magazine. She wanted to ask about food and feminism from a labor perspective, because like, for example, in Portland, you know, you know, you kind of sometimes will get this, you know, scale at the grocery store if you don't buy organic produce. But then, you know, so there's that conversation about buying organically, but in terms of the other side of the question, which is how the laborers are treated. So what nuances are sometimes lacking in mainstream, leisure oriented rhetoric around food and labor? And so how do you connect food feminism and labor? Yeah, I think that's a, I mean, a really, really important question. And the labor side of things in terms of like paid food labor is not my area of expertise. But we do know that women continue to make up a vast majority of the paid workforce in terms of a range of food work, but that work tends to be undervalued. So we can think about the division that many folks have written. And I think this has even actually come up on your show before about between kind of male chefs who are talked about in terms of their genius and their expertise. And women who are more likely to be described as cooks rather than chefs, and their food work is seen as less about a particular kind of training and expertise and knowledge and more about an expression of care. So we even see these ideas of femininity being used to devalue women's food work within, like, friends and being chefs. And then more broadly, I think we can see a lot of feminist issues in the context of food service. So like school cafeteria workers, fast food workers, there's such exciting organizing going on right now around the fight for 15 mobilizing for a $15 minimum wage. So even if that's not explicitly framed as a feminist movement, many of the women who are many of the folks who work in fast food are women. So these are highly feminized industries where women's food work is also undervalued. So I think we can see the connections between the ways that women's unpaid food work within the domestic sphere is undervalued. And then also women's food work is undervalued. paid food work is undervalued vis-a-vis the kinds of legitimacy, I guess, that's granted to men more often, for instance, in restaurant work. Or, I mean, even if you think about the context of, like, food politics, the sort of public faces of what we would often, you know, what some folks would term as, like, the mainstream food movement tend to be white men, right? People like Michael Pollan and Mark Bittman, those are often the folks that we sort of look to as authority figures within contemporary discussions of food politics. And in our research with food activists, we had some activists who pointed toward a kind of gendered division of labor and authority that they saw where kind of frontline food security work. And those folks that were working within communities around issues of access to food, community gardens, community kitchens that tended to be coded feminine network, it was predominantly women, where the realms of policy and food production tended to be coded masculine. There was more often men who were in those kinds of positions that were seem to be, like, decision making around policy and positions that are given authority. So it seems like a lot of what sort of the women's entree into kind of food activism, right, is has almost been relegated to the kind of choice feminism that's defined third wave, like mainstream feminism in America, you know, like what you choose at the grocery store determines, you know, how your ethics, right? And so much of that seems to be rooted in like white bourgeois feminism also. So what are sort of the kind of pathways that you've seen women of color working class women kind of try to reach a more ethical relationship to food? Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely. I think that's a really important point to draw that link between when we talk about choice and, of course, you know, choice is important, but that's often a very individualized rhetoric and we need to think about who has access to the choices that we are holding up as the ideal, right? So not only in relation to gender, but also race and class as well. And so some of the pathways that have come up are certainly around the kind of collective food struggles that I was talking about. So for instance, women of color who, food activists who we talk to that were working with community gardens and community kitchens in order to increase food security within, you know, their local communities. Also around class, one thing that was striking for us was that some of the most, some of the strongest critiques, I guess, of that kind of individualized conception or choice based conception of food politics came from working class women in our study who didn't have access to the quote unquote "but with your dollar approach," right? Right. So there's one, you know, one woman who really comes to mind. She was a single mother living on social assistance who really cared about food, but, you know, on a kind of day to day basis was making sure that she and her daughter had enough calories to get through the day. And she was really angry that there was this vision of being a kind of ethical food citizen that was held up based on the dollars that you spent at the grocery store. And you know, she was saying like, this is an issue that we need to be tackling through the government and, you know, doesn't everybody have access or have a right to nutritious food? And so sometimes I think we can see that kind of collective critique emerged from positions of marginality or, sorry, like, folks who are marginalized by a more choice based, which is often a white middle class vision of food politics. So in the book, one of the things that we argue is that we, you know, we do think that we can learn from a kind of second wave feminist vision of the personal as political, right, that in feminism we want to be thinking about recognizing women and marginalized folks every day's experiences as a site of struggle and politics, right? But at the same time, a feminist politics that only works at the level of the personal is not enough, that we always need to retain a connection to broader critiques of social inequality in the home and beyond, right? And that's what I think is a concern within this kind of vote with your dollar approach that we see. So it's so popular now is that it can be very appealing if you are someone who feels concerned about a corporate dominated global industrial food escape and you have access to resources to make the decisions that you feel are sort of ethical or creating change. But that actually can work to further entrench inequalities because it celebrates kind of the food choices of a privileged few and doesn't do anything to address the broader systemic inequalities in the food system. Okay. Cool. So, yeah, I mean, I've always thought that it was kind of, you know, when I was coming up as like a baby feminist, I remember thinking like, wait, how can I do this when like everything I buy, like oppresses someone or like, how do I buy the ethical? I remember sitting at the grocery store just like looking at boxes and just being like, what the fuck? Yeah. Like, what do I buy? How do I be a good person? And yeah, like it kind of tracks back to that. What you're saying earlier about like anxiety and just about like how it just exacerbates a lot of like, when everything you do is significant, like it's almost paralyzing. Yeah, absolutely. And I think another key piece there is that we also spoke with some women who felt like the women in our city had a whole range of different relationships with feminism. Some actively identified as some and some feminism just wasn't really on their radar. But then we spoke to some women who felt like feminism was a really kind of judgmental force in relation to food. And they felt like their own, for instance, love of cooking would be viewed as like only a sight of oppression from a feminist perspective, right? And I think that that is a really important concern for those of us that want to build up kind of feminist food politics is that if some women are feeling kind of judged harshly by what they see a feminist perspective around food to be as kind of dismissing or degrading the kind of joy that women can take in food. Or as you say, so harshly scrutinizing every single individual food choice that it becomes paralyzing, then I think we're not doing a very good job of building a kind of inclusive and welcoming feminist food politics. And knowing your work, you've made reference to culinary femininity and culinary masculinity. And you mentioned earlier in our conversation about Mike Ruhman and Michael Pollan and Mark Bitman, right, these three white men, let's just be real, who have been seen as like rational authority figures who can articulate politics in a way that people take seriously. So what do you see as the difference between like our perceptions of culinary masculinity and culinary femininity? So we have a chapter in the book where we talk a lot about kind of foodie politics and the emphasis on driving pleasure through food, you know, through learning about eating, experiencing cooking, delicious food. And so in some ways the rise of foodie culture has been a site that we can see as a challenge to ideas of femininity in that for women to claim culinary pleasure is to resist ideas about women denying their pleasure or being defined by self-sacrifice, right? So just being a foodie can be seen, could be seen as a feminist act. But one of the things that we find in talking with folks who identify as foodies is that there are still sort of persistent gender differences or inequities around as you say kind of culinary femininity and masculinity. And one of the ways this comes up is around cooking and how cooking is seen in the context of either everyday food work or a kind of leisure pursuit. So in lots of heterosexual couples that we talk to, they talk about how the everyday work of cooking dinner where it was kind of nothing special, you know, we got to get something on the table after a long day, we'll throw together what we find in the fridge. That was often associated with femininity, right? In some of the focus groups we talked to couples and the men and women would both reflect on this difference, right? Like, so it wasn't that they were clueless about it either or they would talk about, I remember this one couple where the man was saying that his wife is a really great cook, for some reason he gets so much more cred as being a quote guy who cooks, right? So if they take something to a potluck, it would be great. will be like all right while you're such a master of flavors and all of these kinds of and he was saying like he gets more recognition for the food that he prepares beat and he and he saw that as being because he was a man so there was a you know there was a critique of the gender politics that play there even as they thought playing out in their everyday life so can't you know one question that we get asked all the time is like food and raise who cares i mean how to relate it i mean talk about food and talk about race but why talk about them together so like do you get this you know from people who come up to you and say you know what's the big deal food and femininity i mean discuss them but discuss them separately like why together like do you ever get that yeah i mean i think it's interesting because i think in the context of gender there is the connection is maybe seem to be more obvious but it's maybe seen as a thing of the past sometimes right so the why write a book about food and femininity perspective would come last from like what does food have to do with gender and more what does food have to do with gender in 2016 so there's an idea that sure in the past you know maybe food with a site of inequality it was seen as something that predominantly women did but look now men are foodies you know uh. and women are in the workforce and gender equality has been it has been achieved right so that is something um. that i think it's one of the reasons why i feel really strongly about kind of claiming uh. a feminist approach to food issues is because i think that these sort of gender pressures and inequality become even more intense when we denied that they exist right and similarly around the kind of racism that's perpetuated through food right one of the reasons that that work so like insidiously is because of a color brought blind kind of perspective that says you know all no but now we live in a multicultural society where we can all destroy it others food and and that isn't even playing field right and so similarly i think if we have what sometimes referred to as a post feminist approach that says gender inequality is a thing of the past um. you know we no longer need a feminist approach to food then we we've women to have to navigate these intense pressures and uh. penalties as individuals rather than wanting to uh. challenge them collective we as feminists just as we want to challenge the kind of racism that happens through around food you know from a collective anti-racist perspective rather than a color blind perspective that um. denies that it exists what can we where else can we find your work uh. i am on twitter at kate f_caren and you can also go to my website kate carons dot net or find me on my record faculty page thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us uh. thanks for having me i really love the podcast thank you kate this has been wonderful thanks appreciate it to your thank you for listening to racist sandwich be sure to check out kates book food and femininity published by bloomsbury in twenty fifteen co-authored by joezee johnston our show is recorded at k b o o community radio in southeastern and produced by alan montecilia gentan designed our logo our website is racist sandwich dot com you can also find us on twitter at race and food or on facebook at facebook dot com slash race and food email us at racist sandwich podcast at gmail dot com our music comes from athane sayer and blue dot sessions and today we have a very special outro music it is by the the the pakasani kawali singer i'm judge sabri uh. i'm just i'll be was killed on june twenty first in pakas i he was gunned down and you know i grew up listening to this type of pakasani devotional music known as kawali music and one thing that i really love about this type of music is he takes a very devotional sort of he he he takes devotional music and he he challenges us to he challenged us to think about it in a new way so for example he's saying a lot of songs about about religion but then also about intoxication and about wine and generally people feel like if you're going to be talking about religion then don't talk about intoxication and don't talk about wine and don't talk about love but he did all those things and he was gunned down uh. by people who thought he was blasphemy so we want to play this song as a tribute to him but then also a tribute to so many artists around the world who are threatened for what they do so uh. thank you and jetzary for all you gave us i owe you so much (singing in foreign language) (singing in foreign language) Now what is called rhythm for you? The boat are playing for you rhythm and your clap with them. It's okay? Okay. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) , (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (audience applauding) [BLANK_AUDIO]