From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies

Critical Perspectives on Women and Food

By: Arlene Voski Avakian editor, Barbara Haber editor

Narrated by: Margaret Durante

In recent years, scholars from a variety of disciplines have turned their attention to food to gain a better understanding of history, culture, economics, and society. The emerging field of food studies has yielded a great deal of useful research and a host of publications. Missing, however, has been a focused effort to use gender as an analytic tool. This stimulating collection of original essays addresses that oversight, investigating the important connections between food studies and women's studies. Applying the insights of feminist scholarship to the study of food, the thirteen essays in this volume are arranged under four headings - the marketplace, histories, representations, and resistances. Essays analyze the influence of large corporations in determining what came to be accepted as proper meals in the United States, including what mothers were expected to feed their babies. Also how women have held families together by keeping them nourished, from the routines of an early nineteenth-century New Englander to the plight of women who endured the siege of Leningrad. The book is published by University of Massachusetts Press.

©2005 University of Massachusetts Press (P)2011 Redwood Audiobooks

Critic reviews

"Students of culinary and feminist studies won't want to miss the unusual history (in this book)." (The Bookwatch)