Food and Gender (Food and Nutrition in History and Culture) [Paperback]

Carole M. Counihan (Author), Steven L. Kaplan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 1998 | ISBN-10: 905702568X | ISBN-13: 978-9057025686 | Edition: 1

This volume examines, among other things, the significance of food-centered activities to gender relations and the construction of gendered identities across cultures. It considers how each gender's relationship to food may facilitate mutual respect or produce gender hierarchy. This relationship is considered through two central questions: How does control of food production, distribution, and consumption contribute to men's and women's power and social position? and How does food symbolically connote maleness and femaleness and establish the social value of men and women? Other issues discussed include men's and women's attitudes towards their bodies and the legitimacy of their appetites.

Product Details

• Paperback: 157 pages
• Publisher: Routledge; 1 edition (October 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 905702568X
• ISBN-13: 978-9057025686
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.6 ounces
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,935,610 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Carole M. Counihan is Professor of Anthropology at Millersville University in Pennsylvania. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, she earned a BA in history cum laude from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Massachusetts. Counihan's research centers on food, culture, gender, and identity in the United States and Italy. She conducted fieldwork in Bosa (Sardinia) and Florence (Tuscany), Italy during the 1970s and 1980s, and published "Around the Tuscan Table: Food, Family and Gender in Twentieth Century Florence" in 2004. Long fascinated with women's complex relationship with food and body, she explored gender, food, body, reproduction, and culture in her book "The Anthropology of Food and Body: Gender, Meaning, and Power" (Routledge, 1999). She is editor of "Food in the USA: A Reader" (Routledge 2002) and, with Penny Van Esterik, of "Food and Culture: A Reader" (Routledge 2008). She conducted fieldwork from 1996-2006 in a Hispanic community in Colorado, collecting food-centered life histories from nineteen women. Based on this research and supported by a 2005-2006 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, she authored "A Tortilla Is Like Life: Food and Culture in the San Luis Valley of Colorado" (University of Texas Press, 2009). She is editor of the scholarly journal "Food and Foodways." Counihan was a visiting professor at the University of Gastronomic Sciences Masters Program in Colorno (Parma), Italy, during Spring 2009 where she began a new ethnographic research project on food activism in local chapters of the Slow Food movement.