This was so good--please do keep interviewing non-celebrity intellectuals! I don't have much to add, other than that I found the interview insightful and a pleasure to read.
Oh wow, what a fascinating read. I think the link between politics and food is really fascinating, particularly how men use kitchens and cooking to appear more relatable (with often poor results) and women have to play up feminine traits (see Margaret Thatcher cooking for her cabinet colleagues in the Crown).
Thank you AHP and Emily for this!! Such a good read. I work in community organizing/advocacy in food banks so naturally I applied the discussion to the themes that pop up in my world. The gendered aspect of food work takes on a whole new dimension when you factor in food insecurity-- I think many people who haven't experienced food insecurity don't understand just how much labor goes into figuring out where food distributions are or signing up for SNAP. But the thing that I see over and over again that most applies to the conversation of power and food is how much policing of what is "acceptable" to eat or to buy for people who rely on SNAP/food banks. There is a bill that was just filed in the state lege in Texas that would restrict what people can buy with SNAP to "healthy" food (which, like, what does that even mean) and it is SHOCKING how many middle-class/wealthy "progressives" don't see how absolutely disgusting that sort of legislation is. This is compounded by fat shaming and how obesity and diet-related chronic conditions are directly linked to access to nutrient-dense foods.
Didn’t Oklahoma or Kansas or somewhere pass a law making it illegal to use SNAP for steak or lobster or something? (I grew up on food stamps. People’s assumptions and the shame they cause are so destructive.)
This is excellent. It's remarkable how the gendered "food is love" motivation clashes with the disordered "ladies control your intake" theme so strikingly at Big Traditional Family Meals (my experience of the disordered aspects is that it's not only granny or whomever the family chef is withholding the grand meal from her own plate, but that she's also keeping a sharp judging eye on other women's plates around the table, "food is love but don't eat too much, girls").
Another thought: when I was an immigrant living in the US, July 4 was also a Big Universal Holiday, with similar importance in having lots of food, but maybe because it's typically non-kitchen food, i.e., dudes grilling, it doesn't have the same gendered obligations for women?
Grilling as manly food (because meat! and fire!) is so strange. I still see plenty of work for women at a bbq, from hostess responsibilities to sides to cleanup. But somehow being the grill master feels like one of those situations where men feel they're contributing to a household, and think they're taking over responsibility or giving equally, when in fact they're just seizing one task they like and failing to see the rest. Also the idea that a woman "can't grill" of course is toxic and has a flavor of reserving the "most difficult" task for men while the bulk of culinary work is passed off to women...
So much I hadn’t thought about! (The magic of AHP 💗) Thanksgiving is the holiday I actually reclaimed for myself. I cook the traditional food and use my great-great-great-grandmother’s silver but spend the day in my pajamas and listen to the Beatles. We usually have friends or family over with the understanding that everyone is relaxed about it all. Christmas was always a fraught time growing up, so that’s the one I struggle with. It’s not just the food, it’s the entire process of making the magic happen, which seems like it’s part of this—meals are magic and connection that provide a sense of safety? My spouse was upset about my negative feelings about Christmas until he finally came around to seeing that he did little to “make the magic” for our kids (and also spent a lot of time listening to my sisters talk about how much anxiety we had around the holiday).
There’s also daily dinner, which is one of my least favorite things and yet necessary. When my kids were in school it really was the only time the whole family could connect (when I’ve homeschooled, like now, breakfast is a more organic time to do that). But—I’d love to know if other people experience this and if Dr. Contois has studied it—it’s also a fact that in school my kids get around 7-12 minutes to eat lunch (technically it’s 45 but that includes standing in line, recess, and socializing. I’ve had lunch with them numerous times and they get shuffled out within 7-12 minutes of sitting down). They are not only hungry but lacking nutrition, so they need a meal in the evening. It’s wrong but entirely wrapped up in the expectations of K-12 education standards and the way time is sliced up to meet curriculum requirements.
I loved reading about the diversity of Dr. Cointois’s education! I wish everyone had an education like that, including in high school.
Good point about how eating lunch at school (in the US) is too often a frenzied experience. So many scholars have written good books on the history and contemporary politics of school lunch (and school food more broadly), not limited to: A.R. Ruis, Jennifer E. Gaddis & Janet Poppendieck. I also LOVE this article about obentos in Japan, how the huge emotional, technical, and aesthetic work of making them falls to mothers, and then children are disciplinized through eating them — all of the food and quickly — to be good, rule-following citizens. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3317212?seq=1
This is fantastic, thank you! I had read about the pressure on Japanese mothers to make the bento boxes beautiful and balanced, but hadn’t thought about the pressure on kids to eat it all. Looking forward to reading more about school lunches—thanks!
This morning, in the afterglow of a very quiet Thanksgiving, where I cooked all the foods and had all the feels, I thought how it was so much easier than the holidays of my youth. Divorced parents, with remarriages resulting in 4 extended families, contending with the inability of any adult to manage coordinating where each kid needed to be to maintain expectations and court orders. A holiday like Thanksgiving could span ten days. Not to mention the grandparents. It was just so exhausting, all the drama and being powerless to meet all the adults' needs to have "their Thanksgiving" with us kids. Then I read your article and it clicked about "food is love" but when the love is poisoned by broken relationships, the experience at the table isn't going to generate a bunch of happy memories. It's much better now that I cook what I want (lots of chiles in my food) and invite who I want. I cooked the whole feast and now I am not cooking again for days.
Actually, it was up to six families: mom's birth family, stepdad's family, dad's, whichever wife he was married to at the time, and then each step-parent's ex's families who had dibs on the step-kids.
I think it's touched on here but warrants a larger discussion: health and healthy behaviours are as much a construct as gender.
Behaviours that are pathologized in someone with an ED diagnosis are considered admirable in someone with a "normal" BMI and are considered the bare minimum to show you're a "good fatty" for anyone in a larger body.
Low-to-no carb, for example, is a stark marker of disordered eating and can be responsible for the telltale ammenorrhea, and yet is considered admirable in normal BMI people and required in larger bodied people. And yet we know that a fairly large intake of carbohydrates is necessary for optimal menstrual health, and going too low carb even while maintaining a "normal" or high BMI can fuck with your periods.
And these conversations are so hard to have because--especially larger bodied people--are told over and over and over again that if they don't <insert extreme dieting behaviour> they'll essentially die. When what we know from the literature is that health behaviours and consistency are the most important in terms of improving and maintaining good health. So consistently eating vegetables every day, regardless of fat loss, is going to lead to improved health, reduced morbidity and mortality, etc. But the messaging we get is that if we don't undergo some uber restrictive diet to achieve heroic weightloss we'll die--when it's the extreme behaviours themselves that cause harm in terms of relationship with food, increased cortisol, weight cycling, etc.
I think it also speaks to how we often define health in the negative--not being too fat, not having chronic illnesses, not having mental illness--rather than in the positive: having a varied diet, having a healthy relationship with food, finding meaning through vocation or volunteering or community, etc. Which is, of course, a marker of neoliberal thought. It is our individual responsibility to be appropriately thin (but not too thin! or too muscular! but definitely have a booty while somehow also a flat stomach), and if we are faced with food deserts or having to work 2 full time jobs or chronic illnesses, that just means we have to work harder. And there is no government or societal responsibility to ensure greenspaces and adequate rest and nourishing food and childcare and all of the things we need to have a positive definition of health.
Definitely agree that we need more and deeper discussions about what health means to folks, which I get into more in the book. And when I teach Critical Media Studies of Health & Medicine, we start by researching all the definitions out there for health, wellness, illness, disease, etc. from various organizations and then try to devise our own. I also appreciate Robert Crawford's work for thinking about how ideas about health are very much about classism, with deeply racialized implications, and as you point out, about size discrimination too.
When I got the email notification for this article, I saw the subject line "Seems like a good week to talk to a food and gender scholar" and thought you were writing to me personally. For a second I was all warm and fuzzy because someone noticed.
This is such a good read. Really dig how it was pointed out that "wellness" culture and that big money industry is just a softly salt-lamp lit spin on diet culture. I love to hate-read GOOP but still, it's such a guilty pleasure.
It's so baffling to me how this plays out and now I'm keen to check out the book and see how it unpacks some of these thins. Women diets are soft frilly weaknesses, but then Jack Dorsey can trot off and through IF etc makes what would otherwise appear to be a serious eating disorder a hip new way to optimize. Unreal.
As I read the millennial masculinity stuff, I wondered about the differences in men/women moving back home.
My sister-in-law recently got engaged. She's older than my wife by about 6 years, and has wanted to get married for a while. She's quite conservative politically, and quite religious (in the conservative/evangelical translation of Christianity/religion in the US) and my wife and her have had some nasty discussions this summer. One of them stemmed around how the sister-in-law lived with their dad in a house his work was paying for, for free, for about 18 months (they're both doctors) and didn't offer to pay rent, etc. She'd have been in her mid-30s at the time.
My wondering as I read this was how she'd view a man she met in that same context, just given the expectations of men at any age. She rejects a lot of what is discussed in this space -- nothing is a construct, there should only be absolutes, etc. -- so my guess is she'd project something different on men living at home than she would expect from herself living with her dad at the same point in her life.
I wish you could "edit" here. Had a thought I wanted to add after the fact.
I wondered what the author had uncovered about this across cultures. When I lived in Korea for a couple years, I found the gender/food dynamic amplified there. Indeed, there's a whole book about it that I'd recommend "Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982".
Good questions! I think given the verrrrry traditional (and historical) norms of daughters being considered part of their "father's house" until they're married, that she would view it differently. This is part of how patriarchy creates both paternalistic structures that are ambivalent/complicated for women and expectations for men to get good secure jobs, earn money, buy a house, etc. so they can be "attractive" partners. Sociologists of marriage, courtship, relationship, etc. have amazing work on this; so do historians! And good point about cross-cultural examples. One that might be of interest are the "mammone"--Italian men who are "mummy's boys" and live at home well into their 30s. With the country's long declining birthrate, Italy has been worried about this for nearly 20 years now...
If anyone else is like me and wondered wtf The Time of Shedding and Cold Rocks was referring to (especially when their initial google search returned a TON of articles about a NYT editor who published an article without turning off his "Millenials to Snake People" Chrome extension, which is amazing and I am glad to have learned about that), it's referring to the global economic sabotage and subsequent collapse from 2007 to 2009.
thank you AHP & Emily! I have been loving these interviews and the insight into how researchers find the questions that guide their deep inquiry. I am still looking for mine and feeling inspired by hearing about others’ journeys.
I loved this article - touched on so many of my interests, food, gender, power. I work in wine and so many of these issues I see repeated in my industry and across hospitality.
whenever I get these, I'm like, "damn, she sends so many newsletters!" and get inbox anxiety and then I read a couple of paragraphs in and it is entirely worth it. This resonated hard and left me a bit flummoxed mabye..I think for members of the poorer-nation diaspora, food/restaurants is one of the few ways to "pull up your bootstraps" and obtain a level of "success" and be-your-own-boss. But it is also a way that forces immigrants to "stay in their lane." Lots to ponder on this one!
I didn't know until reading this that there was such a broad (?) discussion around this practice. I didn't know it had a proper noun attached to it until quite recently.
The eating pattern I prefer, which I've stumbled into after years of trying to listen to my body and figure out how I feel best, pretty much exactly matches the daily version of IF. When I told my husband about this discovery I'd made and was trying out long-term, he flipped out. Turned out, he was worried about marketing and fad diets and all the rest, and shocked that I'd fallen for such a thing. I...hadn't, but researching his worries is what informed me about IF, the proper noun version, and WOW the promotion and discussion around that can be intense, and very male (the latter of which I am not.) The way it's talked about and targeted to men feels very trendy and a little gross to me, too.
I'm curious about other folks' experiences with IF (or some version of it), re: themselves or family or friends or social media, whatever. Does it feel super-gendered to you, and how? Does it feel unhealthy to you?
Great conversation starter. I did try IF after seeing that British guy (I forget his name) and found that it had an incredible effect for me on many levels (including a mental introspective slowdown like meditation); I don’t follow discussions around it but when I hear it mentioned it’s always in a dude life-hacking context. (Aside: I keep saying to my spouse that life-hacking is just self-help rebranded for men. He disagrees but I maintain it.) Ditto for keto/paleo, which was almost life-changing for me. There’s also the big socioeconomic issue with both of these. Keto/paleo is really expensive compared to eating grains, and as someone who spent many of her formative years hungry due to income, it’s always going to be a mental struggle for me to not eat as much as I can of whatever is available, even when I know it will make me feel bad (physically not mentally) later. Sometimes a 24-hour fast is actually easier for me than sticking solely with foods I know make me feels good.
I find this too, Nia: it's easier not to eat for a longer-than-average period of time (and enjoy the mental and physical clarity that comes with that) than to try to balance my meals all the time. I have only so much energy for that: I'd rather concentrate it in 9 or 8 or 7 or whatever of my most-aware hours.
Re: dude-life hacking:
a) This is also the context where I found IF when I started looking into it, and seems to be its context in the interview above, too.
b) Life-hacking is TOTALLY self-help rebranded for men! This is a thing my husband has also said, only he calls it "helpful hints for men." A higher-status way of talking about improving your life or body.
Right?! If Oprah says something it’s soft and feminine and squishy but if Tim Ferris says the exact same thing it’s robust and manly 🤷🏻♀️
I love “helpful hints for men.” Makes me think of ads for “feminine hygiene products” ;)
I wonder if anyone has studid the IF mental clarity thing? It’s definitely true for me BUT clashes with being a parent because I don’t have the mental energy to answer questions, etc. It’s all being directed internally. I need to choose days that I know won’t be interrupted with a lot of kid needs (rare). It’s like going on a meditation retreat in your home for a day?
OMG, "feminine hygiene products!" Grew up hearing that as normal, of course, but now every time I find it hilarious. My husband asked a clerk at a drug store once where he could find the pads and tampons, and that clerk straight up replied that "feminine hygiene products are in aisle 3."
Interesting point! I might also feel it as inwardly-directed (not sure, but now I'm paying attention!) But I live with no kids and two other adults in a large house, and we don't spend that much time around each other in the daily round, so I could emotionally "afford" the daily inwardness.
One thing I think might affect this is the length of time you go without eating. If I go 24 hours, that for SURE feels inward, absolutely like a mental retreat. Usually I go 14 or 15 or 16 every day, and that feels utterly normal by now. I'm clear, but that's as much a physical feeling as a mental one, and it's something I easily function normally through.
Maybe I should experiment with different iterations. I love food, so wouldn’t want to fast every day, but maybe lunchtime to breakfast a couple days a week?
To flip the gender conversation, my spouse does make fun of me sometimes because he struggles to eat breakfast and will often go until 6 or 7pm without eating. “So am I fasting?” Well, yeah, but it’s become a bit of a joke because this thing I do so intentionally is how he eats normally without thinking about it.
This was so good--please do keep interviewing non-celebrity intellectuals! I don't have much to add, other than that I found the interview insightful and a pleasure to read.
Oh wow, what a fascinating read. I think the link between politics and food is really fascinating, particularly how men use kitchens and cooking to appear more relatable (with often poor results) and women have to play up feminine traits (see Margaret Thatcher cooking for her cabinet colleagues in the Crown).
In the UK, we've had the four ovens scandal: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/james-brokenshire-ovens-two-four-picture-a8913971.html
The two kitchens drama: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-31875297
And famously, 'eat your cereal' lady of the Scottish independence referendum:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLAewTVmkAU
I was thinking about that scene in The Crown, how it's like the "Food is Love" motivation only applies to male members of the family, not the daughter
Thank you AHP and Emily for this!! Such a good read. I work in community organizing/advocacy in food banks so naturally I applied the discussion to the themes that pop up in my world. The gendered aspect of food work takes on a whole new dimension when you factor in food insecurity-- I think many people who haven't experienced food insecurity don't understand just how much labor goes into figuring out where food distributions are or signing up for SNAP. But the thing that I see over and over again that most applies to the conversation of power and food is how much policing of what is "acceptable" to eat or to buy for people who rely on SNAP/food banks. There is a bill that was just filed in the state lege in Texas that would restrict what people can buy with SNAP to "healthy" food (which, like, what does that even mean) and it is SHOCKING how many middle-class/wealthy "progressives" don't see how absolutely disgusting that sort of legislation is. This is compounded by fat shaming and how obesity and diet-related chronic conditions are directly linked to access to nutrient-dense foods.
Didn’t Oklahoma or Kansas or somewhere pass a law making it illegal to use SNAP for steak or lobster or something? (I grew up on food stamps. People’s assumptions and the shame they cause are so destructive.)
This is excellent. It's remarkable how the gendered "food is love" motivation clashes with the disordered "ladies control your intake" theme so strikingly at Big Traditional Family Meals (my experience of the disordered aspects is that it's not only granny or whomever the family chef is withholding the grand meal from her own plate, but that she's also keeping a sharp judging eye on other women's plates around the table, "food is love but don't eat too much, girls").
Another thought: when I was an immigrant living in the US, July 4 was also a Big Universal Holiday, with similar importance in having lots of food, but maybe because it's typically non-kitchen food, i.e., dudes grilling, it doesn't have the same gendered obligations for women?
Grilling as manly food (because meat! and fire!) is so strange. I still see plenty of work for women at a bbq, from hostess responsibilities to sides to cleanup. But somehow being the grill master feels like one of those situations where men feel they're contributing to a household, and think they're taking over responsibility or giving equally, when in fact they're just seizing one task they like and failing to see the rest. Also the idea that a woman "can't grill" of course is toxic and has a flavor of reserving the "most difficult" task for men while the bulk of culinary work is passed off to women...
The whole gendered aspect of grilling is one of the weirdest things about our culture!
Because love is doled out in direct proportion to the size of women's bodies.
So much I hadn’t thought about! (The magic of AHP 💗) Thanksgiving is the holiday I actually reclaimed for myself. I cook the traditional food and use my great-great-great-grandmother’s silver but spend the day in my pajamas and listen to the Beatles. We usually have friends or family over with the understanding that everyone is relaxed about it all. Christmas was always a fraught time growing up, so that’s the one I struggle with. It’s not just the food, it’s the entire process of making the magic happen, which seems like it’s part of this—meals are magic and connection that provide a sense of safety? My spouse was upset about my negative feelings about Christmas until he finally came around to seeing that he did little to “make the magic” for our kids (and also spent a lot of time listening to my sisters talk about how much anxiety we had around the holiday).
There’s also daily dinner, which is one of my least favorite things and yet necessary. When my kids were in school it really was the only time the whole family could connect (when I’ve homeschooled, like now, breakfast is a more organic time to do that). But—I’d love to know if other people experience this and if Dr. Contois has studied it—it’s also a fact that in school my kids get around 7-12 minutes to eat lunch (technically it’s 45 but that includes standing in line, recess, and socializing. I’ve had lunch with them numerous times and they get shuffled out within 7-12 minutes of sitting down). They are not only hungry but lacking nutrition, so they need a meal in the evening. It’s wrong but entirely wrapped up in the expectations of K-12 education standards and the way time is sliced up to meet curriculum requirements.
I loved reading about the diversity of Dr. Cointois’s education! I wish everyone had an education like that, including in high school.
Good point about how eating lunch at school (in the US) is too often a frenzied experience. So many scholars have written good books on the history and contemporary politics of school lunch (and school food more broadly), not limited to: A.R. Ruis, Jennifer E. Gaddis & Janet Poppendieck. I also LOVE this article about obentos in Japan, how the huge emotional, technical, and aesthetic work of making them falls to mothers, and then children are disciplinized through eating them — all of the food and quickly — to be good, rule-following citizens. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3317212?seq=1
This is fantastic, thank you! I had read about the pressure on Japanese mothers to make the bento boxes beautiful and balanced, but hadn’t thought about the pressure on kids to eat it all. Looking forward to reading more about school lunches—thanks!
This morning, in the afterglow of a very quiet Thanksgiving, where I cooked all the foods and had all the feels, I thought how it was so much easier than the holidays of my youth. Divorced parents, with remarriages resulting in 4 extended families, contending with the inability of any adult to manage coordinating where each kid needed to be to maintain expectations and court orders. A holiday like Thanksgiving could span ten days. Not to mention the grandparents. It was just so exhausting, all the drama and being powerless to meet all the adults' needs to have "their Thanksgiving" with us kids. Then I read your article and it clicked about "food is love" but when the love is poisoned by broken relationships, the experience at the table isn't going to generate a bunch of happy memories. It's much better now that I cook what I want (lots of chiles in my food) and invite who I want. I cooked the whole feast and now I am not cooking again for days.
Actually, it was up to six families: mom's birth family, stepdad's family, dad's, whichever wife he was married to at the time, and then each step-parent's ex's families who had dibs on the step-kids.
I think it's touched on here but warrants a larger discussion: health and healthy behaviours are as much a construct as gender.
Behaviours that are pathologized in someone with an ED diagnosis are considered admirable in someone with a "normal" BMI and are considered the bare minimum to show you're a "good fatty" for anyone in a larger body.
Low-to-no carb, for example, is a stark marker of disordered eating and can be responsible for the telltale ammenorrhea, and yet is considered admirable in normal BMI people and required in larger bodied people. And yet we know that a fairly large intake of carbohydrates is necessary for optimal menstrual health, and going too low carb even while maintaining a "normal" or high BMI can fuck with your periods.
And these conversations are so hard to have because--especially larger bodied people--are told over and over and over again that if they don't <insert extreme dieting behaviour> they'll essentially die. When what we know from the literature is that health behaviours and consistency are the most important in terms of improving and maintaining good health. So consistently eating vegetables every day, regardless of fat loss, is going to lead to improved health, reduced morbidity and mortality, etc. But the messaging we get is that if we don't undergo some uber restrictive diet to achieve heroic weightloss we'll die--when it's the extreme behaviours themselves that cause harm in terms of relationship with food, increased cortisol, weight cycling, etc.
I think it also speaks to how we often define health in the negative--not being too fat, not having chronic illnesses, not having mental illness--rather than in the positive: having a varied diet, having a healthy relationship with food, finding meaning through vocation or volunteering or community, etc. Which is, of course, a marker of neoliberal thought. It is our individual responsibility to be appropriately thin (but not too thin! or too muscular! but definitely have a booty while somehow also a flat stomach), and if we are faced with food deserts or having to work 2 full time jobs or chronic illnesses, that just means we have to work harder. And there is no government or societal responsibility to ensure greenspaces and adequate rest and nourishing food and childcare and all of the things we need to have a positive definition of health.
Definitely agree that we need more and deeper discussions about what health means to folks, which I get into more in the book. And when I teach Critical Media Studies of Health & Medicine, we start by researching all the definitions out there for health, wellness, illness, disease, etc. from various organizations and then try to devise our own. I also appreciate Robert Crawford's work for thinking about how ideas about health are very much about classism, with deeply racialized implications, and as you point out, about size discrimination too.
Thanks, Emily. Definitely looking forward to reading your book!
When I got the email notification for this article, I saw the subject line "Seems like a good week to talk to a food and gender scholar" and thought you were writing to me personally. For a second I was all warm and fuzzy because someone noticed.
This is such a good read. Really dig how it was pointed out that "wellness" culture and that big money industry is just a softly salt-lamp lit spin on diet culture. I love to hate-read GOOP but still, it's such a guilty pleasure.
It's so baffling to me how this plays out and now I'm keen to check out the book and see how it unpacks some of these thins. Women diets are soft frilly weaknesses, but then Jack Dorsey can trot off and through IF etc makes what would otherwise appear to be a serious eating disorder a hip new way to optimize. Unreal.
As I read the millennial masculinity stuff, I wondered about the differences in men/women moving back home.
My sister-in-law recently got engaged. She's older than my wife by about 6 years, and has wanted to get married for a while. She's quite conservative politically, and quite religious (in the conservative/evangelical translation of Christianity/religion in the US) and my wife and her have had some nasty discussions this summer. One of them stemmed around how the sister-in-law lived with their dad in a house his work was paying for, for free, for about 18 months (they're both doctors) and didn't offer to pay rent, etc. She'd have been in her mid-30s at the time.
My wondering as I read this was how she'd view a man she met in that same context, just given the expectations of men at any age. She rejects a lot of what is discussed in this space -- nothing is a construct, there should only be absolutes, etc. -- so my guess is she'd project something different on men living at home than she would expect from herself living with her dad at the same point in her life.
I wish you could "edit" here. Had a thought I wanted to add after the fact.
I wondered what the author had uncovered about this across cultures. When I lived in Korea for a couple years, I found the gender/food dynamic amplified there. Indeed, there's a whole book about it that I'd recommend "Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982".
Good questions! I think given the verrrrry traditional (and historical) norms of daughters being considered part of their "father's house" until they're married, that she would view it differently. This is part of how patriarchy creates both paternalistic structures that are ambivalent/complicated for women and expectations for men to get good secure jobs, earn money, buy a house, etc. so they can be "attractive" partners. Sociologists of marriage, courtship, relationship, etc. have amazing work on this; so do historians! And good point about cross-cultural examples. One that might be of interest are the "mammone"--Italian men who are "mummy's boys" and live at home well into their 30s. With the country's long declining birthrate, Italy has been worried about this for nearly 20 years now...
Russian men, too. Many of the women I know in Russia do absolutely everything for their boys until they’re men ... and then keep doing it.
I don’t have much to add to this but just want to send sympathy to your sister. That sounds pretty rough and hard on the heart.
If anyone else is like me and wondered wtf The Time of Shedding and Cold Rocks was referring to (especially when their initial google search returned a TON of articles about a NYT editor who published an article without turning off his "Millenials to Snake People" Chrome extension, which is amazing and I am glad to have learned about that), it's referring to the global economic sabotage and subsequent collapse from 2007 to 2009.
thank you AHP & Emily! I have been loving these interviews and the insight into how researchers find the questions that guide their deep inquiry. I am still looking for mine and feeling inspired by hearing about others’ journeys.
I loved this article - touched on so many of my interests, food, gender, power. I work in wine and so many of these issues I see repeated in my industry and across hospitality.
Emily - is your book available in the UK?
Thanks for asking! Yes, UNC Press can ship internationally. It also looks like the book will be available on amazon.co.uk by the end of the month.
This is fantastic, thank you!
whenever I get these, I'm like, "damn, she sends so many newsletters!" and get inbox anxiety and then I read a couple of paragraphs in and it is entirely worth it. This resonated hard and left me a bit flummoxed mabye..I think for members of the poorer-nation diaspora, food/restaurants is one of the few ways to "pull up your bootstraps" and obtain a level of "success" and be-your-own-boss. But it is also a way that forces immigrants to "stay in their lane." Lots to ponder on this one!
The references to IF in here make me curious to talk more about it. Threading for those, like AHP, who would rather just skip this discussion.
I didn't know until reading this that there was such a broad (?) discussion around this practice. I didn't know it had a proper noun attached to it until quite recently.
The eating pattern I prefer, which I've stumbled into after years of trying to listen to my body and figure out how I feel best, pretty much exactly matches the daily version of IF. When I told my husband about this discovery I'd made and was trying out long-term, he flipped out. Turned out, he was worried about marketing and fad diets and all the rest, and shocked that I'd fallen for such a thing. I...hadn't, but researching his worries is what informed me about IF, the proper noun version, and WOW the promotion and discussion around that can be intense, and very male (the latter of which I am not.) The way it's talked about and targeted to men feels very trendy and a little gross to me, too.
I'm curious about other folks' experiences with IF (or some version of it), re: themselves or family or friends or social media, whatever. Does it feel super-gendered to you, and how? Does it feel unhealthy to you?
Great conversation starter. I did try IF after seeing that British guy (I forget his name) and found that it had an incredible effect for me on many levels (including a mental introspective slowdown like meditation); I don’t follow discussions around it but when I hear it mentioned it’s always in a dude life-hacking context. (Aside: I keep saying to my spouse that life-hacking is just self-help rebranded for men. He disagrees but I maintain it.) Ditto for keto/paleo, which was almost life-changing for me. There’s also the big socioeconomic issue with both of these. Keto/paleo is really expensive compared to eating grains, and as someone who spent many of her formative years hungry due to income, it’s always going to be a mental struggle for me to not eat as much as I can of whatever is available, even when I know it will make me feel bad (physically not mentally) later. Sometimes a 24-hour fast is actually easier for me than sticking solely with foods I know make me feels good.
I find this too, Nia: it's easier not to eat for a longer-than-average period of time (and enjoy the mental and physical clarity that comes with that) than to try to balance my meals all the time. I have only so much energy for that: I'd rather concentrate it in 9 or 8 or 7 or whatever of my most-aware hours.
Re: dude-life hacking:
a) This is also the context where I found IF when I started looking into it, and seems to be its context in the interview above, too.
b) Life-hacking is TOTALLY self-help rebranded for men! This is a thing my husband has also said, only he calls it "helpful hints for men." A higher-status way of talking about improving your life or body.
Right?! If Oprah says something it’s soft and feminine and squishy but if Tim Ferris says the exact same thing it’s robust and manly 🤷🏻♀️
I love “helpful hints for men.” Makes me think of ads for “feminine hygiene products” ;)
I wonder if anyone has studid the IF mental clarity thing? It’s definitely true for me BUT clashes with being a parent because I don’t have the mental energy to answer questions, etc. It’s all being directed internally. I need to choose days that I know won’t be interrupted with a lot of kid needs (rare). It’s like going on a meditation retreat in your home for a day?
OMG, "feminine hygiene products!" Grew up hearing that as normal, of course, but now every time I find it hilarious. My husband asked a clerk at a drug store once where he could find the pads and tampons, and that clerk straight up replied that "feminine hygiene products are in aisle 3."
😂
Interesting point! I might also feel it as inwardly-directed (not sure, but now I'm paying attention!) But I live with no kids and two other adults in a large house, and we don't spend that much time around each other in the daily round, so I could emotionally "afford" the daily inwardness.
One thing I think might affect this is the length of time you go without eating. If I go 24 hours, that for SURE feels inward, absolutely like a mental retreat. Usually I go 14 or 15 or 16 every day, and that feels utterly normal by now. I'm clear, but that's as much a physical feeling as a mental one, and it's something I easily function normally through.
Maybe I should experiment with different iterations. I love food, so wouldn’t want to fast every day, but maybe lunchtime to breakfast a couple days a week?
To flip the gender conversation, my spouse does make fun of me sometimes because he struggles to eat breakfast and will often go until 6 or 7pm without eating. “So am I fasting?” Well, yeah, but it’s become a bit of a joke because this thing I do so intentionally is how he eats normally without thinking about it.