Week 4
Meat, Animal Studies, Vegetarianism, Veganism, Unremunerated Domestic Food Production, and Ecofeminsim (Dr. Alex Ketchum, GSFS 401)
We will be talking about the connections between feminist activism, meat/vegetarianism/veganism, animal studies, and issues of domestic labour. These seemingly disparate topics are grouped together because they are the ways that feminism and food is often linked.
Also we will be talking about different generational approaches.
why?
Hard to believe we’ve been making this baby since 2008, it makes me feel old in a way I love because I’ve always wanted to be an old crone and now I’m an old chocolatey crone and, uh, wow. #goals. THE VANDANA SHIVA! A sturdy, timeless deeply American confection made with a combination of Ecuadorian and Mexican chocolate, named for an Indian woman, Vandana Shiva, a pioneer in the realm of seed-saving and earth-saving. When I asked VS if she minded having a chocolate named after her in 2007, she said sure and invited us to her home base farm in India (staff trip?!? OMG), and here’s us presenting her with some of her namesake chocolates when she came to speak at Vassar. Chocolate has brought so many great moments to my life, wowza. // OK so this chocolate: we make it with a combination of @republicadelcacao and @tazachocolate, one from Ecuador and one from Mexico. It’s to me the exact opposite of fussy European-style painted-mold bonbons, flavorwise and design-wise. Taza stone-ground chocolate is straight up GRITTY while European-style chocolate takes great pride in its long conching times which lead to super smoothness. Sometimes people describe this chocolate as “spicy” because it has two kinds of chilies in it (ancho and chipotle) but it’s really so lightly spicy it should maybe just be called “spiced.” Mexican cinnamon and masses of vanilla bean round out those bright chile flavors. Is anyone still reading? I have a lot more I could say about this chocolate!!!
Say it with me: vahn-dahn-ah, not vAn-dAn-a!
Xoxo, laGUSta not la-GOO-sta
@ New Paltz, New York
Posted on Jan 22. 2020
Lagusta’s Luscious
Sweet and Salty Cookbook
History linked also to Bloodroot Cookbook
Bloodroot Cookbook
On feminist, lesbian feminist, and queer cookbooks
During the 1970s and 1980s, feminists in the United States and the United Kingdom used cookbooks not only to share a recipe for a dish but plans for a new world order. In addition to demonstrating the political and countercultural potential of cookbooks, feminist cookbooks were feminist texts in and of themselves--vehicles to spread feminist messages. More than that, the three central cookbooks of this study do something different from either the environmental, feminist, or lesbian cookbooks of the 1970s and 1980s by demonstrating the connections between environmentalism, food, labor, and feminism. While, other studies that have documented how feminists have analyzed these political strands together, this article shows how these political strands intertwine within cookbooks.The Bloodroot Collective and Pulse Collective’s decision to use the format of the cookbook renders their political discussions around feminism, lesbian identities, and vegetarianism more accessible and digestible. Cookbooks thus are not only able to be political documents; cookbooks can be the most effective genre for particular kinds of political writing. Although significant attention is given to the introductory matter of the cookbooks, this article takes seriously the materials included amongst the recipes themselves, in order to highlight what it means that these ideas are situated within a cookbook.
More in the queer cookbook exhibit
http://www.historicalcookingproject.com/2021/08/digitized-whats-recipe-for-queer.html
Feminist Restaurant Project (and forthcoming longer book)
Maps of the spaces
List of articles on the topic
I will show y’all
thefeministrestaurantproject.com
Las Hermanas Coffeehouse San Diego, California
Cookbooks as a form of communication/ building on politics
One is a cookbook and one is a nonfiction book
Both political
Both ecofeminist
Sexual politics of meat
The Sexual Politics of Meat argues that male dominance and animals’ oppression are linked by the way that both women and animals function as absent referents in meat eating and dairy production, and that feminist theory logically contains a vegan critique...just as veganism covertly challenges patriarchal society. Patriarchy is a gender system that is implicit in human/animal relationships.
Queer Cookbooks: Whoever said Dykes Can’t Cook
Also a push back on domestic food production
http://www.historicalcookingproject.com/2019/06/special-series-on-cookbook.html
Alt- Man Adventures
Drudgery of cooking
Burden of cooking for some
Who can choose to cook or not? (race, class, gender, and able-bodied privilege)
Will show my undergrad thesis
These questions come up again in current food movements like Slow Food and Michael Pollan’s work
Betty Crocker Cookbook
Pressures of a kind of perfection
For whom?
Race, class, gender
Meat
The landscape and processed foods
How the Queer Cookbook Genre has changed
The role of power, money gender, and celeb status
Always Political (Jan 21, 2019 Insta Story)
What businesses are always inherently political
Whose bodies become political?
Who chooses to be political and whom is chosen?
What is the role of labeling? To self label your business as anarchist-feminist (thinking in contrast to Antoni’s cookbook)
Tying Together
“It was always more than just a cake”- Sweet Feminist
Food
Politics
feminism
This week’s readings we will be discussing:
The Political Palate (Introduction) by Bloodroot Feminist Vegetarian Restaurant Collective (1980)
“What the World Needs Now Is Anarcha-Feminist Vegan Chocolates” by Julia Tausch, Oct 14, 2019, https://medium.com/tenderlymag/what-the-world-needs-now-is-anarcha-feminist-vegan-chocolates-14a657a0b4e3
Adams, Carol J., and Lori Gruen, eds. Ecofeminism: Feminist intersections with other animals and the earth. Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2014. Introduction. (on amazon preview but also ordering from the library)
Parkin, Katherine. “Campbell’s Soup and the Long Shelf Life of Traditional Gender Roles.” In Kitchen Culture in America: Popular Representations of Food, Gender, and Race, edited by Sherrie Inness, 51-67. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001. (PDF)
Shapiro, Laura. Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950’s America. New York, NY:Viking, 2004. (ebook through mcgill library) Introduction
Optional Readings:
Blog post on Postwar Sexism and Feminist Response in Cookbooks: http://www.historicalcookingproject.com/2019/05/special-series-on-cookbook_28.htmls
Blog post: Environmental Counterculture and Cookbooks: http://www.historicalcookingproject.com/2019/05/special-series-on-cookbook.html
Blog post on Queer Cookbooks: http://www.historicalcookingproject.com/2019/06/special-series-on-cookbook.html