Food, Masculinities, and Home: Interdisciplinary Perspectives 9781474262323, 9781474262354, 9781474262347

Table of contents :
Title page
Copyright page
Contents
List of figures and tables
List of contributors
Series preface: Why home?
Introduction
Why this book?
Food, gender, and home in the literature
Theoretical considerations
Methodology
Overview of chapters
Summary: The intersections of food, masculinities, and home
Limitations and future research directions
Notes
References
Section One The production of “masculinity” and “home” through food: Empirical studies of masculinity and home cooking
Chapter 1 Cooking up manliness: A practice-based approach to men’s at-home cooking and attitudes using time-use diary data
Introduction
Material and methods
Toward a conceptualization of cooking
Methods
Results
Cooking from a life-course perspective
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Note
References
Chapter 2 “Women have a gift for cooking”: Israeli male teachers’ view of domestic cookery
Introduction
Masculinity in Israel
Gender and foodwork in the literature
Methodology
Findings
Home cooking as an option
Home cooking as “meant for men”
Home cooking as a traditionally feminine duty and skill
Conclusion
References
Chapter 3 Transnational domestic masculinity: Japanese men’s home cooking in Australia
Introduction
Method
Contextualizing “domestic masculinities”/“masculine domesticities” in a transnational social space
Work arrangements
Social expectations
Conclusion
References
Chapter 4 Stumbling in the kitchen: Exploring masculinity, Latinicity, and belonging through performative cooking
Vignette 1: Preparación | Preparation
Vignette 2: Making meringue
Vignette 3: Bizcochuelo
Vignette 4: Dulce de leche
Acknowledgments
References
Chapter 5 From “The missus used to cook” to “Get the recipe book and get stuck into it”: Reconstructing masculinities in older men
Introduction
Gender order and the social construction of masculinity
Influence of the Cooking for 1 or 2 program: An empirical study
Study findings: Before participating in Cooking for 1 or 2
Learning to cook due to necessity: Maintaining independence or helping out “the wife”
Findings from interviews after the program: Broadened masculinities
The plurality of masculine scripts around food preparation
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
References
Chapter 6 Men’s foodwork in food systems: Social representations of masculinities and cooking at home
Introduction
Foodwork in food systems
Households, homes, and gendered foodwork
Social representations of men and foodwork at home
Ideological social representations of men cooking at home
Social representations theory and Connell’s conceptualization of multiple masculinities
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
References
Section Two Discourses of men’s and boys’ home cooking in popular culture and the media
Chapter 7 Cool kids cook: Girls and boys in the foodie kitchen
Introduction
Foodie culture and evolving definitions of home cooking
Foodie culture: Attracting children, expanding the market
Constructing culinary selves
Children’s culinary culture
First steps: Pretend kitchens, gadgets, and culinary play
From pretend kitchens to the real thing: Children’s culinary shows, cookbooks, and magazines
Kid celebrity chefs: Making the most of foodie culture
Growing up: Future implications of a foodie culture
References
Chapter 8 “Wish I was a better boy. Nothing pertikeler for tea”: Food, boyhood, and masculine appetite in nineteenth-century women’s coming-of-age novels
“Smears of molasses on the sleeve of his jacket”: Boys and the ideal masculine appetite
“I wish I loved my lessons as much as I do my dinner”: Alcott’s fat boys and eating shame
Conclusion
References
Chapter 9 “If you want to, you can do it!”: Home cooking and masculinity makeover in Le Chef Contre-Attaque
Gender and culinary makeovers in food television
Cyril Lignac and Le Chef Contre-Attaque
Crisis: “I’m sick of it!”
Carnival: “We reverse the roles!”
Transformation: “If you want to, you can do it”
Home cooking and masculinity hierarchies
References
Chapter 10 Kitchen mishaps: Performances of masculine domesticity in American comedy films
Food, men, and comedy
Finding men’s identity in drag
Muscles, food, and childcare
Daddy cares, and supports his family too
What’s so funny?
References
Chapter 11 Chefs at home? Masculinities on offer in celebrity chef cookbooks
Introduction
Theorizing celebrity, food, and masculinity
Analyzing cookbooks
Men celebrity chefs’ personas: Domestic connections
Conclusion: Establishing space for domestic masculinities?
Notes
References
Cookbook references
Chapter 12 “Don’t try this at home”: Men on TV, women in the kitchen
Introduction
Cooking up ideology
Men on TV, women in the kitchen
Don’t try this at home
Conclusion
References
Index

Citation preview

Food, Masculinities, and Home: Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Home Series Editors: Victor Buchli and Rosie Cox ISSN: 2398-3191 This exciting new series responds to the growing interest in the home as an area of research and teaching. Highly interdisciplinary, titles feature contributions from across the social sciences, including anthropology, material culture studies, architecture and design, sociology, gender studies, migration studies, and environmental studies. Relevant to undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as researchers, the series will consolidate the home as a field of study. Making Homes by Sarah Pink, Kerstin Leder Mackley, Roxana Morosanu, Val Mitchell, and Tracy Bhamra Sexuality and Gender at Home: Experience, Politics, Transgression edited by Brent Pilkey, Rachael M. Scicluna, Ben Campkin, and Barbara Penner FURTHER  TITLES FORTHCOMING

Food, Masculinities, and Home: Interdisciplinary Perspectives Edited by Michelle Szabo and Shelley Koch

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Selection and Editorial Material: Michelle Szabo and Shelley Koch, 2017 © Individual Chapters: Their Authors, 2017 Michelle Szabo and Shelley Koch have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-6232-3 ePDF: 978-1-4742-6234-7 ePub: 978-1-4742-6233-0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Cover design: Clare Turner Cover image © Shutterstock Series: Home Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com. Here you will find extracts, author interviews, details of forthcoming events and the option to sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of figures and tables  vii List of contributors  viii Series preface: Why home?  Rosie Cox and Victor Buchli xii

Introduction  Michelle Szabo and Shelley Koch 1

Section One  The production of “masculinity” and “home” through food: Empirical studies of masculinity and home cooking  29 1 Cooking up manliness: A practice-based approach to

men’s at-home cooking and attitudes using time-use diary data  Sarah Daniels and Ignace Glorieux 31

2 “Women have a gift for cooking”: Israeli male teachers’ view

of domestic cookery  Liora Gvion and Dorit Patkin 59

3 Transnational domestic masculinity: Japanese men’s home

cooking in Australia  Iori Hamada 75

4 Stumbling in the kitchen: Exploring masculinity,

Latinicity, and belonging through performative cooking  Marcos D. Moldes 92

5 From “The missus used to cook” to “Get the recipe book

and get stuck into it”: Reconstructing masculinities in older men  Lauren Williams and John Germov 108

6 Men’s foodwork in food systems: Social representations of

masculinities and cooking at home  Jeffery Sobal 126

vi

CONTENTS

Section Two  Discourses of men’s and boys’ home cooking in popular culture and the media  145  7 Cool kids cook: Girls and boys in the foodie kitchen Elizabeth

Fakazis 147

 8 “Wish I was a better boy. Nothing pertikeler for tea”: Food,

boyhood, and masculine appetite in nineteenth-century women’s coming-of-age novels  Samantha Christensen 166

 9 “If you want to, you can do it!”: Home cooking and masculinity

makeover in Le Chef Contre-Attaque   Jonatan Leer 182

10 Kitchen mishaps: Performances of masculine domesticity in

American comedy films   Fabio Parasecoli 197

11 Chefs at home? Masculinities on offer in celebrity

chef cookbooks  Alexandra Rodney, Josée Johnston, and Phillipa Chong 213

12 “Don’t try this at home”: Men on TV, women in the kitchen 

Ellen Cox 231

Index  249

List of figures and tables Figure 6.1 The food system: Subsystems and stages 128 Table 1.1

Descriptive characteristics of survey sample 37 Table 1.2 A contextual description of the 5-cluster typology of men’s cooking styles 42 Table 1.3 The distribution of the conditional probabilities in terms of men’s social family background 48 Table 1.4 The cooking clusters and men’s cooking, gender, and meal attitudes 50 Annex 1.1 An illustration of the Flemish diary format of the 2004 survey 54 Annex 1.2 Sum scales 54 Annex 1.3 The model-fit indices of the different latent class cluster models 55 Table 6.1 Cross-cultural analysis of gendered division of food labor in 224 cultures 129 Table 11.1 Male celebrity chef personas 218

List of contributors Phillipa Chong is an assistant professor in sociology at McMaster University. As a cultural sociologist, Chong specializes in how we define and evaluate worth: this includes the value we assign to social objects (e.g., books, paintings, knowledge, opinions, etc) and social groups (e.g., experts, artists, minority groups, etc). To date, her empirical focus has been evaluation in the field of artistic and cultural production. Samantha Christensen completed her Master’s program at the University of Alberta, and her Master’s thesis focused on food and gender in nineteenthcentury coming-of-age literature. She is currently a sessional lecturer of English at the University of Alberta, Augustana Faculty. Ellen Cox teaches in the Philosophy and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies programs at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, where she is also Chair of the Humanities Division. Her research centers on discursive constructions of embodiment, with particular attention to the ways that neoliberalism inflects identity. Sarah Daniels obtained a PhD in sociology from the Vrije Universiteit van Brussel (VUB). Currently, she is a voluntary fellow at the Department of Sociology, VUB (research group TOR). She has published on the cooking habits in Belgium, the significance of food, and the consumption of convenience foods, including “More than preparing a meal? Concerning the meanings of home cooking” in Appetite, 58(3), 1050–1056, and “Convenience on the menu? A typological conceptualization of family food expenditures and foodrelated time patterns” in Social Science Research, 51, 205–218.  Elizabeth Fakazis teaches journalism and media studies at the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point. Her most recent research interests focus on food, communication, identity, and children. Her work has been published in Gastronomica: The Journal of Food & Culture, and in the Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery Proceedings. Fakazis has integrated her research and

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

ix

teaching by offering a study abroad program in Greece that gives students an opportunity to study culinary and agricultural traditions and sustainable practices in agriculture and tourism. John Germov is Pro Vice-Chancellor of the Faculty of Education and Arts at the University of Newcastle, Australia. A professor of sociology, John’s research interests span the social determinants of food and alcohol consumption and production, public health nutrition policy, workplace change, interdisciplinary wine studies, and the history of sociology. He has published twenty books, and the fourth edition of The Sociology of Food and Nutrition: The Social Appetite (OUP 2017) with Lauren Williams is forthcoming. Ignace Glorieux is a professor of sociology and head of the sociology department of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium). He teaches courses on social theory, social inequality, sociology of time, leisure politics, and methodology. He has been involved in time-use studies in Belgium for more than thirty years, studies the entry and careers of students in higher education, and is involved in different surveys on cultural practices and cultural participation. Currently, he is the president of the International Association for Time Use Research (IATUR). Liora Gvion is Professor of Sociology at the Kibbutzim College of Education. Her areas of expertise are the sociology of food and the sociology of the body. Her research revolves around social relationships embedded in the production and consumption of food. Her book on Palestinian food in Israel came out both in Hebrew and in English. Currently, she is doing field work in the opera and conducting research on food and reality television. Iori Hamada is a research associate at the Asia Institute, University of Melbourne. Her research interests include transnational migration; the gendered division of labor, and food and cooking. Her most recent publications include “Fitting Japanese Cuisine into Australia: Imperfect Translations” in Internationalising Japan: Discourse and Practice (Routledge, 2014). She is also the author of five books on international communications and language learning. Josée Johnston is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. She is the coauthor of Foodies (2nd edition, 2015) with Shyon Baumann, as well as Food and Femininity (2015) with Kate Cairns. She has published articles in venues including American Journal of Sociology, Journal of Consumer Culture, Signs, Theory and Society, and Gender and Society.

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Shelley Koch, PhD, is Associate Professor of Sociology and a member of the Women and Gender Studies collective at Emory & Henry College in Emory, VA, United States. Her research and teaching interests include the sociology of gender and inequality, food and food systems, the intersection of the economy and consumption, and the environment. She is author of A Theory of Grocery Shopping: Food, Choice and Conflict published in 2012 by Berg and has published articles on gender, food retail, and consumption in The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Social Currents, and The Handbook of Food and Popular Culture.  Jonatan Leer, PhD, postdoc, University of Århus is a part of the research project on taste www.smagforlivet.dk. Jonatan has published widely on food culture, notably “Strange Culinary Encounters” (Food, Culture and Society) with Katrine M Kjær and “Carnivorous Heteropopias: Gender, Meat and Nostalgia on the Copenhagen Meat Scene” (NORMA: International Journal of Masculinity Studies) with Linda Lapina. Jonatan is also the editor of the book Food and Media: Practices, Distinctions and Heterotopias (Routledge, 2016). Marcos D. Moldes, a communication and cultural studies scholar, completed his PhD in communication studies at Simon Fraser University’s School of Communication on the unceded Coast Salish Territories, also known as Vancouver, British Columbia. His research interests include examining issues related to diaspora, migration, sexuality, and storytelling. His work examines questions of belonging and identity through performance and sensory ethnography.  Fabio Parasecoli is Associate Professor and Director of Food Studies Initiatives, The New School, New York.  His work explores the intersection of food, media, and politics. He is the author of Bite Me! Food in Popular Culture (2008) and Al Dente: A History of Food in Italy (2014). He is coeditor of the six-volume Cultural History of Food (2012). Dorit Patkin is a professor in the “Kibbutzim College of Education” Science Faculty, where she serves as Head of the M.Ed. Program in Mathematics Education. She holds a PhD in mathematics. Her background is in high school mathematics teaching as well as being a mathematics education academic coordinator and scientific consultant for the Israeli Educational Television. Her previous works include three coedited books. Moreover, she has cowritten eight mathematics textbooks. Alexandra Rodney is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto, Department of Sociology. Her dissertation research, situated within the fields of gender,

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

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culture, and health, involves looking at the production and reception of healthyeating discourses in print and online media for women. She has coauthored articles in Sociology, Journal of Consumer Culture, and Poetics. Jeffery Sobal is a professor in the Division of Nutritional Sciences and Field of Development Sociology at Cornell University. He studies the construction, interpretation, and social epidemiology of body weight, food choice processes, food systems, gender and food, and commensal eating. He has coedited several books with Donna Maurer, include Eating Agendas  (1995),  Weighty Issues (1999), and Interpreting Weight (1999), and has published a number of articles in sociology, health, and nutrition journals. Michelle Szabo is Professor of Environmental Studies and Sociology at the Sheridan College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning in Oakville, Canada. She received her PhD in Environmental Studies from York University and was a 2014–2015 SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in Sociology at the University of Toronto. She has conducted research and taught on masculinities and cooking, consumer culture and sustainability, gender theory, and the sociology of food. Her publications appear in Journal of Gender Studies; Women’s Studies International Forum; Sociology; Food, Culture & Society; Journal of Consumer Culture; Sustainability; Agriculture & Human Values, and The Sage Encyclopedia of Food Issues. Lauren Williams is Professor and Head of Nutrition and Dietetics at Griffith University, Australia. She holds tertiary qualifications in science, dietetics, social science, health promotion, and a PhD in public health nutrition. Lauren has published widely on obesity, dieting, body acceptance, gender, and health. Through her edited book with John Germov, The Sociology of Food and Nutrition: The Social Appetite (4th ed OUP 2017), she has helped place the social aspects of food onto the nutrition and dietetics agenda.

Series preface: Why home? Rosie Cox and Victor Buchli

T

he home is where people are made and undone. As life is increasingly seen as precarious, fluid, mobile, and globalized, there is a growing interest in the home: what it is, what it means to various groups of people, how it constitutes them, and how it relates to other spheres of life both in the present and in the past. Home is both physical and metaphorical, local and national, a place of belonging and of exclusion. It is at the heart of the most seemingly mundane spaces and experiences—the site of quotidian activities such as eating, washing, raising children, and loving. Yet it is precisely the purportedly banal nature of the home that masks its deep importance for the underlying assumptions that structure social and political life. Home reveals the importance of routine activities, such as consumption, to highly significant and urgent wide-ranging issues and processes, such as the maintenance of and challenges to global capitalism and our relationship to the natural environment. Among academic writers, home is increasingly problematized, interrogated, and reconsidered. Long understood as an axis of gender inequality, home is also seen as a site for the making of class, racial, and ethnic identities; a space of negotiation and resistance as well as oppression; and a place where such relationships are undone as well as made. As a topic of study, it is the natural analytical unit for a number of disciplines and with relevance to a wide range of cultural and historical settings. The home is probably one of the few truly universal categories upon which an interdisciplinary program of research can be conducted and which, over recent years, has resulted in a distinctive analytical category with relevance across disciplines, times, and cultures. This book series offers a space to foster these debates and to move forward our thinking about the home. The books in this series range across

SERIES PREFACE: WHY HOME?

xiii

the social and historical sciences, drawing out the crosscutting themes and interrelationships within writings on home and providing us with new perspectives on this intimate space. While our understanding of “home” is expansive and open to interrogation, it is not unbounded. In honing our understandings of what “home” is, this series aims to disturb and it goes beyond the domestic, including to sites and states of dispossession and homelessness and experiences of the “unhomely.”

xiv

Introduction Michelle Szabo and Shelley Koch

Why this book?

T

he terms masculinity and home are not closely associated in the Western imagination. “Home” has traditionally been women’s realm and continues to be associated in many ways with women’s presence and feminine care and duty. But as recent demographic, material, and cultural changes are bringing more men into domestic spaces and building cultural narratives around men’s domesticity, there is potential for shifts in these traditional associations. The goal of this book is to give scholarly attention to the burgeoning relationship between masculinities, food, and home and to examine this transformative potential. Before introducing the contributions of the book, it is important to examine the historical relationships between the notions of masculinity, food, and home. Masculinity and home have traditionally helped to define each other through opposition. Though there have been exceptions to this (GormanMurray 2008a), the masculine is often shaped in counterpoint to home through cultural narratives of employment, adventure, and travel, which, in their traditional forms, take men away from home (Morley 2000). It is women who have been the quintessential creators and emblems of home. Through their physical and emotional care work, women have imbued domestic spaces with “homeliness” and what has come to be associated with the feminine: comfort, tradition, family, and intimacy (Morley 2000; Parkin 2006). We might think of the cultural trope of the woman at the threshold, waving goodbye to an outward-bound male loved one. Whether the exploit is school, work, or the epic journey of a soldier off to war, the woman’s stable presence at home1 provides a symbolic counterpoint to the man’s or boy’s adventure. The woman is not only in the home but of it. She is home.

2

Food, Masculinities, and Home

The role of food in this material and symbolic split is of particular note. It is traditionally women who have done the domestic foodwork2 to nurture and sustain families: meal planning, food shopping, and quotidian cooking (DeVault 1991; Murcott 1982). Indeed, a woman’s body is both our original home and our first source of nourishment in the form of breast milk. Men, on the other hand, if associated with food production at all, have been linked with food in nondomestic spaces. The most prominent of these is perhaps the professional culinary world, a world distanced through “artistry” and remuneration from the mundaneness of the home (Swenson 2009). What Harris and Guiffrie (2015) call the gendered “haute/home split” is demonstrated by quantitative and qualitative research. Men hold 84 percent of the 160 prestigious head chef positions in the top fifteen American restaurant groups while women hold roughly 16 percent (Sutton 2014). Meanwhile, on food TV, female professional chefs are typically framed as domestic advisors rather than artists (Johnston, Rodney, and Chong 2014; Swenson 2009). We might also think of farming, hunting, and barbecuing, all activities associated with men (despite women’s less visible participation in them) (Lockie and Collie 1999; Loo 2001; Shortall 2006), all occurring away from, or outside of, the domestic kitchen space.3 To be sure, these gendered spatial dichotomies were exacerbated in the Global North with the Industrial Revolution as men were recruited from farms into factories, and “work” and “home” became more sharply delineated in space and time (Cowan 1983; Meah 2014a). However, the dichotomization of the female/private and the male/public has also been observed in the Global South in pastoral and other nonindustrial economies. For example, among the Samburu of Kenya, while women have control over the general preparation and distribution of food, butchering and roasting meat in open spaces and for ceremonial purposes is men’s work (Holtzman 2002). Similarly, among the Lau of Fiji, the “oven house,” a place to make feast foods for special occasions, is men’s realm, while the everyday kitchen is women’s (Jones 2009). The links between femininity and home/private and masculinity and away/public have had remarkable potency across time and space. In recent years, however, we are witnessing shifts in demographics, workforce participation, and cultural messaging that have the potential to challenge the association between food, home, and femininity. For example, women’s participation in the paid workforce is gradually approaching that of men’s4 (OECD Stat 2016). There are increasing numbers of households in which women are absent, such as households headed by single men, single fathers, and gay male couples (Chapman 2004; Statistics Canada 2012; Vespa et al. 2013). In other words, men are now being pulled into domestic food preparation, or at least food provisioning, by necessity. At the same time, increasing numbers of people are conducting paid work from home,5 blurring

INTRODUCTION

3

the boundaries between “work” and “home,” and potentially, femininities and masculinities in response. On food TV, while women’s cooking is still associated with domesticity and dichotomized with men’s “culinary artistry” (de Solier 2005; Johnston, Rodney, and Chong 2014; Swenson 2009) professional chefs like Jamie Oliver are sometimes pictured nurturing their families through food (Hollows 2003). Terms like “gastrosexual” have been coined to capture the growing status of cooking for men, especially among the more privileged classes (Future Foundation 2008; Johnston, Rodney, and Chong 2014). Notions of “intimate” and “involved” fatherhood are also gaining ground (Dermott 2008; Owen et al. 2010) and recent research is showing that some men with domestic care responsibilities are using food to nurture loved ones and create feelings of care, comfort, and “home” (Aarseth and Olsen 2008; Carrington 1999; Owen et al. 2010; Metcalfe et al. 2009; Szabo 2014a). This is also a cultural moment when food has become extremely politicized. As the material and social consequences of food-related issues such as obesity, food insecurity, and environmental degradation gain prominence in the public imaginary, food and cooking have become the subject of enormous public and private scrutiny (Biltekoff 2007; Campos et al. 2006). In both the Global North and South, the increasing corporatization and industrialization of the food system has created concerns about issues such as sustainability, citizen and food worker health, conditions and rights of migrant laborers, the extinction of traditional foods and crops, and the erosion of traditional and indigenous foodways (LaDuke 2005; Shiva 2000; Ramsaroop and Wolk 2009). These personal and political issues all have consequences for food access and culture, not to mention notions of home, belonging, and identity. Given these developments, scholars are beginning to examine what Gorman-Murray (2008a) calls “domestic masculinities”—ways in which men’s increasing engagement with homemaking practices shapes masculine identities, and “masculine domesticities”—ways in which men’s shifting participation in the domestic sphere transforms meanings of “home.” The expansion of the interdisciplinary field of food studies is also bringing attention to the significance of food practices in place- and self-making. However, this scholarly work is still in its infancy, especially in examining the intersections of the three concepts of food, masculinities, and home. This collection is a modest attempt to fuel this conversation. In brief, in this context of shifting gender roles and subjectivities, of the blurring of public and private spaces, and of a highly politicized and fraught global foodscape, we interrogate the intersections between food, masculinities, and home. Key questions framing the book are: To what extent are gender hierarchies and heteronormativities being challenged through contemporary practices and meaning-making around eating and household

4

Food, Masculinities, and Home

foodwork? To what extent are masculinities and notions of “home” being reshaped by the increasing presence of men in domestic kitchens and other spaces of domestic food production? What consequences do these food practices and representations have for gender, race, and class equality, as well as public health and environmental sustainability? We fully recognize that masculinities are not necessarily attached to biological men and acknowledge the important theorization of female and trans masculinities (Browne 2005; Halberstam 2002). However, despite our efforts, we were not able to recruit chapters on alternative masculinities and food, and thus the focus of this book is the masculinities surrounding biological men. We point readers interested in domestic foodwork and alternative masculinities to underground art and short films on topics such as “butch baking” (e.g., Levin and Levitt 2000, 2001).

Food, gender, and home in the literature What do we already know about food and gender in relation to home? There is a significant body of work from the social sciences and humanities on food and gender. The focus has been predominantly on the different food preferences of men and women and associations between particular foods and femininity (e.g., salads, sweets) or masculinity (meat, fast foods) (Buerkle 2012; Brady and Ventresca 2014; Counihan and Kaplan 1998; McPhail et al. 2012; Sobal 2005). There is also a growing number of studies on gender and foodwork. These typically fall under two themes: 1) studies on practices or representations of men’s professional foodwork (e.g., professional chef work, commercial farming) and masculinity (e.g., Barlett and Conger 2004; de Solier 2005; Ferrell 2012; Hollows 2003; Holden 2013; Swenson 2009) and 2) work examining practices and representations of women’s domestic foodwork and femininity (e.g., Cairns and Johnston 2015; Charles and Kerr 1988; DeVault 1991; Fürst 1997; Hollows 2006; Inness 2001; 2006; Parkin 2006; Murcott 1982). The latter research on femininity is where we have seen the most attention to “home” and domestic foodwork. These scholars have demonstrated the ways in which notions like family, comfort, and ethnocultural identity are reproduced through women’s cooking. For example, in her foundational book on working- and middle-class women’s feeding practices in the United States, Marjorie DeVault (1991) illustrates the ways in which heterosexual women construct “family,” as well as notions of “proper womanhood,” by producing and orchestrating family meals. In a more recent investigation of gay and straight women’s food practices in Canada, Cairns and Johnston (2015) demonstrate the ways in which femininity and motherhood

INTRODUCTION

5

are tied to complex feeding and eating practices that protect and nurture loved ones while providing measured doses of self-oriented comfort and pleasure. A number of authors have written about the place of women’s cooking in the construction of ethno-cultural identity and belonging in diasporic communities (e.g., Avakian 2005; D’Sylva and Beagan 2011; Lessa 2007). Scholars have also demonstrated the important roles of ethno-racial background and class in women’s domestic foodwork. For example, it is often easier for women with significant cultural and material resources to enact “proper womanhood” through their eating and feeding practices (Cairns and Johnston 2015; DeVault 1991; Parsons 2014). Women’s justifications for their degree of engagement with domestic cooking have also been found to depend on ethno-racial background (e.g., Beagan et al. 2008; D’Sylva and Beagan 2011). Investigations of men’s or masculine food practices in relation to “home” have been less common. While several authors have recently honed in on the subject of men’s household cooking or its representations in the media (which we detail below) (Aarseth and Olsen 2008; Meah 2014b; Owen et al. 2010; Parasecoli 2008: Szabo 2013; Szabo 2014a; Szabo 2014b; Yuen 2014), there are to our knowledge no book-length scholarly collections on masculinities, food, and home.6 Two special issues of academic journals have broached the topic of food and masculinities more generally (Julier and Lindenfeld 2005; Nash and Phillipov 2014), but domestic masculinities and masculine domesticities as they relate to food remain underexamined. The broader literature on masculinities and place and men’s care work shed some light on relations between food, masculinities, and home, though not often explicitly. There is a substantial literature, for instance, on men’s shifting responsibilities in domestic arenas (e.g., Aarseth 2009; Carrington 1999; Fox 2009; Kilkey et al. 2013; Ranson 2010; Segal 1990; Tosh 2007), and a growing literature on masculinities and place (e.g., Gorman-Murray and Hopkins 2014; Pink 2004; van Hoven and Horschelmann 2005), some of which gives attention to the domestic or notions of “home” or belonging (Chapman 2004; Gorman-Murray 2006; 2008a; 2008b; Pink 2004; Smith and Winchester 1998). However, these typically give only tangential attention to the kitchen and other food spaces. A similar note can be made about explorations of “home” beyond the domestic scale as in community, nationhood, or virtual “homes.” While some of these take femininity and masculinity into account (e.g., Darke 2002; Gorman-Murray and Hopkins 2014; Kollock and Smith 2002; Morley 2000; van Hoven and Horschelmann 2005), food is rarely highlighted. In terms of the work that does examine the intersections of food, masculinities, and home, a few preliminary themes have emerged. First, as we detail below, women still spend at least twice as much time in household cooking as men in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries (OECD Stat 2016). This difference in time spent on foodwork

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Food, Masculinities, and Home

and degree of responsibility for feeding others seems to have consequences for men’s and women’s approaches to domestic food activities. Scholars who have compared men’s and women’s home foodwork have found that cooking, meal planning, and food shopping for women tend to be seen as a day-to-day, other-oriented responsibility—part of the creation of “home” for a family unit or domestic partnership (Adler 1981; Cairns et al. 2010; Parkin 2006). Women also take feeding others seriously because they are expected to be stricter guardians of health and sustainable consumption in families (Aarseth and Olsen 2008; Beagan et al. 2008, 662; Cairns et al. 2010; Cairns and Johnston 2015; Dixon and Banwell 2004; Oates and McDonald 2006; Owen et al. 2010; Mróz et al. 2011). Men’s foodwork, on the other hand, is more often framed as self-oriented leisure, artistry, or performance or, alternatively, a quick and instrumental “fuelling up” (Adler 1981; Cairns et al. 2010; Future Foundation 2008; Parasecoli 2005; 2008; Szabo 2014a). As men are less culturally responsible for feeding others “properly,” men’s cooking and food shopping has been found to be less fraught with worries over nutrition and eco-eating than women’s (Aarseth and Olsen 2008; Koch 2012; Owen et al. 2010). This lines up with traditional Western representations of what Gorman-Murray (2008a) calls “hetero-masculine domesticity” and “bachelor domesticity,” where the home for men is seen as a haven from work or a site for selfexpression or heterosexual seduction. However, it should be noted that this research has often been based on men with only occasional involvement in the domestic kitchen, such as single men who prefer simple or premade meals, or men in more typical heterosexual relationships where the women are day-to-day cooks and the men cook on weekends or special occasions. As Gorman-Murray (2008a) reminds us, “gay domesticity” and alternative notions of “hetero-masculine domesticity” also exist. Research focusing on gay male couples, involved fathers, and heterosexual couples where men have a primary role in home cooking tells a somewhat different story. Men with significant responsibilities for feeding others often show a great deal of investment, responsibility, and care around their cooking, including the desire to create a sense of “home” or domestic comfort for themselves and others (Aarseth and Olsen 2008; Carrington 1999; Neuman et al. 2015; Owen et al. 2010; Szabo 2013; Szabo 2014a; Szabo 2014b). Like women in earlier studies, these involved male cooks show a good deal of anxiety about their own and others’ nutritional health and, in some cases, sustainable consumption (Johnston and Baumann 2009; Sellaeg and Chapman 2008; Szabo 2013; Szabo 2014a). There are still contexts in which masculinity and home cooking are seen as antithetical (e.g., American men’s fitness magazines and comedies featuring hypermasculine bodies [Parasecoli 2005; Parasecoli 2008]). However, research in Australia, Sweden, Scandinavia, Canada, Japan, and the UK shows that the ability to plan household meals, shop, and cook with relative ease

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is increasingly being framed in the Global North as an essential or attractive quality of a responsible father or “modern” independent man (Aarseth and Olsen 2008; Gorman-Murray 2008a; Metcalfe et al. 2009; Neuman et al. 2015; Sellaeg and Chapman 2008; Szabo 2014b; Yuen 2014). Though there is less research on the intersections of race and class with masculine than feminine foodwork, some studies suggest that racialized and middle class men are more likely to engage in routine domestic tasks, such as cooking, than their white and working-class counterparts (e.g., Chua and Fujino 1999; PenhaLopes 2006; Warde and Hetherington 1994). Despite these advances, questions remain about the extent to which alternative domestic masculinities are becoming culturally dominant rather than marginal and the extent of their influence on gender equality, public health, and environmental sustainability. There is a dearth of information on the circumstances and contexts related to men’s food practices that promote what Messerschmidt (2012) calls “equality masculinities: those that legitimate an egalitarian relationship between men and women, between masculinity and femininity, and among men” (73). This lack includes how equality masculinities vis-à-vis food might incorporate other types of social equality, including race and class equality. Further, there has been little exploration of the influence of men’s food practices on notions of “home.” This book attempts to spearhead these conversations.

Theoretical considerations The feminist study of masculinities The chapters in this book present a feminist examination of masculinities. Feminist examinations of women’s domestic foodwork (Cairns and Johnston 2015; DeVault 1991; Murcott 1982) have been invaluable in revealing the relations of power that undergird gendered practices and images. Feminist research on masculinities has made similar contributions (e.g., Connell 1995; Kimmel 1987), including attempting to theorize more egalitarian relationships between genders (Messerschmidt 2012). We follow in these traditions and see gender scholarship as a tool toward greater equality between and among men, women, gender fluid, trans, and intersex people of various sexualities. This scholarship continues to be important as domestic labor, especially around food, remains stubbornly gendered. Despite the media prominence of male celebrity chefs, women continue to do the majority of domestic foodwork (cooking, cleaning up, and food shopping) in regular households. The average time spent on cooking and food clean up per day by women across

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the OECD countries as well as China, South Africa, and India between 1998 and 2009 was four times that of men (83 minutes per day versus 21 minutes per day) (Miranda 2011, 25–6). In industrialized nations such as Canada, the United States, and Australia, women spend more than twice as much time on these domestic food activities as men (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2009; Statistics Canada 2011a; US Bureau of Labor Statistics 2015). In some cases, there has been little change over the past several decades in the gendered allocation of food labor. For example, men in the United States have increased their cooking by only about 30 minutes per week since the 1960s (Bianchi et al. 2000; US Bureau of Labor Statistics 2014). These discrepancies have consequences for the gendered division of labor more generally. While women in OECD countries spend about 85 percent of the time that men do in paid work, men spend about 44 percent of the time that women do in unpaid work (OECD 2013, 260). This has led feminists to suggest that there is a “stalled” or “unfinished” gender revolution, as women move into the public realm, but men do not move to an equal degree into the private (Hochschild 1989; Gerson 2010), leaving women with inferior access to financial independence, career advancement, and leisure time (Hochschild 1989; US Bureau of Labor Statistics 2015). The chapters in this book examine masculinities as they relate to domestic food practices with an eye toward the potential for reducing these well-being gaps between men and women.

Conceptualizing masculinities The authors in this collection describe their specific theoretical orientations and conceptualizations of gender in their chapters. While individual authors understand the nuances of gender in somewhat different ways, in general, the book eschews understandings of gender as innate and straightforwardly determined by the immutable biological constitutions of male and female bodies. Rather, authors understand gender as influenced by social and cultural contexts, as “done” or performed in social interaction (West and Zimmerman 1987) or as created and reproduced in language and discursive institutions (Butler 1988). Masculinity and femininity are understood as “intersectional” (Nakano Glenn 1999) and influenced by the various other identities that individuals and groups may use to frame their behavior in, and understanding of, the world, such as race ethnicity, class, sexuality, and age. To highlight traditional inequalities between and among genders, many chapters employ or reference Connell’s (1995) foundational concept of “hegemonic masculinity.” This concept expresses the notion that there is a hierarchy of masculinities (also called “multiple masculinities”) in particular social contexts, with the “hegemonic” form having the most status and power and other forms being

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marginalized (Connell 1995; Connell and Messerschmidt 2005). For example, in North America, a heterosexual, white, high-income-earning but also physically strong masculinity—epitomized by someone like Brad Pitt—might be seen as the hegemonic form in a mainstream context, while racialized, queer, or low-income masculinities are typically less valued in general. However, what is hegemonic is not absolute. In some contexts (e.g., the military, amateur sport), physical strength might be more valued than breadwinning ability; in others (e.g., the business world), breadwinning might be prioritized. The same can be applied to the realm of food. Meat eating and barbecuing is, in many contexts, seen as a hegemonic masculine norm (Sobal 2005), as is eating “junk food,” especially during sports games. However, in a radical vegan community, it might be seen as more masculine to avoid meat and to know how to cook from scratch and avoid processed foods (Clark 2004). Overall, there is significant cultural pressure on men and other masculineidentified people to follow the hegemonic norm in the contexts in which they find themselves most often, as there are negative consequences for not doing so, from teasing and social ostracism to extreme violence (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005). In addition, we note that masculinity and femininity do not neatly overlap with male and female bodies (e.g., Halberstam’s Female Masculinity [1998]). Simply put, men, trans, gender fluid, and intersex individuals may sometimes relate to “feminine” identities and act in “feminine” ways, and women, trans, gender fluid, and intersex individuals may sometimes relate to “masculine” identities and act in “masculine” ways. In some cases, individuals may relate to neither “feminine” nor “masculine” identities or behaviors or they may relate to a combination of both. While some chapters in the book begin, by necessity, with the fixed categories of “men” and “women” as primary units of investigation (e.g., Daniels and Glorieux’s quantitative exploration of time-use diaries among men), others delve more deeply into how the very notions of “man” and “masculinity” are created through repeated behavior, representations, and discourse (e.g., Hamada’s chapter on how Japanese migrants to Australia construct “masculinity” in novel ways in the new country). We believe that these somewhat different approaches to gender in the book are complementary and give us a fuller understanding of what gender is and how it “works.”

Conceptualizing “home” The term “home” has various meanings in different contexts. Home may be a micro or macro physical space where people find and create a sense of privacy, belonging, security, family, intimacy, or comfort (Chapman 2004;

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Darke 2002; Morley 2000). Examples include one’s household or an establishment, neighborhood, city, region, or nation with which one identifies. Home may also be a virtual, symbolic, or imaginary community with few precise physical boundaries but where people find and create these same qualities: privacy, belonging, security, family, intimacy, or comfort. Examples include one’s family, an internet community, a political or social movement, or a diasporic community. In both cases, the sense of home is not simply a virtue of the physical space or community composition, but is a felt sense that is continually shaped through the ways in which individuals and groups interact with that home and the ways in which they influence its physical and sensory character. As mentioned above, food and foodwork have large parts to play in the creation and delineation of home (DeVault 1991). The sights, smells, sounds, tastes, and textures of food remind us of our childhood homes (Cairns et al. 2010), connect us to distant “homelands” (Avakian 2006), and help us to imbue our current living spaces with comfort, intimacy, belonging, and identity (D’Sylva and Beagan 2011; Szabo 2014a). Home may also have negative connotations. For women in particular, home may evoke feelings of resentment, burden, or restriction because of domestic work overload or lack of economic or physical independence (Darke 2002; Oakley 1975). Other issues such as poverty, abuse, sexism, homophobia, and family discord may negatively color feelings of home for all genders (Gorman-Murray 2008a; Gurney 1990; Hochschild 1997; Morley 2000). In this book, several authors explore home in the first sense: in relation to men’s and boys’ eating or foodwork done in the domestic space as opposed to, or in contrast with, a public or professional space. A smaller number of authors explore home in the second sense: the felt sense of family, intimacy, ethno-cultural identity, or national belonging. We describe each of the chapters in detail below.

Methodology One of the strengths of food studies is that it crosses disciplinary and national boundaries to examine food practices, meanings, representations, and institutions. This book is a strong example of the scope of food studies scholarship. To cover the wide angle of food and masculinity at home, we have included scholars writing from a multiplicity of disciplines, including cultural studies, anthropology, sociology, history, English, media studies, philosophy, nutrition studies, and communication studies. The academic terrain covered by these scholars includes media, textual, and discourse analyses, quantitative food diaries, qualitative interviews, performance ethnography, and theoretical

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pieces. In addition, the geographical scope of the studies is quite varied; chapter authors hail from or write about Canada, the United States, Israel, Belgium, France, Australia, Uruguay, Denmark, and Japan. The scholarly stories these chapters tell us about masculinity, home, and food all take place against a backdrop of increasing urbanization, a globalized industrial agricultural system, and global cultural flows (c.f. Appadurai 1990). While the local is still salient, the corporatization of the political economic system and the global access to media has decreased the power of national borders to exclusively frame individual experiences and identities; thus, the complexity of this system demands a more interdisciplinary approach to highlight changes or continuities. The different methodological approaches presented in this book provide a broad context for understanding domestic masculinity as a historical process shaped by popular culture through novels (Christensen), television shows (Leer), movies (Paresecoli), cookbooks (Rodney, Johnston and Chong), and toys (Fakasis), as well as a lived experience shaped by migration (Hamada) and immigration (Moldes), the lifecycle (Williams and Germov), paid work (Gvion and Patkin), family and social background (Daniels and Glorieux), ideology and fantasy (Cox), and social representations (Sobal).

Overview of chapters The book is divided into two complementary sections. The chapters in the first section, “The production of masculinity and home through food: understanding men’s involvement in domestic cooking,” focus on food practices of men in domestic spaces. The second section, “Discourses of men’s and boys’ home cooking in popular culture and the media,” explores representations of men’s cooking in various media sources.

Section 1: “The production of masculinity and home through food: Understanding men’s involvement in domestic cooking” While men are still not assuming shared or full responsibility for household foodwork statistically, these chapters suggest that spaces are opening for men to use cooking as a means of connection to specific family members, the idea of family, or to their cultural heritage. Iori Hamada describes how cooking serves as a bridge between cultures in “Transnational domestic masculinity: Japanese men’s home cooking in Australia.” She examines how Japanese migrants living in Australia use domestic cooking as a means to “do”

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masculinity in a place in which the breadwinner/public role is not as open to them as in their original homeland. Without excellent English skills, Japanese men are often relegated to secondary labor markets and the role of primary breadwinner is not necessarily an option. The kitchen thus becomes a site of negotiating a new identity, and domestic cooking allows these men to straddle the cultural and social norms and expectations of the “home” and “host” country. Daniel Moldes, in “Stumbling in the kitchen: Exploring masculinity, Latinicity, and belonging through performative cooking,” uses performative cooking as a method to explore the ways in which his gender, sexuality, and cultural heritage intersect. Drawing on a series of autoethnographic vignettes in which he recreates his South American family recipes in his new North American home, Moldes explores how the kitchen space can transcend distance and difference as well as regenerate relationships and identities. Cooking is also a means by which domestic identities are formed or maintained. Liora Gvion and Dorit Patkin investigate the foodwork practices and attitudes of Israeli men who are employed in the traditionally femaledominated profession of teaching and married to the household’s primary breadwinner. The researchers find that, rather than describe their foodwork as caring for others and embracing a more traditionally feminine food identity, these fathers stated that their cooking was a hobby or a practice they chose out of necessity since their wife could not or would not cook. Those men who did not cook justified their limited involvement as a means by which their wives could use their feminine skills to nurture the family. Lauren Williams and John Germov also examine men’s domestic foodwork in their study of a communitybased cooking program in Australia. This cooking program was designed for older men (55 to 93) who live alone or who were preparing to care for others. The men who took part in the research study were older veterans, about half of whom were partnered and half of whom lived alone and who voluntarily entered this program to learn more about cooking. Williams and Germov show that the model of masculinity these participants drew on before the five-week course was the standard hegemonic script of men as recipients of others’ cooking. After the program, however, they found a greater willingness on the part of the participants to adopt alternative masculine scripts that allowed them to incorporate the mastery of cooking. They argue that one of the important variables in this shift was the homosocial setting in which men observed other men cooking and incorporating cooking into a masculine identity. On one hand, it is notable that the identities of these older men are not so ossified that they cannot change. On the other, the characteristics of the new masculine identity some adopted were independence and self-reliance rather than more feminine-coded qualities of caring for others or for self. Sarah Daniels and Ignace Glorieux take a quantitative approach to men’s cooking activities and how men describe their participation in cooking. The

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authors use time-use data collected in 2004 among the Flemish population. They find that women are still doing much of the daily cooking; in fact, 36 percent of men in their sample did not cook at all and 27 percent cooked only occasionally. However, of the men who did cook more frequently, the researchers argue that men’s cooking and their description of it do not fall into the neatly dichotomized image suggested in previous research of male cooking as “play” versus female cooking as “work”; rather, men’s cooking was also motivated by commitment, obligation, friendship, family, or necessity. In the last chapter in this selection, “Men’s foodwork in food systems: Social representations of masculinities and cooking at home,” Jeffery Sobal provides a theoretical framework from which to understand the continued gendered nature of foodwork. Cross-culturally and historically, he argues, men and women engage in all forms of foodwork (except for hunting). In Western societies, however, domestic cooking is gendered female. Social representation theory, which states that social representations provide “thema” or core ideas that people draw upon in social discourse to use in individual and collective activities, is useful for illuminating the social process by which this occurs. Three different forms of social representation are available for individuals to draw upon in relation to foodwork: hegemonic, polemic, and emancipatory. The dominant hegemonic social representation is that men don’t do foodwork, while some evidence exists for an emancipatory social representation in the form of men contributing to or helping with foodwork. Polemic representations—men doing most of the foodwork—do not exist. He argues that promoting multiple and alternative social representations is critical for changing gendered foodwork norms, a message which connects directly to the chapters in the next section.

Section 2: Discourses of men’s and boys’ home cooking in popular culture and the media The authors in the second section of the book dissect how masculinity and foodwork are represented in a wide variety of media and texts in industrialized societies. Cooking shows and cookbooks are extremely popular and provide a lens through which to view mainstream masculine presentations of domestic cooking. Jonatan Leer conducts a close reading of one episode from the French cooking show Le Chef Contre-Attaque (The Chef Strikes Back) hosted by Cyril Lignac. In this particular episode, three men from the north of France are ostensibly taught how to cook food for their families, but also latently instructed in how to do modern masculinity. Leer argues that domesticity, food, and masculinity cannot be understood separately

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from other social categories—most importantly, social class—and that the televised representations of food, masculinity, and cooking thus establish hierarchies between different groups of men in their construction of legitimate and illegitimate ways of embracing and/or refusing home cooking. Alexandra Rodney, Josée Johnston and Phillipa Chong offer a discourse analysis of cookbooks written by prominent male chefs in “Chefs at home? Masculinities on offer in celebrity chef cookbooks.” The authors use these texts to analyze how male chefs are symbolically and culturally positioned in relation to the home and, in particular, how masculine personas are constructed. They find four personas—maverick, chef-artisan, self-made man, and gastrosexual—each of which allows the male chefs to maintain masculine professional privilege when providing recipes and advice for the home kitchen. The authors suggest that the dominant cultural form of a heteronormative masculinity found in these texts reinforces rather than challenges traditional gendered relationships in the domestic kitchen. Representations of men and food in American film are the focus of Fabio Parasecoli’s chapter titled “Kitchen Mishaps: Performances of masculine domesticity in American comedy films.” Analyzing six movies from the last thirty years, ranging from Kindergarten Cop to Daddy Day Care, Paresecoli describes situations in which male protagonists face unusual tasks or missions that require them to partially compromise mainstream expectations about masculinity, in particular cooking for or feeding children. These situations usually entail mishaps that reveal the characters’ inadequacies as nurturers—hence the comedy; however, these films reinstate a heteronormative masculinity as these characters often come off as more caring without losing their masculine privilege to refrain from day-to-day nurturing or their romantic relationships with female characters. Masculinity is an accomplishment that must be constantly culturally reinforced. Samantha Christensen takes a historical look at the messages about boys, masculinity, and food female readers received in the coming-ofage novels of Louisa May Alcott and Susan Coolidge in the late nineteenth century. Boys in these novels were the eating counterparts to girls who cooked; they were told they should exhibit a healthy appetite in the home but discipline in the industrial work world. The characters of Jo Marsh and Laurie in the Little Women series exhibit this dichotomy. The “fat boy” character, found in several of the nineteenth-century novels, symbolizes failed masculine socialization and becomes a cautionary figure. These authors are not necessarily writing for a young male readership but rather shape their boys into the types of masculine figures their young female readers should seek to marry. Christensen reminds us that masculinity and femininity are relational but that specific roles must be culturally and repeatedly reinforced for both boys and girls. Elizabeth Fakazis provides a contemporary example

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of the symbolic and material resources American children can draw from to construct culinary selves. New toy kitchen sets with gender-neutral colors, professional gadgets, magazines, cookbooks, cooking classes for teens, and children’s exposure to foodie culture may be breaking down the gendered expectations that exist in domestic cooking and in the professional kitchen. However, they may be reinforcing class differences as foodie culture coalescences around a discourse of individual health rather than gender and gender roles. Ellen Cox, in “Don’t Try This At Home: Men on TV, Women in the Kitchen,” provides a philosophical explanation for the seeming contradiction between the increasing number of men cooking on television but the still relatively low number of men taking significant responsibility for domestic foodwork in statistical terms. Using Zizek’s notions of ideological fantasy and enjoyment, she argues that aspects of dominant gender ideology may remain salient despite the proliferation of new representations of masculinity, as seen in celebrity male chefs. She suggests that representations of celebrity male chefs provide us with an imagined experience of gender equality in food preparation, which may help preserve actual gendered patterns of inequality in domestic foodwork.

Summary: The intersections of food, masculinities, and home Gender inequality Some of the chapters in this collection suggest that gender hierarchies are being challenged in everyday food practice. For example, Daniels and Glorieux’s chapter shows that, in Belgium, men who are at least occasional home cooks are more often motivated to cook out of necessity (because they live alone) or a sense of obligation to family than for leisure. Their research adds to the growing body of work challenging the notion that men’s cooking is primarily a leisurely pursuit (Aarseth and Olsen 2008; Szabo 2013; 2014a), and advances the notion that leisure cooking among men is a phenomenon engaged in mainly by higher social classes (see also Johnston and Baumann 2010). In their chapter on a community cooking program for older male veterans in Australia, Williams and Germov demonstrate that older men who see cooking as “women’s work” can learn to embrace cooking if they are required to cook, again, out of necessity (in this case because of divorce or ailing or deceased partners) and if they see other men engaging in the practice. These chapters suggest that demographic changes to households, with increasing numbers of men living alone, create the necessity for more men to cook than in the

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past, which in turn can normalize the practice for other men. This supports previous research in Canada on men who live alone, and in Britain and Scandinavia on fathers in heterosexual partnerships, suggesting that many men see their own cooking as a taken-for-granted skill for self-sufficiency or a family responsibility (Aarseth and Olsen 2008; Metcalfe et al. 2009; Sellaeg and Chapman 2008; Szabo 2014a; 2014b). The fact that children’s home kitchen toys are increasingly being marketed to boys, as Fakazis shows in her chapter, and that some male celebrity chefs on both English and French food TV publicly valorize domestic cooking, as Leer, and Rodney, Johnston and Chong point out, further suggests that domestic cooking is being normalized for men and boys. However, other chapters in this collection provide evidence that home cooking is still seen in some contexts as women’s primary responsibility, with men cooking only occasionally or for pleasure. In Daniels and Glorieux’s quantitative study of cooking in Belgium, the authors found that 36 percent of the male population did not cook at all, with men in heterosexual couples being much less likely to cook than single men. Further, 27 percent of men surveyed cooked occasionally as “family support work” and 8 percent cooked as a “pleasurable weekend activity.” In their investigation of Israeli male teachers, Gvion and Patkin note that the men in their sample who did not cook justified this by highlighting their roles as breadwinners or by appealing to their wives’ desire to nurture the family through food. These findings echo previous research demonstrating that, in heterosexual relationships, men are often “helpers” in the domestic realm rather than taking on full emotional and physical responsibility for care work (Beagan et al. 2008; Fox 2009). It also lines up with research demonstrating that couples who deviate from the male breadwinner standard (in the case of Israeli male school teachers, having a traditionally feminine job and being secondary income-earners) often compensate through a traditional division of labor in the household (Bittman et al. 2003). Empirically, while we see some normalization of male home cooking, we have little evidence that a male cook who takes on primary responsibility for household meals has become a culturally dominant phenomenon in the countries studied here. The chapters in the second section of this book suggest that representations of men, masculinity, and food in popular culture are also conservative. In many cases, these representations contribute to what Sobal terms a “hegemonic social representation” in regard to foodwork. Christensen’s chapter on nineteenth-century American coming-of-age novels gives us a glimpse into the historical underpinnings of these representations in the United States. As the author shows, “proper” American boys were discursively constructed in these novels as enthusiastic eaters of female-prepared food. Though boys were at risk of shame through overindulgence in the public sphere, there was

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never a question that they would become producers rather than consumers of household meals. More recently, now that the workforce and income earning has opened up to women to a much greater extent, there is more opportunity and necessity for men to move into the domestic realm. However, as shown by Rodney, Johnston and Chong in their look at the cookbooks of male celebrity chefs and by Parasecoli in his consideration of male home cooking in American comedy films, popular discourse still promotes a strong association between masculinity and professional cooking and femininity and domestic cooking. Thus, while we may see some men in domestic kitchens, pop cultural representations of men’s cooking may work to maintain the gendered “haute/home” split (Harris and Guiffrie 2015). Moreover, as Cox argues in her chapter, ideologies of equality in the Western cultural imaginary may actually allow material inequalities to persist by providing the illusion that the feminist project is complete.

Race, class, and sexuality The chapters here also detail some of the ways in which gender, sexuality, class, and race intersect in social hierarchies. In his autoethnographic account of cooking traditional Uruguayan dishes in Canada, Moldes demonstrates the important role that queerness plays in, on the one hand, facilitating his presence in the traditionally feminine space of the kitchen and, on the other, marking him as an “outsider” to Latino masculinity. In their investigation of the most prominent male celebrity chefs, Rodney, Johnston and Chong note the privileged attention given to white, heterosexual chefs as well as the typecasting of male chefs of color in “rags-to-riches” masculinity narratives. Social class also plays a significant role in defining “proper” masculinity and femininity and “proper” food. Through his examination of the French cooking show, Le Chef Contre-Attaque (The Chef Strikes Back), Leer explores the ways in which the show promotes a decidedly middle-class and moralistic gaze on working-class men’s cooking. In her examination of children’s culinary toys and culture in the United States, Fakazis argues that, while boys (and girls) are increasingly being offered both “masculine” and “feminine” ways of approaching food, access to culinary culture still requires significant cultural and material resources. These studies are in keeping with several other studies on “foodies” and culinary culture in Britain and the United States (e.g., de Solier 2005; Hollows and Jones 2010; Johnston and Baumann 2010) which illustrate that this culture is tied up with discourses of “[working] class pathologization” (Hollows and Jones 2010, 308), and promotes pleasures which are largely inaccessible to lower income and class groups. Overall, these chapters show that masculinity is deeply entwined with race, class, and

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sexuality, and “proper” masculinity vis-à-vis food is still often framed using middle-class, white, and heteronormative ideals.

Home In this book, most authors explore “home” vis-à-vis men’s or boys’ foodwork done in, or set against, the physical space of the domestic realm. However, chapters also shed light on “home” in relation to a felt sense of family, intimacy, ethno-cultural identity, or national belonging. The chapter by Moldes complements previous literature demonstrating the important role of women’s cooking in the preservation of ethno-cultural tradition in diasporic communities (e.g., D’Sylva and Beagan 2011; Avakian 2006) by describing the complex connections between the author’s cooking of Uruguayan foods, his sense of cultural belonging, and his queer Latino-Canadian identity. The author suggests that, even though some of his relatives had seen his cooking as inappropriately effeminate, when he cooked Uruguayan food and was seen as “preserving tradition” in Canada, he was given a “pass” to transgress traditional gender roles. Furthermore, he argues, cooking Uruguayan food is a powerful reclamation of belonging as it allows him to occupy the often oppositionally framed subjectivities of queer and Latino. Hamada’s chapter on Japanese migrants to Australia also sheds light on the influence of transnational migration on masculinity and foodwork. She finds that food values and customs of the “home” country can be reshaped to fit practical circumstances as well as different notions of masculinity in the new culture. For Japanese migrant men, the act of engaging in home cooking in Australia, a practice they would be less involved with in Japan because of greater breadwinning opportunities, is, as Hamada puts it, an act of “making home away from home.” In addition, home cooking is a way for these men to redefine themselves as men since the traditional masculine identity of breadwinner is less available to them. Finding belonging in a new community is also a theme in Williams and Germov’s chapter on cooking lessons for older veterans in Australia. While many of the veterans had traditional notions of home cooking being feminine work before being involved in the community cooking lessons, several refigured these ideas through the process. As the authors argue, this was not only through learning the practical skills of cooking and becoming more competent cooks. It was also by being immersed in a homosocial environment where cooking was normalized by the participation of other men who, as wars veterans, fulfilled masculine ideals in other ways. In sum, men’s participation in domestic foodwork is entwined in complex ways with their sense of “home” and belonging, especially as they negotiate new ways of being masculine in unfamiliar or challenging circumstances.

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Public health and environmental sustainability Industrialized countries are experiencing sharply rising rates of food-related illnesses including obesity, cancer, and heart disease. Large-scale studies in several countries find that men’s diets are poorer than women’s when it comes to fruit, vegetable, and fiber consumption and the limiting of fat and soft drinks (Li et al. 2000; Beer-Borst et al. 2000; Liebman et al. 2001; Wardle et al. 2004). Qualitative studies in countries such as the United States, Canada, and Finland have also shown that meat eating, larger portions, and “unhealthy” eating is highly associated with masculinity, while vegetable eating, smaller portions, and “healthy eating” is more associated with femininity (e.g., McPhail et al. 2012; Sobal 2005; Roos et al. 2001). Further, a few studies of men’s cooking show that men are less concerned with nutrition, or at least less anxious about feeding their children healthy meals, than women (Aarseth and Olsen 2008; Owen et al. 2010). These behaviors and notions have been linked to earlier mortality (Mróz et al. 2011) as well as the greater prevalence of diet-related diseases such as obesity among men across the Global North (Kanter and Caballero 2012). As Williams and Germov point out in their chapter, traditional gendered notions associating domestic food skills (and healthy eating) with femininity may exacerbate this if it discourages men from learning food skills and participating in the kitchen (see also Mróz et al. 2011). It is heartening, then, to see that masculinity and home cooking are being reconciled in some contexts, as many of the authors here demonstrate. What remains to be seen is the extent to which health-promoting cooking is reconciled with masculinity. Programs spearheaded by public health concerns such as the cooking classes for older men discussed by Williams and Germov; the programs celebrating young cooks discussed by Fakazis; and celebrity chef Jamie Oliver’s “Food Revolution,” discussed by Rodney, Johnston and Chong, may help in this vein. However, as many authors here point out, this may not be a great step forward if the programs do so in a way that pathologizes working-class culinary culture or is inaccessible to lower income eaters. Though the chapters in this book do not go into detail about sustainability, in light of the severe consequences of the industrial food system for the environment and the recent attention in the media and popular literature to “eco-eating,” we feel it warrants a brief mention as we close. Agricultural production contributes significantly to carbon emissions and other forms of pollution (European Environment Agency 2015). Neoliberal policies that cut state services require more care work to fall on the household. Thus, the questions of who prepares our food and in what ways, and how home is defined and delineated, are not just academic but foundational to a system committed to the care of others and to the environment (MacGregor 2006).

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This makes examining and promoting equitable food practices in the home even more important to achieving long-term sustainability (e.g., Szabo 2011). For global sustainability, our notion of “home” may need to be expanded to include the environment as our human home.

Limitations and future research directions When we first put out the call for chapters for this book, we did our best to solicit chapters on female masculinities, more chapters with detailed attention to race and ethnicity, and more chapters from the Global South. However, we were not as successful as we had hoped. These voices are thus sadly missing and we encourage future projects to take up this important work. We are also aware of the need for more attention to masculine food practices in relation to “domesticity” and to “home” at the extra-domestic scale (community, nationhood). Future research should continue to interrogate the changes masculine-identified people bring to the notion and construction of “home” via food, and vice versa, with potential attention to issues such as alternative housing arrangements, communal spaces, and ritual and social meals in spaces defined as home. We also hope more attention will be paid in future to the influences of masculinity and foodwork on environmental sustainability.

Notes 1 Although women’s long-term presence in the home has not always been a material reality (working-class women and women of color have worked outside the home for generations), the symbolic link between the feminine and the domestic and the masculine and the extra-domestic remains powerful (Rose 1992).

2 We use the term “foodwork” in a similar way to other food scholars (e.g., Beagan et al. 2008; Bove and Sobal 2006) to include any of the following activities: planning and organizing meals; traveling to a food purveyor; selecting and purchasing products; growing food in a garden or pots; preparing raw ingredients; cooking/baking; cleaning up; and disposing of food and packaging waste.

3 In the Global South and in indigenous communities, the exact boundaries between public and private may be different, but food spaces are often gendered in similar ways, with the areas most proximate to the home or associated with food labeled “feminine.” For example, in central Mexico, what Christie (2006) calls the “kitchenspace”—the indoor and outdoor spaces where food is prepared—is traditionally off-limits to men. In many parts of Africa, gathering firewood and water for cooking and drinking—though this

INTRODUCTION

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might take place at some distance from the home—is “women’s work” (Hyder et al. 2005).

4 For example, the labor force participation rate for men and women in 2014, respectively, was 83 percent versus 72 percent in the UK, 76 percent versus 68 percent in Israel, 88 percent versus 79 percent in Switzerland, and 80 percent versus 63 percent in the OECD countries overall (OECD Stat 2016).

5 About one in four Americans, one in five Canadians, and one in ten Austrians, Netherlanders, Danes, and Finns now work for pay from home (Eurostat 2015; Turcotte 2010; US Bureau 2014).

6 We are not surprised by this lack of attention to men’s relationships with home and food. Not only has men’s involvement in kitchens and other domestic food spaces been historically relatively marginal, but it has been our experience that men do not respond as readily as women to recruitment ads for research on food when participant gender is not specified. For example, in one large-scale qualitative study of family food practices in Canada that recruited both male and female participants, 105 women responded, compared to 18 men (Beagan et al. 2014).

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Section one

The production of “masculinity” and “home” through food: Empirical studies of masculinity and home cooking

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1 Cooking up manliness: A practice-based approach to men’s at-home cooking and attitudes using time-use diary data Sarah Daniels and Ignace Glorieux

Introduction

C

ooking has many secondary meanings and symbolic weights besides its nutritional significance (Belasco 2002). It is an indirect way of communicating and a practice through which people can create and show their identity, status, or lifestyle (Kaufmann 2010; Short 2006). This makes it an interesting research object, especially in relation to gender. Cooking practices are not simply a mirror of gendered identities but actively contribute to the construction and experience of these identities (Hollows 2008). Despite the fact that home cooking is still mainly done by women and is a highly gender-specific task, in Western societies more men than ever are finding their way into the kitchen, showing more interest in and spending more time on all aspects of cooking (Ekström and Fürst 2001). This increase in participation is part of a general trend brought about by men contributing more in the household (Sullivan 2000). In an effort to take more responsibility

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in the total household workload, men are likely to spend time cooking and helping in the kitchen (Sullivan 1997). Cooking is by far the most pleasurable and rewarding domestic chore because it differs from other chores (like cleaning the house or doing the laundry) through its creative potential (Ricroch and Division 2011). The conventional image of the at-home kitchen as a characteristically feminine arena thus seems to have been reshaped. The focus is no longer only on women as food producers versus men as food consumers (Devasahayam 2005). In many images and forms of popular culture, mass media, and food literature, men’s increased role in the kitchen is portrayed as a game, pastime, hobby, or an enjoyable culinary pleasure. Men’s domestic cooking practices are generally portrayed as temporally marked leisure while women’s feeding practices as quotidian domestic (care) work. Within this image, men’s participation in the kitchen is viewed as having little or nothing to do with the long-held associations between cooking, femininity, and caring. Seen in this light, men’s cooking responsibilities are assumed to be limited to the baking of pancakes on Sunday morning, the science of barbequing, or the preparation of luxury and special dinners for friends and family (Adler 1981; Fürst 1997; Neuhaus 1999; Sobal 2005). Accordingly, male cooks are often depicted as “kings of the kitchen” who, as food heroes or “culinary artists,” are fired up by a passion for cooking and have a natural ability to cook and be creative with ingredients and combinations (Neuhaus 2003: 258; Szabo 2012: 3). Paul Aikens (2008: 3) conceptualizes this group of male cooks as “gastrosexuals,” who mainly cook for the pleasure, praise, and potential seductive power of food. They experience cooking as “an enjoyable experience” and as “something to be relished” (Aikens 2008: 3). The above shows that food habits are not fixed, but change and continually develop over time in response to societal trends, changing ideas about gender roles, and life-course transitions (Hartog 1987; Julier and Lindenfeld 2005). Unlike for women, cooking is a relatively new habit for men, which is without a doubt related to the changed nature of home cooking from a formerly backstage and rather low-status activity to a more popular, fashionable, frontstage activity (Bugge 2003). A number of current trends support this move, such as the celebrity status of master chefs; the high sales of cookery books and kitchen gizmos; the popularity of culinary television programs, or the change in kitchen designs from separate working rooms to open “trophy” spaces, places of sociability, and central “hubs of homes” (Contois 2014: 1; Freeman 2004; Van Otterloo 2000; Shove and Hand 2003). Many of the current cookbooks (e.g., How to Cook Like a Man, Man Meets Stove, Gordon Ramsay’s Fast Food) and TV programs (e.g., The Naked Chef) are specifically designed for the modern man who takes on cooking as a fun and creative leisure and/ or a cool masculine activity (Hollows 2003). This shift in meaning “has invoked

COOKING UP MANLINESS

33

a sense of ‘masculine domesticity’ that has given men a legitimate place at the stove” (Jackson 2014: 93; Swenson 2009: 47). The tensions between masculinity and the long prominent effeminate nature of home cooking seem to have disappeared insofar as that it is now perfectly acceptable for men to cook, so long as they do so in a “manly” way. The “traditional” hegemonic view of masculinity has not disappeared but is being challenged by a number of “new domestic” or “alternative” masculinities that make it possible for men to engage in domestic labor (Gorman-Murray 2008). Men are no longer solely breadwinners or “bread keepers” (the origin of the word “lord”), but also “bread-kneaders” (the origin of the word “lady”) (Wrangham 2009: 151). However, one may wonder whether the above-described interpretation fully portrays men’s everyday-life kitchen practices. As sociologist Jeffery Sobal (2005: 151) describes, most of men’s food consumption practices are not an adventurous “wild game cooked over an open flame.” In reality, men’s relationship with cooking is much more complex than the dichotomized, stereotyped, gendered image of cooking. Whether and to what extent men’s home-cooking practices and perceptions differ from the gender-stereotyped hierarchies around cooking (e.g., men’s cooking as “play,” women’s cooking as “work” [Adler 1981: 51]) is the subject of this study. We explore how and to what extent men’s cooking practices are linked to the notion of gastrosexuality and also to other, what might be considered more “traditionally” feminine, gender-neutral, or nonmacho aspects. However, while the trend of men’s involvement in the kitchen is evident, men are (with a few notable exceptions) rarely explicitly included as a target population in studies on cooking and feeding practices. Where men do appear, qualitative and survey studies show a somewhat more nuanced picture. When asked to choose the words they are most likely to associate with cooking from a list of propositions, French sociologist Jean-Pierre Poulain (2002) found that men were most likely to perceive cooking as a social practice and a way of giving, sharing, having fun, and expressing love and care. This is related to the conventional notion of cooking as “a gift of time, hands, and heart,” an aspect of cooking primarily attributed to women (DeVault 1994; Shapiro 2004: 60). However, men also think of cooking as an obligation and, to a somewhat lesser extent, a relaxing, therapeutic activity, entertainment, or culinary art. Nevertheless, compared with women, they do experience cooking more as leisure (DeVault 1994; Poulain 2002; Shapiro 2004: 60). A Canadian study by sociologist Michelle Szabo (2012: 13) confirmed this, and showed that men perceive cooking to be “work-leisure.” Most men do see cooking as “an aesthetic or artistic enterprise” or adult version of “playing with toys,” yet some are more care-oriented and concerned with aspects of health, social approval, and others’ preferences (Szabo 2014a: 24). Men who have a greater responsibility in the kitchen especially take on more “female

34

Food, Masculinities, and Home

ways of doing” cooking and consider cooking to be a gender-neutral task (Szabo 2012: 13). Whether men cook on a daily basis or only rarely, they derive pleasure and satisfaction from preparing food (Miles 2005). The way they experience cooking (or time in general) is highly context-dependent (Hollows 2008; Sullivan 1997; Szabo 2012). Results from observatory studies indicate that men are more likely (consciously or not) to make their contexts of cooking more relaxing. They drink a glass of wine, listen to some music, socialize with friends, or include their children or partner in the process of cooking. Some take the time to slow down and enjoy cooking, although some also seem to like “the thrill of fast-paced cooking” (Szabo 2012: 9). The findings from the different studies just described demonstrate that it is important to understand that there are multiple “masculinities” that are created and shaped by the different patterns of feeding practices through which men engage their masculinity (Connell 2005). However, despite the fact that there has been progress in recent years in closing the research gap surrounding men’s cooking in the home (Szabo 2014b), there is still little scientific evidence concerning men’s cooking practices in quantitative terms. Most researchers interested in exploring the notions of masculinity through cooking for home consumption are more likely to use qualitative data. Yet, quantitative research material may be valuable to gain more insight into the daily patterns of human behavior and attitudes at a societal level (Scott 2009). The goal of this chapter is to learn more about masculinity and cooking through examining how a nationally representative sample of men cluster empirically into different types of cooks based on when, how, and with whom they cook, how this differs by sociodemographic characteristics, and how this links to orientations toward gender and cooking. Thus, we focus on how the ways men cook and think of themselves as cooks are linked to their social statuses and are likely to differ across the life course as they move into different household arrangements. Sociologists use the concept “nutritional career” to refer to the changes in practices, social roles, responsibilities, needs, and expectations that each life transition brings (Beardsworth and Keil 1997: 56). However, in order to achieve our research goal, we need rich quantitative information about everyday-life cooking practices as well as about the sociodemographic characteristics of the individuals or “practitioners” doing the cooking. In this way we are able to observe the differences in cooking behaviors among men of different age categories and demographic and family backgrounds. Such information can be found in time-use or diary surveys. In what follows, we first introduce our research material and methodology, discuss the shortcomings and strengths of working with time-use data, present the results of our analyses, and end with a discussion.

COOKING UP MANLINESS

35

Material and methods What people do while being watched by an observer: consume, say, or choose to answer when being questioned or interviewed, may be entirely different from how they actually do the cooking in their real-life kitchens. Buying the latest bestselling cookbook or owning the latest new trend in kitchen utensils may serve as a show of status through the ownership of showpieces rather than reveal people’s day-to-day dietary choices and food preparation habits. Time-use surveys can be used to shed useful light on these choices and habits. They are shown to offer the most reliable findings when it comes to studying everyday behaviors and are “a sort of social microscope that allows us to examine facets of daily life . . . in quantitative terms” (Robinson and Bostrom 1994: 13). Time-use surveys are conducted in many countries and register (although not always in identical ways) human daily activities by means of diaries. In these diaries respondents are asked to report their day- and nighttime activities, the different moments when, where, and for how long they performed those activities, and whether other persons were present. Timeuse diaries are highly valued because of their specific potential to provide both a macro-level view of time-use patterns and micro-level insights into individuals’ daily life activities (Evans, McMeekin, and Southerton 2012; Gershuny 2008). At the most micro level of the activity registrations, these diary data offer rich contextual information, which is crucial to gain insight into individuals’ perceptions of time (Gershuny and Sullivan 1998). The data offer many opportunities and there is consensus among social scientists that time-use surveys are one of the most profound and thorough ways to capture daily human behavior. The likelihood of social desirability bias is higher in other social-scientific research methods such as retrospective questionnaires that ask how respondents “usually” spend their time. Instead, in time-use surveys, respondents “report their activities as they naturally and sequentially occur in daily life. . . . They allow examination of human activities in real time . . ., it is a micro-behavioral approach to survey research” (Robinson and Bostrom 1994: 13; Robinson and Godbey 1997). In this study we use the Flemish time-use survey—carried out in Flanders1—as an interesting source of data. Through this study we also hope to illustrate the potential of time-use data to gain a better understanding of the philosophy, significance, and meaning of time. In this study we focus on the time-use data collected in 2004 (from April 4 to October 30, 2004, the six-week summer vacation not included) from the Flemish population by the Research Group TOR of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. This time-use survey (abbreviated as TOR04) is a one-week paperand-pencil diary study (see Annex 1.1) in which respondents were asked to sequentially report their activities for seven consecutive days in a diary using

36

Food, Masculinities, and Home

a standard list of activities (163 activity codes). Gershuny and Robinson (2013: 102) claim that “having a week’s worth of diary data” is important because it helps “to smooth out the irregular sources of activity variation to provide a more ‘normal’ or balanced accounting of time and activity.” This is crucial to construct different “lifestyle profiles” by examining “how different people connect their daily activities in a patterned and meaningful way” (Gershuny and Robinson 2013: 101). Apart from their daily activities (and the contexts in which they occurred), respondents were also asked to qualify their time in terms of four different motives: whether they experienced their time mostly as (1) an obligation, (2) a necessity, (3) a commitment and way to please others, and/or (4) as a pleasure. In the first two cases (i.e., obligation and necessity) time is driven by external and instrumental motivations. An activity can be experienced as an obligation imposed by others or as a necessity that simply needs to be done (e.g., to put food on the table). In the latter two cases (i.e., commitment and pleasure) time is mostly influenced by internal motivations and values (such as solidarity, family loyalty, or affection) or by personal pursuits (to have fun). Respondents could choose more than one option that motivated each of their activities. This is useful for developing a better understanding of men’s cooking motives. Respondents also filled in two questionnaires inquiring about their sociodemographic characteristics and attitudes toward, for example, the traditional sexual division of labor, the sharing of domestic responsibilities, and other food-related issues (see Method section). Despite the fact that there are important strengths in the data to construct a typology of male cooks’ cooking activities, attitudes, and behaviors, the reality of working with data that were not primarily created with the intention to investigate cooking patterns brings some limitations to this study. The data do not cover all aspects relevant to construct men’s cooking practices, such as the type of meals they prepare, the ingredients, recipes, and kitchen utensils they use for cooking, or the nature of the meal occasion (i.e., “special” or “everyday”). Nevertheless, the data provide a unique potential to identify a typology of male cooking patterns in that they are a rare source that allows for such an assessment. The total sample consists of 1,768 randomly selected respondents aged eighteen to seventy-five years and is weighted based on sex, age, and educational level in order to be representative of the population. In this study, college students and individuals living with parents were not considered because we believe that their social living conditions and food patterns are different from the rest of the population. From what we observe from the diary data, 56 percent of men are involved in the preparation of (at least one) weekday meal(s) (compared to 95% of women) and that, on average, 40 percent of men spend some time cooking during weekends (in comparison with 79% of women). This is more or less in line with what Smith and her colleagues (2013) found in the American time-use studies in 2008 and with the results from UK time-diary

37

cooKinG UP ManlinESS

studies (Cheng et al. 2007). Most men reported cooking two times in a week (compared to five times by women) and once during the weekend (versus two times by women). This already indicates that a substantial proportion of men are “non-cooks,” which is an important factor in the further interpretation of our findings on male cooking. As Sherrie A. Inness (2001: 9) said: “Even today, millions of women are convinced that their place is in the kitchen; millions of men are convinced that their place is anywhere but the kitchen.” As for the men who cooked total time spent in food preparation greater than zero, we selected all respondents with no missing information in their cooking contexts. On average, they spent nearly two hours (i.e., an estimated 111 minutes) cooking during the week and forty-four minutes during the weekend. They predominantly cooked three times during the week and once during the weekend. Our final sample size included 728 male respondents (466 cooks and 262 noncooks). Despite the fact that this chapter focuses on Flanders (Belgium), the results of this study may be considered to reflect Western European developments. Findings of harmonized European time-use surveys (HETUS) show that Belgium is among the European countries in which men spend more and more time preparing meals. Northern European countries are more egalitarian, whereas Southern Europe countries are more traditional in their gender role views and in the division of household labor. But despite some common trends (e.g., the decline of time spent cooking, the still mostly female responsibility of cooking, and the increased participation of men in the kitchen), it is important

tablE 1.1

Descriptive characteristics of survey sample, n = 728 Mean

Age (in years)

48

Married/living with partner (%)

77.7

Employed (%)

66.8

Low educated (%)

43.2

Middle educated (%)

30.7

High educated (%)

25.0

Missing data, education (%) Source: TOR04.

1.1

Standard deviation 13

38

Food, Masculinities, and Home

to stay aware of cross-national differences both in how individuals spend and how they perceive their time cooking (Warde et al. 2007).

Toward a conceptualization of cooking It is difficult to confine the variety of cooking into one single definition (Marshall 2005). In his book The meaning of cooking, Jean-Claude Kaufman (2010) tries to answer this question in nearly 279 pages. When people are asked to describe the term cooking, it seems that cooking can be described in a multitude of ways, stemming from a day-to-day chore to a creative activity or social responsibility (Short 2003; Trubek 2013). Given the fact that “the landscape of cooking is varied and that people’s relationship to that landscape is rich and diverse,” it is important to move attention away from the most common measurements of cooking as a one-sided act of “preparing a meal” or “applying heat” (Jackson 2013; Julier and Lindenfeld 2005; Trubek 2013: 304). This draws on the complexity of cooking as an activity that “crosses the borders of traditional time-use categories” and may either be considered as household labor, personal care, or leisure (Mandemakers and Roeters 2015: 122). As Sargant (2014: 31) puts it, “Practices are never one-of-a-kind, even when discussed under the same banner.” Cooking practices do vary between individuals. This variation can be explained by several factors, such as differences in knowledge, skills, attitudes, financial resources, and social background (Warde 2005). As a result of the many different ways of thinking about, defining, and operationalizing domestic cooking (Short 2003), we use the term cooking in its widest sense and include any and all culinary or food-manipulating activities. To grasp the “loaded” and “multidimensional nature” of cooking, we need an approach that captures information about the diverse styles and contexts of cooking (Ekström and Fürst 2001: 213; Jackson 2013: 59). It is only by using such a practice-based approach that we can get a precise glimpse into men’s cooking behaviors and perceptions about cooking (Evans, McMeekin, and Southerton 2012). A practice-based approach provides an interesting conceptual framework for investigating the variability in cooking practices. The central idea of this perspective is to take practices rather than the individual actor (i.e., the “practitioner”) as the core unit of analysis (Evans, McMeekin, and Southerton 2012; Sargant 2014).

Methods The question is not why to examine masculinities through different patterns of men’s home-cooking practices, but how? To examine the degree of similarity

COOKING UP MANLINESS

39

or “routineness” in men’s weekday and weekend cooking activities, we use Latent Class Cluster Analysis (LCCA) in the Latent Gold 5.0 software package. LCCA is a suitable statistical procedure to categorize men on the basis of their cooking behaviors (observations) into different types of male cooks (latent classes) from a bottom-up perspective. This method requires a total sample size of at least hundred respondents to yield reliable results. In using LCCA we first try to find groups of male cooks that are similar on the basis of their cooking practices by making micro-level comparisons of their cooking styles, contexts, and situations. We conduct the typology in terms of the following observed contextual and perceptual variables: (1) the duration of cooking, (2) the number of cooking episodes, (3) the temporal context or timing, (4) the social context and (5) interaction partners, (6) aspects of multitasking, and (7) men’s cooking motives. We do this separately for both week and weekend days because the leisurely nature of the weekend may have an impact on the effort and the time spent on cooking (Short 2003) as well as on the experience of cooking (Daniels et al. 2012; Short 2003). We believe that the interplay between these, in total, fourteen categorical indicators provides a clear picture of the complex nature of cooking (see Table 1.2 in Results section for an overview). The first two variables (the duration and number of cooking episodes) are categorized in percentile groups on the basis of the registered cooking activities of the male cooks. The other five indicators are constructed in terms of the total time spent cooking during the week and at the weekend (expressed in mean percentages or shares that sum to exactly 0 or 100 percent for each variable). On the basis of these shares, we are able, for instance, to examine whether men mainly cook alone or together with others. Equal percentage shares are added in separate subcategories, but did not occur often. As the nature of this first analysis is mainly explorative, the clusters are given a name that emerges from the data itself and the clusters’ main features. The main reason for working with LCCA as opposed to other rather more absolute and traditional cluster techniques is because it classifies the total sample of men into clusters on the basis of their membership probabilities to belong to the different distinguished clusters. By gradually extending the number of cluster-models we are able to distinguish the bestfitting model using the model-fit diagnostics that LCCA provide. The lower the values of the model-fit indicators (especially the Bayesian information criterion [BIC]-indicator), the better the model fits the data (see Annex 1.3). For more detailed information about LCCA, we refer to the report of Magidson and Vermunt (2004). To further understand the cluster-profiles, we describe the different clusters in terms of some key sociodemographic characteristics using the mean cluster probabilities. We look at men’s housing and living arrangements (single, couple, couple with children younger than seven and couple with

40

Food, Masculinities, and Home

children seven years or older), their age (50), working situation (unemployed or retired vs. full-time or part-time worker), and educational level (low: maximum lower secondary; medium: maximum upper secondary; high: tertiary education). Next, we examine the relations between men’s cooking behaviors (using the time-diary information from the typology) and their attitudes toward their—and if applicable, their partner’s—responsibility for doing the cooking at home (expressed in percentages), the gender division of labor, and conventional meal patterns (using the data from the questionnaires). To do this we use Multiple Classification Analysis (MCA) in SPSS software and present the adjusted predicted means for the above four variables, controlled for family and demographic background. To assess men’s views on gender roles and conventional meal patterns, we use two scales on the basis of different questionnaire items, which are rated on a 1-to-5 disagree-agree response scale (see Annex 1.2). Scores can range from 0 to 100, with higher scores reflecting a more traditional view of gender and a higher importance attached to the organization of meals and the social context of eating. For this analysis, we use the modal assignment approach as the classification rule. This means that we assign each respondent to the cluster he is most likely to belong to.

Results Our findings (see Annex 1.3) show that men’s cooking practices can be best discussed in terms of five segments. Table 1.2 gives an overview of the different cluster sizes and the distribution of each cluster in terms of several indicators that we used to construct the typology. The conditional probabilities help to characterize the nature of the clusters and indicate how the clusters differ from each other. Within each of the four main types of cooking behaviors, the conditional probabilities for each indicator sum to one and show the differences in response patterns. The first and largest cluster consists of noncooks (36%), showing that cooking is still mainly woman’s work. The second cluster, “Cooking as sporadic weekday and family support work,” consists of 27 percent of male cooks. They cook rather occasionally and do not spend too much time in the kitchen preparing meals. These men have a particularly high probability of experiencing cooking as a necessity; however, they also see this activity as a way to contribute to the household tasks. Men who belong to this cluster have a somewhat higher probability score than other male cooks to characterize the time that they spend on cooking in terms of commitment, possibly because they want to be a good and responsible or

COOKING UP MANLINESS

41

caretaking parent or because they want to help their partner in doing the domestic work. As opposed to this second cluster, the 18 percent of men in the third cluster “Cooking as time-consuming and enjoyable family activity” clearly spend more time in preparing meals. This is especially the case during the weekends when cooking seems to turn into a less burdensome task and a more enjoyable family activity compared to weekdays. Men in this cluster have the highest probability to cook in the presence of or together with their partner and/or children while talking about the food they are cooking or their daily events. Compared with the other clusters, they are also less likely to combine cooking with other activities, and instead are more likely to devote their time and energy almost entirely to cooking. The cooking practices of men in the fourth cluster (12%) are labeled as “day-to-day solo household chores,” since men in this cluster are most likely to consider cooking as a necessity or obligation that simply needs to be done. They reported cooking at home most frequently and have the highest probability score of spending most time in the kitchen compared with the other clusters. They also have the highest probability of combining cooking with other domestic tasks. Thus, when cooking is a more solo and quotidian affair, it tends to become a chore and nothing more than a means to an end. Despite the fact that they have a somewhat high likelihood of combining their cooking activities with leisure time (usually passive), men in this cluster still experience cooking radically differently and as a chore of “secondary importance.” With regard to the timing of cooking, the results do not show many large differences between the different clusters. During the week men are most likely to spend most time in the kitchen in the evening and on weekends; they mainly prepare lunch or dinner at noon. However, men in this cluster are also somewhat more likely to spend most time in their kitchens during weekday mornings. Finally, the 8 percent of men in the last cluster, “Cooking as a pleasurable and social weekend activity,” clearly seem to enjoy being in their kitchens and consider it a joy to create meals. Compared with the other clusters, they have a somewhat higher probability of considering cooking as an obligation, although the probability of viewing it as something pleasurable is much higher. They only seem to be responsible for the preparation of meals during weekends (between 10:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m.) and tend to take their time to slow down the process and to chat with their families. They have the highest probability of combining cooking with leisure activities. This last cluster seems to correspond mostly closely to the notion of gastrosexuality as it is described in the literature. However, this must be interpreted with caution because there is no hard evidence supporting this.

0.275

0.212

3rd quartile

4th quartile

0.338

0.205

0.253

0.204

1st quartile

2nd quartile

3rd quartile

4th quartile

Number of cooking episodesb

0.279

2nd quartile

week

0.234

36%

1st quartile

Time spent cookinga

indicators

Cluster size

no cooking

0.000

0.000

0.001

0.999

0.000

0.000

0.001

0.999

weekend

27%

cooking as a sporadic weekday and family support work

0.295

0.287

0.183

0.235

0.292

0.302

0.244

0.163

week

0.145

0.323

0.530

0.002

0.388

0.460

0.149

0.002

weekend

18%

cooking as a timeconsuming and enjoyable family activity

0.452

0.301

0.131

0.116

0.397

0.313

0.193

0.098

week

0.208

0.352

0.439

0.001

0.451

0.434

0.114

0.001

weekend

12%

cooking as a day-today solo household chore

0.000

0.000

0.003

0.997

0.000

0.000

0.003

0.997

week

0.075

0.260

0.662

0.003

0.317

0.481

0.200

0.003

weekend

8%

cooking as a pleasurable and social weekend activity

A contextual description of the 5-cluster typology of men’s cooking styles, n = 728 (distribution of cluster conditional probabilities)

tablE 1.2

42

Food, MaScUlinitiES, and hoME

0.252

0.045

0.523

0.043

0.011

0.001

10:00 a.m.–2:00 p.m.

2:00–4:00 p.m.

4:00–8:00 p.m.

After 8:00 p.m.

Two or more

No cooking

0.414

0.390

0.184

0.011

0.001

Alone

In the presence of others

Together with others

Two or more

No cooking

The social context

0.125

Before 10:00 a.m.

Timing of cooking

1.000

0.000

0.000

0.000

0.000

1.000

0.000

0.000

0.000

0.000

0.000

0.000

0.001

0.016

0.332

0.645

0.006

0.001

0.011

0.037

0.610

0.050

0.218

0.073

0.001

0.025

0.289

0.563

0.123

0.001

0.017

0.030

0.297

0.029

0.502

0.125

0.001

0.033

0.000

0.031

0.934

0.001

0.000

0.064

0.423

0.012

0.370

0.131

0.002

0.008

0.135

0.307

0.549

0.002

0.026

0.077

0.342

0.044

0.424

0.087

0.998

0.000

0.000

0.001

0.001

0.998

0.000

0.000

0.001

0.000

0.001

0.000

(Continued)

0.002

0.000

0.225

0.537

0.235

0.002

0.000

0.000

0.293

0.014

0.504

0.187

cooKinG UP ManlinESS 43

(Continued)

0.037

0.019

0.000

Friends, family, or others

Two or more

No cooking

0.000 0.000 0.000

0.168

0.005

0.327

Household tasksd

Leisure

0.014

0.001

Two or more

No cooking

f

e

1.000

0.000

0.000

0.062

Personal carec

Family tasks

0.000

0.424

1.000

0.000

0.000

0.000

0.000

weekend

No multitasking

Multitasking

0.559

Partner/children

week

0.385

no cooking

cooking as a sporadic weekday and family support work

Alone

Interaction partners

indicators

tablE 1.2

0.001

0.017

0.266

0.039

0.158

0.058

0.462

0.001

0.033

0.019

0.948

0.000

week

0.001

0.017

0.264

0.000

0.172

0.080

0.467

0.001

0.082

0.000

0.772

0.145

weekend

cooking as a timeconsuming and enjoyable family activity

0.001

0.000

0.393

0.000

0.204

0.044

0.359

0.001

0.008

0.000

0.004

0.987

week

0.002

0.009

0.332

0.000

0.202

0.048

0.408

0.002

0.024

0.027

0.390

0.557

weekend

cooking as a day-today solo household chore

0.998

0.000

0.001

0.000

0.000

0.000

0.001

0.998

0.000

0.000

0.001

0.001

week

0.002

0.000

0.400

0.000

0.156

0.065

0.378

0.002

0.013

0.012

0.738

0.235

weekend

cooking as a pleasurable and social weekend activity

44

Food, MaScUlinitiES, and hoME

0.193

0.449

0.252

0.022

0.001

Commitment

Necessity

Pleasure

Two or more

No cooking

1.000

0.000

0.000

0.000

0.000

0.000

0.001

0.043

0.258

0.503

0.141

0.056

0.001

0.064

0.325

0.435

0.129

0.047

0.001

0.027

0.082

0.651

0.128

0.112

0.002

0.040

0.224

0.531

0.095

0.109

0.998

0.000

0.000

0.001

0.000

0.000

0.002

0.063

0.475

0.259

0.062

0.139

a Quartiles for weekdays: less than 30 minutes / 30–80 minutes / 80–150 minutes / more than 150 minutes. Quartiles for weekend days: no weekend cooking / less than 25 minutes / 25–60 minutes / more than 60 minutes. b Quartiles for weekdays: one cooking event / two cooking events / three to four cooking events / more than four cooking events. Quartiles for weekend days: no weekend cooking / one cooking event / two cooking events / more than two cooking events. c Eating, drinking, resting, . . . d Cleaning, laundry, dishwashing, . . . e Childcare tasks, family support, . . . f Listening to music, watching TV, relaxing, chatting, . . .

Source: TOR04.

0.084

Obligation

Cooking motives

cooKinG UP ManlinESS 45

46

Food, Masculinities, and Home

So far, we can already conclude that the at-home kitchen does not seem to be the main territory of the gastrosexual. The popular image of the culinary hobbyist seems to be less common in everyday life and men, instead, are more likely to consider cooking as a necessity or as a household duty and way to share the household workload.

Cooking from a life-course perspective The different clusters of male cooks do not only differ in the way they cook and experience cooking, they also differ in their family and social backgrounds (see Table 1.3). Coupled men are far more likely not to cook compared with single men, although men in couples with young children also take a significantly greater share in cooking, probably as part of their parental responsibilities. The fact that older men and men with lower levels of education have a rather high rate of not cooking could be the result of more traditional attitudes, different skills, or different employment responsibilities. Younger men and men with higher levels of education tend to be more willing to contribute to domestic tasks. Cooking as a day-to-day solo household chore is more common among single men, unemployed men, and men older than fifty. This shows that men are more likely to be responsible for the day-to-day task of cooking (and to do the housework) if they are unemployed or literally have no other choice (simply because they have no partner). In this case, the social component of preparing a meal as a “gift” is not, or only to a limited extent, present (Sidenvall, Nydahl, and Fjellström 2000). The second cluster (Cooking as sporadic weekday and family support work) is more prevalent among young, middle educated, and employed men, and men in families with young children. However, men tend to be more frequently engaged in the everyday preparation of family meals (the third cluster) when they have somewhat older children or when they are younger than fifty and their total workload is on average at its highest. The last cluster in which cooking is most likely to be perceived as a weekend leisure activity is clearly more common among men of a higher social class or with higher levels of education.

Cooking practices, gender, and food lifestyles In Table 1.4 we compare men’s cooking practices with the information that they registered in the corresponding questionnaire detailing their thoughts about

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47

their contribution to and responsibility for at-home cooking, and their attitudes toward traditional gender roles and the importance of conventional meal patterns. These results are controlled for sociodemographic characteristics because, as discussed above, men’s cooking behaviors are clearly lifestylerelated and characterized by a social gradient. Most men in the first cluster of noncooks rated their own involvement in cooking as low mainly because it is their partner’s responsibility and they have more traditional gender role attitudes. Men who belong to the second, third, and fourth cluster (especially the fourth one) are significantly more likely to report being responsible for food preparation and to be more favorable toward gender equity than men in the last cluster who only occasionally cook, purely for pleasure. It is also the cluster of the most traditionally minded men (with a mean score of 41.5% on the scale of traditional gender attitudes) which is reflected in their strongly gendered and unequal division of cooking. However, they still take up cooking more often (31%) than men in the first cooking cluster (17%). The highest proportion of men who cook falls within the category of single men. To them cooking chiefly tends to be a necessity (see Table 1.3). This runs contrary to men in “traditional” family structures, who are less likely to indicate that they are responsible for cooking. The results also reveal a generational effect in men’s perceptions of gender identity and gender roles, in which the older generations hold more hegemonic traditional ideals and play a smaller role in the kitchen compared with younger and new generation men. For instance, it is clear from Tables 1.2 and 1.3 that older men are more likely to view cooking in terms of necessity while younger men are more likely to cook out of a sense of commitment and to derive pleasure from doing so. Having traditional gender role perceptions also seems to be a matter of social class position, as men with lower levels of education tend to have more conservative values compared with men with higher levels of education. Men with lower levels of education are also far more likely not to cook. However, while men of a higher social class tend to view themselves as having more modern and gender-neutral ideals (they clearly score lower on the scale of the traditional gender role attitudes), they still seem to be gender-specific in their behavior as they are most likely to belong to the fifth cluster of men who view cooking as a leisure experience. With regard to the importance attached to the at-home (family) meal, we do not find any significant differences between the different clusters. Despite the fact that they all have different cooking practices and motives, they all seem to acknowledge the significance of the family meal and the conventional structure of mealtimes. This also demonstrates that diary information can offer valuable additional information in understanding individuals’ food habits compared to stylized survey information. Men mainly seem to find at-home

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No partner

Couple

Couple with young children (