I've always heard the typical date where a man orders a steak and woman orders a salad. Men are made out to seem carnivorous while women are seen as herbivores, "little rabbits". In my Foodways class, we read a very interesting article that goes into more detail over this.
In the Sexual Politics of Meat, Adams assesses that "women and animals are similarly positioned in a patriarchal world, as objects rather than subjects, both enduring a cycle of objectification, fragmentation, and consumption." Meat used to be perceived as a s high-class commodity and therefore the ones who consumed meat were of high-class and achieved power. Economies that relied more on plant-based diets had more women in power and the society was more egalitarian, while meat based societies were more patriarchal.
In the book Beyond Beef, Rikfin traces the masculinity of meat back to ancient Egypt, where the first major religion was bull worship, based on the bull god. The bull represented masculinity and a powerful urge for war and subjugation. Every year, a bull would be sacrificed and fed to the king so he could gain the god's strength and masculinity. The Vedic word for "war" means the "desire for cows".
Just as men in our readings who are sexually passive are deemed effeminate, today's standard for men who are vegetarians are also deemed effeminate.
Having It His Way: The Construction of Masculinity in Fast-Food TV Advertising
Carrie Packwood Freeman and Debra Merskin
This relates to a reading I had in another class this week. While the idea that women should eat lightly when with a man is an idea that’s been around for hundreds of years, the differences between women’s and men’s eating habits has a deeper history. In “Korean Military Brides: Cooking American, Eating Korean” written by Ji-Yeon Yuh about Korean war brides the writer describes how these women were expected to relinquish their Korean culture entirely when they came to the US. One of the ways this manifested was in the food they ate and cooked.
ReplyDeleteUS citizens were suspicious of Korean women who married US soldiers, especially their mothers-in-law. For most people the food they cook and eat is strongly tied to their ethnic and cultural identity. It is how we remember their lives and alleviate homesickness when we live far from home. But these Korean brides had to learn how to cook and eat American food in order to fit in here and appease their husbands and in-laws. In addition, their own cultural traditions required that they defer to their husbands.
Korean food is vastly different from American food. So these women had no idea how to cook the food or use the ingredients that we eat. The learning curve was steep. To make matters worse, many did not even know how to cook Korean food so they could not cook it for themselves if they wanted to. Hopes that they could pass on this part of their cultural heritage were dashed because they could not teach their children to cook Korean food since they did not know how to themselves. Compound this was that their children resisted any Korean identity. They wanted to be American and eat American.
These women lost so much by moving so far from home to a completely different culture. Loosing even the simplest comforts made their transition even harder.
Hey Alina! I found your post to be extremely thought-provoking because I had never thought to compare masculine/feminine qualities of power/passivity to the food we consume. As a woman, I have often dealt with the stigma that women can eat as much as men; which for me meant no seconds after dinner because the man of the household (typically my father) would eat the most amount of meat in addition to whatever was left over. Even when I dated a man who was actively a vegetarian, I still dealt with the assumption from our family and friends that he had to eat more than me in quantity and frequency. It's strange that such societal standards can exist without one noticing, especially in regards to the active/passive roles men and women have been expected to take on throughout history. I think it would have been really interesting if Kinsey could have included eating patterns in his research in order to find if a correlation existed between eating habits and sexual roles.
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