Vicki A. Swinbank - Womens Food Matters: Stirring the Pot

Vicki A. Swinbank

Womens Food Matters

Stirring the Pot

1st ed. 2021

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This groundbreaking interdisciplinary feminist study offers a new perspective on how, and why, womens food matters throughout history and in our contemporary world. As one of the first studies to combine a focus on food production, processing and cooking, on food cultures and food systems, Swinbank puts womens knowledge and creativity at center stage in the reproduction and transformation of culture and agriculture. Womens Food Matters provides a theoretically rich contribution that is jargon-free, making it an appropriate choice for classes at any level, as well as for the general reader. Destined to stir the pot of contemporary food studies.

David E. Sutton, Professor of Anthropology at Southern Illinois University

Womens Food Matters provides a comprehensive and overarching historical and cross-cultural view of womens food-work and the important role women have played in shaping the food landscape from production through consumption. Drawing from examples around the world, Swinbank illustrates how womens food knowledge and practices must be considered in addressing some of the most pressing problems facing the food system today.

Deborah Harris, Associate Professor of Sociology at Texas State University, San Marcos, Texas

Radical feminism has just taken its long-awaited seat at the food studies table. In Womens Food Matters, Vicki Swinbank reminds us that women's inter-generational food knowledge its production, preparation and consumption - is at the heart of most food cultures. In her original radical feminist analysis of women's role in various food systems throughout history, Swinbank powerfully sets out the erosion of womens knowledge by patriarchal and capitalist systems that have contributed to everything from taking credit for womens recipes in contemporary culinary culture to industrialised farming and genetically-modified crops. Womens Food Matters is consistently engaging, informative and persuasively argued; both taking us back to the wonderful memories of being in grandmas kitchen, and into the diverse and widely-politicised world of the global food system.

Natalie Jovanovski, Lecturer and DECRA Research Fellow, The University of Melbourne, Australia

In memory of my mother

whose love of cooking lives on in me

In recent years there has been a veritable explosion in books dealing with food issues, ranging from the history of cooking to a critique of the industrialised food system. There is, however, relatively little that deals with food from a feminist perspective, with much of the existing literature focusing on womens problematic relationship with food, especially eating disorders and body image (Bordo ). Whilst this work by feminist academics has made an invaluable contribution to the literature on womens often conflicted relationship to food, my aim in this book is to examine the more positive and empowering aspects of womens involvement in food production, preparation and cooking.

My analysis in this book is from a radical feminist standpoint, that is a politics that places women and womens experiences at the centre, names the oppression of women, and involves a holistic view of the world, an analysis which probes every facet of existence for women ( Rowland and Klein , 13). Radical feminist theory is concerned about the material reality of womens lives, recognising that the personal is politicalin other words, that womens personal experiences are a consequence and reflection of the power imbalances in hetero-patriarchal society resulting from a gendered hierarchy based on sexual difference. This is exacerbated and complicated by class, race and ethnicity. Radical feminists argue that the system of male domination and female subordination that gendered power relations are based upon is