Feminist Food Studies: Intersectional Perspectives 9780889616097, 9780889616110, 9780889616103

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—DR. JENNIFER L. JOHNSON, THORNELOE UNIVERSITY AT LAURENTIAN

“One of the major contributions of Feminist Food Studies is that it explores intersectionality through refined angles at both the theoretical and the empirical levels. In a clear and accessible manner, every chapter of the book experiments with moving intersectionality to ‘unexplored places.’ The result is a fascinating and enriching journey into feminist scholarship and its multiple connections with food.”

Parker, Brady, Power, and Belyea

“Feminist Food Studies assembles new scholarship on food and feminism. The collection takes up an intersectional lens that is well-defined in the introductory chapters for new readers. The authors pay homage to the anti-colonial and social justice roots of feminist food studies as a field, a commitment that is enacted and built upon in every chapter. Established scholars and new readers alike will find ideas to forage for that nourish a critical feminist consciousness about food studies.”

—DR. CARLA GUERRÓN MONTERO, UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE

BARBARA PARKER is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Lakehead University. She teaches

in the areas of food, gender, and health; the sociology of nutrition; social justice; and qualitative research methods. JENNIFER BRADY is Assistant Professor of Applied Human Nutrition at Mount Saint Vincent University. She teaches courses on critical perspectives of food; health and nutrition; health inequity and community nutrition; and food, health, and social policy. ELAINE POWER is Associate Professor in the School of Kinesiology and Health Studies at Queen’s University, where she teaches on topics such as food systems; critical weight studies; and qualitative research methods. SUSAN BELYEA is the director of a women’s centre at Queen’s University and teaches courses on social and political responses to food insecurity and agriculture and the environment.

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FEMINIST FOOD STUDIES

Feminist Food Studies untangles the complex social relations and structures that manifest in everyday food practices for women and girls—from production and distribution to consumption and beyond. Engaging with intersectionality, feminist scholars use food as a lens to articulate social injustices that permeate and are perpetuated by historical, cultural, economic, environmental, and political contexts surrounding food and food systems as well as imagine a more socially just world. Topics include vegan vlogs, the “obesity epidemic,” beliefs about “masculine” and “feminine” forms of dieting, the struggle plate, engagement with the alternative food movement, the disruption of collective memory when food is withheld or denied, and fermentation as a challenge to anthropocentrism. This edited collection not only expands feminist foods studies as an important field of study in its own right but also calls on scholars to explore how oppression and privilege impact their research and scholarship. Engaging and highly readable, Feminist Food Studies will appeal to students in food studies, nutrition, gender and women’s studies, sociology, and anthropology.

FEMINIST FOOD STUDIES INTERSECTIONAL PERSPECTIVES EDITED BY

Barbara Parker Jennifer Brady Elaine Power Susan Belyea

2019-08-12 6:00 PM

FEMINIST FOOD STUDIES

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FEMINIST FOOD STUDIES Intersectional Perspectives

Edited by Barbara Parker, Jennifer Brady, Elaine Power, and Susan Belyea

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Feminist Food Studies: Intersectional Perspectives Edited by Barbara Parker, Jennifer Brady, Elaine Power, and Susan Belyea First published in 2019 by Women’s Press, an imprint of CSP Books Inc. 425 Adelaide Street West, Suite 200 Toronto, Ontario M5V 3C1 www.womenspress.ca Copyright © 2019 Barbara Parker, Jennifer Brady, Elaine Power, Susan Belyea, the contributing authors, and Women’s Press. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of Women’s Press, under licence or terms from the appropriate reproduction rights organization, or as expressly permitted by law. Every reasonable effort has been made to identify copyright holders. Women’s Press would be pleased to have any errors or omissions brought to its attention. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Feminist food studies : intersectional perspectives / edited by Barbara Parker, Jennifer Brady, Elaine Power, and Susan Belyea. Names: Parker, Barbara, 1970- editor. | Brady, Jennifer, 1978- editor. | Power, Elaine M., 1961- editor. | Belyea, Susan, 1964- editor. Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190112212 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190112824 | ISBN 9780889616097 (softcover) | ISBN 9780889616110 (EPUB) | ISBN 9780889616103 (PDF) Subjects: LCSH: Food. | LCSH: Food—Social aspects. | LCSH: Cooking. | LCSH: Cooking— Social aspects. | LCSH: Feminist criticism. | LCSH: Feminist theory. Classification: LCC TX357 .F46 2019 | DDC 641.3—dc23 Page layout by S4Carlisle Publishing Services Cover art by Brooke Lark on Unsplash Cover design by Em Dash Design 19

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Printed and bound in Ontario, Canada

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For our children Zoe, Laurel, Levi, Claire, and Jordi, who inspire us each and every day to work toward a more socially and environmentally just world

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CONTENTS Foreword  Psyche Williams-Forson   ix Introduction This Is What Feminist Food Studies Looks Like  1

Barbara Parker, Jennifer Brady, Elaine Power, and Susan Belyea Chapter 1

Critiquing Hegemony, Creating Food, Crafting Justice: Cultivating an Activist Feminist Food Studies  13

Alice Julier Chapter 2

“The Bees Wore Little Fuzzy Yellow Pants”: Feminist Intersections of Animal and Human Performativity in an Urban Community Garden  33

Teresa Lloro-Bidart Chapter 3

How Veggie Vlogging Looks Like: Intersections of Gender, Race, and Class in Western Mainstream Veganism  57

Daniela Pirani and Ella Fegitz Chapter 4

Is Veganism a Queer Food Practice?  79

Alissa Overend Chapter 5

Because … “Obesity”: Reframing Blame in Food Studies  103

Jennifer Brady, Jacqui Gingras, and Katie LeBesco Chapter 6

“Lose Like a Man”: Gender and the Constraints of Self-Making in Weight Watchers Online  123

Emily Contois Chapter 7

Feeding the Muslim South Asian Immigrant Family: A Feminist Analysis of Culinary Consumption  145

Farha Ternikar

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viii  Contents

Chapter 8

The Struggle Plate at the Intersection  163

Delores Phillips Chapter 9

Low-Income Mothers and the Alternative Food Movement: An Intersectional Approach  183

Blake Martin, Mari Kate Mycek, Sinikka Elliott, and Sarah Bowen Chapter 10

“Waiting to Be Fed”: Reading Memories of Hunger in the Tsilhqot’in Land Claim Trial Transcripts and Tracey Lindberg’s Birdie  205

Lauren McGuire-Wood Chapter 11

We’re All Intersectional Now: Representational Intersectionality in Melbourne’s Immigration Museum  225

Elaine Swan, Deana Leahy, Emily Gray, Sian Supski, and Adele Wessell Chapter 12

Fermentation and the Possibility of Reimagining Relationality  249

Maya Hey Glossary  269 Contributor Biographies   279 Index  285

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FOREWORD No particular application of intersectionality can, in a definitive sense, grasp the range of intersectional powers and problems that plague society. This work-in-progress understanding of intersectionality suggests that we should endeavor, on an ongoing basis, to move intersectionality to unexplored places. —D. Carbado, K. W. Crenshaw, V. Mays, and B. Tomlinson, Intersectionality: Mapping the Movements of a Theory

I have always been intrigued by juxtaposition. As a young girl, I grew up in Buffalo, New York, and then Farmville, Virginia, in a middle-class household. But I sucked my thumb and ate government cheese too because I was, from time to time, hungry—juxtapositions. So, when I first encountered Gwendolyn Brooks’s autobiographical first novel, Maud Martha, with its myriad contrasts, I was immediately captivated. When writing about the 1953 text of vignettes in Building Houses out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power, I discuss how Brooks portrays the big life experiences of an ordinary black woman, who lives very small. Mary Helen Washington says of the novel, “In 1953 no one seemed prepared to call Maud Martha a novel about bitterness, rage, self-hatred and the silence that results from suppressed anger. No one recognized it as a novel dealing with the very sexism and racism that these reviews enshrined. What the reviewers saw as exquisite lyricism was actually the truncated stuttering of a woman whose rage makes her literally unable to speak” (Washington 1983, 453). Though rendered virtually silent, Maud is an artist and a creator of self as she and other black women practise the customs and rituals that make life bearable while living in the cramped quarters of the kitchenette building. Surrounded by cracked sidewalks with overgrown dandelions and other weeds that reflect structural harm and systematic neglect, Brooks lets us know that denizens of the quarters perform routines that not only belie their material conditions but also transcend them. For example, one resident finds contentment in taking daily tea. To prepare, she spreads a large “stool with a square of lace,” adds a “low bowl of artificial flowers, a teacup or teacups,” and a pot of tea with sugar, cream, and lemon with sundries. By this example, Brooks allows for humanity to creep in among the “onion fumes,” “fried potatoes,” and “yesterday’s garbage ripening in the hall.”1 Juxtapositions.

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x  Foreword

Such contrasts are not new to black women. In fact, they form the bases for the creation of intersectionality, contemporarily situated within Critical Race Theory but with roots dating back to the nineteenth-century pen of Maria ­Stewart, Anna Julia Cooper, and many other early black feminist authors and activists.2 When Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw drew upon black feminist theory to elucidate the multiple conceptions and structures of power and identity, she did so “to demonstrate the limitations of the single-axis frameworks that dominated antidiscrimination regimes and antiracist and feminist discourses” (Carbado et al. 2013, 311). But Crenshaw did so with the goal of “not simply understand[ing] social relations of power, nor to limit intersectionality’s gaze to the relations that were interrogated therein, but to bring the often-hidden dynamics forward in order to transform them” (Carbado et al. 2013, 312). Beyond transformation, however, is a need also to dismantle and prohibit their reconstruction. In the ensuing decades, intersectionality has been deployed far and wide, across disciplinary boundaries, nationally and transnationally. It has also been heavily critiqued as well as praised, misunderstood, and righteously enjoyed, misappropriated, and rightly defended. As Jennifer Nash (2019, 3) writes, “defensiveness is largely articulated by rendering intersectionality black feminist property, as terrain that has been gentrified, colonized, and appropriated, and as territory that must be guarded and protected through the requisite black feminist vigilance, care, and ‘stewardship.’” Juxtapositions. And while all of this may have been merited, the position of Carbado et al. (2013) in the quotation that opens these remarks has salience for this volume on feminist food practices. In short, intersectionality embraces a “work-in-progress conceptualization,” encouraging its use across a wide swath of engagements. As Nash (2019, 11) also notes, “I speculate that it is the term’s capacity to allow its reader to imagine its analytic import, to neatly and coherently represent a term that aspires to describe complexity, that has given intersectionality its ability to migrate across entrenched disciplinary divides and to become ‘the most important contribution women’s studies … has made so far.’” The editors of this volume have taken up this charge and moved forward the discourses on intersectionality, but more so they are leading the way in pushing the field of food studies to actively address issues of structure inequity and inequality, power, and all the -isms that comprise discriminatory projects. Through the various chapters here, and the deliberate engagement with theories of intersectionality, the work is exposing the ways in which circulations of power exist and are used in our daily lives through food. Whereas a single-axis approach is not only limiting but also likely to render such operations of power invisible,

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Foreword  xi

intersectionality thrusts these structures into the limelight. But the work is far from over once the chapter has been written. Now, as Brittney Cooper rightly admonishes, “the negative impact of those structures must be addressed.”3 And clearly there are several ways that this could and should be done. But, as I spoke with black feminist anthropologist and food scholar Ashanté Reese, she suggested that it begins with the reading list. If we, in food studies and beyond, are going to be deliberate about dismantling those structures that reinscribe subjugation and oppression, then we must be intentional about naming the places in which we find our privileges and then move on from there to assign readings that reflect the work being done in communities, homes, classrooms, houses of ­worship, and the like that insist upon food justice and food equity. It begins with the reading list. Be purposeful about seeking out the voices that provide the greatest commonalities and differences not toward the project of diversity and inclusion but toward forefronting and addressing the diverse ways in which relations of domination and subordination are produced and enacted. Juxtapositions! Reading and actively using this rich volume is one of many steps that should be taken by those of us who unpack food histories, practise food activism, and seek justice and equality in food studies. Another step is to be clear about finding the many voices that can speak to racial marginalization along with other forms of inequity. Yet another is to be intentional about our citational practices. Find the weeds in the cracks and place them on the table in a lovely bowl; spread the square lace; and use the teacup, even if it is chipped. Find, read, and cite the work of scholars who are canonical, but also find those whose scholarship may or may not be known but who are doing the emotional, intellectual, and political l­abour of building fields and subfields; those who understand that their location(s) vary on the spectrum of “penalty and privilege [within] the multiple systems of ­oppression which frame everyone’s lives” (Collins 2000, 287). Engage those who do foodwork in all of its problems, glories, messiness, and with all its complications, complexities, and juxtapositions not because they have all the ­answers but because they force us to reckon with the hard questions. Not ­doing this work in food studies allows conversations, scholarship, and policies to ­reinscribe the very oppressions we proclaim we want to dismantle. Psyche Williams-Forson University of Maryland College Park

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xii  Foreword

NOTES 1. See Brooks (2006, 110–13). 2. Though Vivian May and Brittney Cooper, among others, trace this genealogy to Anna Julia Cooper, I suggest we can go back further to the work of Maria Stewart. See May (2012) and Logan (1995). 3. See Cooper (2018).

REFERENCES Brooks, G. 2006. “Kitchenette Building.” In Maud Martha, in Blacks, 141–322. Chicago: Third World Press.

Carbado, D., K. W. Crenshaw, V. Mays, and B. Tomlinson. 2013. “Intersectionality: Map-

ping the Movements of a Theory.” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 10 (2): 303–12.

Collins, P. H. 2000. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge.

Cooper, B. 2018. “Intersectionality.” In Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory, edited by L. Disch and M. Hawkesworth, 1–23. Online ed. New York: Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199328581.013.20.

Logan, S. 1995. “Maria W. Stewart (1803–1879).” In With Pen and Voice: A Critical

­Anthology of Nineteenth-Century African-American Women, edited by S. W. Logan, 1–11. ­Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

May, V. 2012. “Intellectual Genealogies, Intersectionality, and Anna Julia Cooper.” In Fem-

inist Solidarity at the Crossroads: Intersectional Women’s Studies for Transracial Alliance,

edited by K. M. Vaz and G. L. Lemons, 59–72. New York: Routledge.

Nash, J. C. 2019. Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality. Durham: Duke University Press.

Washington, M. H. 1983. “Taming All That Anger Down: Rage and Silence in Gwendolyn Brooks’ Maud Martha.” The Massachusetts Review 24 (2): 453–66.

Williams-Forson, P. A. 2006. Building Houses out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food & Power. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

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INTRODUCTION

This Is What Feminist Food Studies Looks Like Barbara Parker, Jennifer Brady, Elaine Power, and Susan Belyea

WHAT IS FEMINIST FOOD STUDIES? Feminist food studies comprises interdisciplinary scholarship and activism and uses food as a lens to explore and advance social justice. The work of feminist food scholars employs a gender analysis and includes a concern for women and girls, and the various complex relationships that we have with food. Yet, feminist food studies extends well beyond gender and the idea that feminist food scholarship is synonymous with the concerns of women and girls as a biologically defined and assumedly homogeneous group. Rather, for us, feminist food studies is intersectional and concerned with the ways that various forms of oppression and privilege including, but not limited to, gender, race, class, sexuality, ability, religion, and age are shaped and experienced in relation to food. An intersectional feminist food studies pursues an understanding of the ways that social injustices permeate and are perpetuated by the historical, social, cultural, economic, environmental, political, and transnational contexts surrounding food, from production to distribution to consumption and beyond.1 If we are to fully understand the complex everyday contexts in which women labour in food systems, do food provisioning work, and embody their food ­practices, feminist food studies must attend to the social and s­tructural inequalities of systems of intersecting oppressions that are produced and ­ ­reproduced through global and local food systems and food practices. This is an

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2  FEMINIST FOOD STUDIES

imperative for food justice. We recognize that this is a wide-reaching, complex, and ambitious agenda. Our interest in this volume grew out of our shared commitment to feminist approaches to food studies, and our conviction that a feminist approach demands intersectional analysis. Fortunately, our interest in feminist food studies is reflected in the growing attention to feminist and intersectional analyses of food; for example, we received 86 abstracts for this volume! Although exhilarating, we pause to recognize that for decades, feminist scholars across many disciplines (e.g., sociology, gender and women’s studies, anthropology, history, English, health studies, film studies, communication studies, and more) have explored food and eating in relation to women’s lives, 2 and feminists across academic and activist communities have engaged in transnational political struggle to improve the lives of women around the world. We credit this work for providing us with a foundation for the feminist intellectual pursuit of deepening our knowledge about food and intersectionality. Yet the work comprised by the label “feminist food studies” is not always clear-cut, and drawing boundaries around what counts as a contribution to a ­defined area of scholarship is inherently political. Many contributions to food studies include feminist analyses, but authors do not necessarily name their work as such, and some predate the first uses of the phrase feminist food studies. For example, Marjorie DeVault’s (1991) book Feeding the Family: The Social Organization of Caring as Gendered Work, and Deborah Barndt’s (2004) edited collection, Women Working the NAFTA Food Chain: Women, Food and Globalization,3 are early and important contributions to understanding women’s relationships with food and foodwork, and the gendered, classed, and raced dynamics these relationships produce. Similarly, Arlene Avakian’s (1998) edited volume, Through the Kitchen Window: Women Explore the Intimate Meanings of Food and Cooking, and Penny Van Esterik’s (1999) article, “Right to Food, Right to Feed, Right to Be Fed: The Intersection of Women’s Rights and the Right to Food,” mark other important early contributions to the literature that explore the complexity of women’s embodied and material relationships with food. Feminist food scholars see these contributions as distinctly feminist food studies scholarship, but we acknowledge that our doing so does not elide the politics of naming and boundary-making. Arlene Voski Avakian and Barbara Haber’s (2005) edited collection, From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies: Critical Perspectives on Women and Food, names feminist food studies as a distinct area of scholarship. This foundational volume engages conversations about historical and contemporary relationships women have with food, and marks a turning point by naming and positioning

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Introduction This Is What Feminist Food Studies Looks Like  3

feminist food studies within a burgeoning food studies literature. This edited collection is closely followed by a key contribution by Patricia Allen and ­Carolyn Sachs (2007), “Women and Food Chains: The Gendered Politics of Food,” which articulates the need for critical feminist analyses of structural inequalities of g­ ender, race, and social class in food systems and food practices. These early contributions did not engage explicitly with intersectionality, which we know is absolutely necessary to advancing the broader goals of social justice within feminist food studies. Our commitment to the imperative of intersectional analyses within feminist food studies is indebted to the scholarship of racialized, feminist scholars who have led the way in exploring the intersections of race/racism and gender/sexism in relation to food (Nettles-Barcelón et al. 2015; Harper 2010, 2012; Beal 2008; Williams-Forson 2006). These accounts attend to the politics of historic and contemporary systems of power, such as white supremacy, colonization, and patriarchy, which privilege and oppress women through contested discourses about food. For example, Psyche A. Williams-Forson’s (2006) book, Building Houses out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power, is one of the first volumes to offer an in-depth study of black women’s relationships with food, foodwork, and identity. This scholarship by Williams-Forson foregrounds the possibilities of an intersectional feminist food studies, as she explores the gendered, racialized, and classed narratives of resistance through black women’s “food voices” in relation to chicken, a highly racialized food in US foodways. Her work is critical because it demonstrates so clearly how intersecting forms of oppression, particularly racial and class, impact the everyday lives of women and their communities. Similarly, Breeze Harper’s (2010) edited collection Sistah Vegan: Black Female Vegans Speak on Food, Identity, Health & Society has been instrumental in highlighting how axes of identity in relation to food practices and veganism shape social meanings about health, nutrition, the environment, animal ethics, parenting, bodies and the experiences of black women who take up a vegan diet. Since then, Psyche Williams-Forson and Abby Wilkerson (2011) have called for a deeper engagement with intersectionality in feminist food studies. This edited volume takes up their invitation in the chapters that follow, representing some of what intersectional feminist food studies has to offer. As excited as we are to share this work, we recognize that there is much more to do and learn in the dynamic area of study, and that this volume only skims the surface of the ways in which feminist scholarship engages with questions about food and food justice. We anticipate that this volume will spark continued scholarship in the growing field of feminist food studies. At the same time, we call on the food studies

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4  FEMINIST FOOD STUDIES

community to make the need for intersectional analyses redundant. Like other critical areas of scholarship, feminist food studies has emerged from the gaps in the mainstream body of food studies literature. Although this volume contributes to filling that gap, we are not content with the prospect of a future that requires further gap filling. Thus, this volume stands as a petition to the food studies community to infuse food studies with the tools of feminist intersectionality and the aim of social justice for all. Just as a feminist approach demands intersectional analysis, we assert that food studies must come to demand a feminist approach. For us, doing food studies must mean doing feminist food studies.

INTERSECTIONALITY The term intersectionality is attributed to Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989, 1991) whose work on employment discrimination demonstrated how legal scholarship related to either race- or gender-based discrimination but did not adequately account for the experiences of black women. Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality to describe the unique form of racialized sexism that black women faced in the workplace.4 Her critique was not new; black women, women of colour, and Indigenous women had long voiced experiences of oppression based on intersecting identities bound to race, gender, and class (Collins 1989; hooks 1984; Moraga and Anzaldúa 1981; Maracle 1988). But Crenshaw’s naming of this form of analysis stuck (Collins and Bilge 2016).5 Feminist scholars and activists continue to develop intersectionality as a body of theory and practice to make sense of experiences of privilege and ­oppression. Today, feminist intersectionality is a critical theoretical, m ­ ethodological, and pedagogical framework that foregrounds power to underscore the social ­construction of social identities shaped by structural, political, symbolic, and material realities alongside embodied and material experiences. Race, ­gender, and class among other social identities mutually construct one another and produce and reproduce privilege and oppression (Cho et al. 2013; Collins 2000b).6 ­Intersectional analyses enable us to unpack how power operates through these social positionalities and social structures to understand how privilege and oppression reconstitute themselves through everyday food practices. Davis (2008, 68) defines intersectionality as “the interaction between gender, race and other categories of difference in individual lives, social practices, institutional arrangements and cultural ideologies and the outcomes of these interactions in terms of power.” This definition broadly captures the spirit of intersectionality, and the challenges of taking up an intersectional approach given

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Introduction This Is What Feminist Food Studies Looks Like  5

the ways structural and discursive power operate at the level of the everyday in terms of food consumption and production. As feminist food studies scholars, we maintain that engaging with intersectionality opens up opportunities to deepen our understanding about social inequality and injustice within food systems. Moreover, an intersectional approach demands social change, which we know is needed more than ever given growing social inequalities and concerns about food security and food sovereignty. Feminist food studies engages intersectionality to make sense of the tangled and complex social relations and structures through which identity, consumption, and production are mutually constructed (Brady et al. 2018; WilliamsForson and Wilkerson 2011). Contemporary feminist food discourses—whether they are material, embodied, socio-cultural or crosscut these domains (Allen and Sachs 2007)—are dynamic and contextually dependent. Whether interrogating the relationships of labour in relation to food production, food provisioning, and food practices for consumption, or the embodied experiences of eating, individual relationships to and with food are not static. Rather, food is experienced relationally to the conditions, structures, and practices where food production and consumption are negotiated, whether at the local or global scale (Carney 2015; Sachs and Patel-Campillo 2014; Kimura 2013, 2016). At the same time, food practices are also socially and culturally patterned, and extend beyond individual “choice” or “taste,” nutrition, and the stereotypical representations so often present in popular media (Brady et al. 2018; Cairns and Johnston 2015a, 2015b; Beagan et al. 2015; Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy 2013; McPhail et al. 2012). For us, food is central to who we are, and as feminists, we know the personal is political! Experiences of privilege and oppression are shaped through the collective social meanings we apply to food through our experiences of gender, class, sexuality, religious, ethnic, or racialized identities, which structure, embed, and maintain hierarchies of power through colonialism, racism, capitalism, sexism, and heterosexism. These experiences are formed through shifting identities that are discursively produced through material realities and gender may be peripheral. Yet women have unique relationships with food in care work (of people, animals, and the natural environment); as food providers in the private and public realms; or in many cases as farmers, fishers, hunters, and gatherers. In these important relationships with others, the earth, and with our bodies, we embody our relationships with food and our food practices define who we are. Food speaks to the core of our identities and to our relationships with each other and to the world around us.

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6  FEMINIST FOOD STUDIES

WHAT IS IN THIS VOLUME This volume includes 12 chapters that have been written by 22 feminist food studies scholars. Some of these chapters address intersectionality directly by troubling, expanding, and developing the scaffold of its theoretical framework. Other chapters draw on intersectionality to conduct analyses of various aspects of food, including the food system, eating, health, and nutrition, as well as the food movement. Although there is repetition in definitions of intersectionality, we have purposely left these in as we expect our readers to approach the book differently and in ways that suit individual readers. In the following paragraphs, we offer a brief summary of each chapter. Chapter 1 by activist, sociologist, and food studies scholar Alice Julier opens the volume with a rewriting of food studies from a feminist food ­studies ­perspective. A long-time scholar and observer of the field, Julier braids t­ ogether three strands of feminist food studies: the neglected history of (white and black) ­women’s contributions to food studies; a pedagogy that attends to ­issues of power, privilege, and inequality and puts that analysis into practice; and a rich, ­multifaceted, intersectional activism that centres the voices and concerns of those who are most marginalized. Julier concludes with her summary of the categories of analysis central to feminist food studies: paid and unpaid labour, community, and discourse. Drawing on feminist posthumanist interpretations of intersectionality and performativity, and writings on ecological and socio-ecological learning, in chapter 2, Teresa Lloro-Bidart encourages us to think about extending our conceptualization of community beyond human species and consider nonhuman urban animals, plants, fungi, and microbes, and the nonhuman built environment through intersectionality as a pedagogical and theoretical approach that considers species as a critical axis of difference, whereby speciesisms operate as a system of oppression. To do this, she presents a piece of a larger ethnographic study, and focuses on students who work in the community garden to discover not only food politics, but bugs, beetles, and bees as well. Building on the work of black feminist scholars of veganism, chapter 3’s authors Daniela Pirani and Ella Fegitz employ an intersectional framework to look at racialized, classed, and gendered dimensions of veganism as expressed through online vegan vlogs. Pirani and Fegitz further expand their analysis to show how recent trends in veganism resonate with and reinforce a neoliberal focus on the “will to health” through individualizing responsibility for choosing and enacting healthy eating practices in particular ways.

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Introduction This Is What Feminist Food Studies Looks Like  7

Using soy as a case study, in chapter 4, Alissa Overend theorizes queer veganism to trouble what she argues is “substance-based politic,” and reorients this framework toward one that is “relationally framed.” For Overend, a relational queer veganism attends not just to the ethics of meat consumption, but to the wider ethical issues at play in the social, political, economic, and cultural processes throughout which food and the food system are produced. For example, a relational queer veganism may attend to the role of migrant workers in the food system, and the appropriation of “ethnic” foods within vegan culture that is often driven by a white, middle-class, and healthist position. In chapter 5, Jennifer Brady, Jacqui Gingras, and Katie LeBesco explore how fat bias and discrimination, which result in social and material discrimination against fat people, are reflected in antifat biases in the discourse of food studies and within the food movement. Bringing an intersectional perspective that recognizes weight-based oppression to a critical feminist exploration of food studies in the context of the alternative food movement, their analysis recognizes ways in which weight-based discrimination interacts with other forms of discrimination and oppression. Supporting calls to end injustices related to the global industrial food system, they assert that such calls must not be made on the backs of fat people, thereby exacerbating fat bias as one form of social injustice. Emily Contois, in chapter 6, illuminates how beliefs about “­masculine” and “feminine” forms of dieting circulate to women and men through ­representations of food, the body, and technology use on Weight Watchers Online. Weight Watchers portrays female dieters on a difficult but actualizing and empowering journey toward a new and better self. Conversely, Weight Watchers depicts male clients as losing weight easily, even effortlessly, but ­retaining a stable and immutable masculine selfhood throughout the process. This constraint upon self-making exposes how patriarchy subordinates even the men assumed to profit the most from its power, as the male weight-loss promise withholds transformative potentials. In chapter 7, Farha Ternikar considers religion, an often-neglected dimension of intersectional analysis, as a central axis of her analysis of interviews with second-generation South Asian immigrant women about how they feed their families. Ternikar’s rich analysis examines how Indian and Pakistani (Desi) Muslim women use food to maintain their cultural, classed, gendered, and religious identities as diasporic peoples living in the United States. The politics of Muslim food practices has intensified dramatically since the Trump administration’s Muslim ban, anti-immigrant policies, and racialized fear-mongering, making Ternikar’s analysis especially timely.

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Taking up pop culture in chapter 8, Delores Phillips’s chapter offers an intersectional analysis of celebrity chef culture and popular meme turned Twitter hashtag, “the struggle plate.” Using the meme/hashtag as an entry point, P ­ hillips unpacks the politics of race, gender, class, and nationality as these intersect with normative ideas about domesticity as well as questions about what authentic black food culture means in light of the ongoing struggle for racial equity. Chapter 9 by Blake Martin, Mari Kate Mycek, Sinikka Elliott, and Sarah Bowen complements Brady, Gingras, and LeBesco’s chapter with an exploration of women’s roles and relationships with the alternative food movement. The authors present qualitative interview data to explore low-income mothers’ engagement with alternative food practices, and how their engagement is shaped by race, class, and gender. In line with their intersectional analysis, the authors argue that there are significant differences among low-income women in their relationships with alternative food, differences that are often obscured when these women’s experiences are understood only as a counterpoint to those of middle-class women. Analyzing the novel Birdie by Tracey Lindberg, and the transcripts of the Tsilhqot’in land claim trial, in chapter 10, Lauren McGuire-Wood ­illustrates how food is complicated as a marker of memory for Indigenous ­nations: while it can provide a language to speak about what is unspeakable, it can also ­reinforce the values of one culture or nation as superior to another. ­McGuire-Wood demonstrates how food is a text that reflects systems of power and oppression. Food helps to maintain collective memory, but when access to food or to the land is withheld or denied, collective memory is disrupted. Her analysis shows that the absence of food, the hunger that exists in silences and stories lost in translation, and the appearances—and lack of appearances—of food are political at their very core. Elaine Swan, Deana Leahy, Emily Gray, Sian Supski, and Adele Wessell bring a representational intersectional analysis of food exhibits in the Immigration Museum, Melbourne, Australia, in chapter 11. Taking inspiration from critical race food studies scholar Psyche Williams-Forson’s call for more intersectional studies of food, they extend their analysis beyond food production and consumption to examine cultural constructions of identity, or what Kimberlé Crenshaw defines as “representational intersectionality.” Finally, framed within personal, reflexive narratives, in chapter 12 Maya Hey explores the potential of fermentation—both as process and as metaphor— as a theoretical tool for destabilizing our conceptualization of I versus we, and us versus them. Hey uses the idea of fermentation to challenge anthropocentrism,

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and to present a fresh take on feminist epistemologies such as embodiment and “fabulation” or the telling of stories or fables, asserting that “[f]ermentation combines multiple species, multiple senses, and multiple scales of life that challenge assumptions about control … and knowledge.…”

WHAT IS NOT IN THIS VOLUME One of the challenges presented by intersectionality is the seemingly endless and sometimes overwhelming complexity of understanding and redressing the myriad intersecting forms of oppression and privilege that engender social injustice. Some may see intersectionality as an impasse, an all-or-nothing deadlock to creating social change. How can we possibly begin to build a socially just world if the complexity means we fall endlessly short of addressing all the possible intersections that cement inequality? Although this is one response to the potency of intersectionality, we offer another, more hopeful view of what intersectionality means for feminist food studies scholarship and to social justice more broadly. We acknowledge that in this volume, there is inadequate inclusion of Indigenous voices or analyses of the social injustices that Indigenous populations the world over have faced historically or in the present day. Similarly, only one chapter includes an analysis from an explicitly queer positionality and (dis)ability is absent in this volume. Although we had many abstracts to choose from in selecting the chapters that follow, we recognize these gaps because they represent voices and positionalities that have the potential to offer us deeper insight and opportunities for social justice. These gaps and the numerous intersections among them remind us that our knowledge is always partial, fragmented, and understood with some measure of uncertainty. Our challenge is to acknowledge and make visible the complexity, uncertainty, and messiness that intersectional analyses reveal. No single contribution can address the breadth and depth of power, oppression, and privilege. However, we believe that a single contribution does offer a starting place from which growth can occur as we work with complexity and, in the spirit of feminist organizing, construct knowledge and build community that will encourage and support each other in doing so. We propose that rather than an impasse of endless shortfalls, the gaps that are inevitably created by intersectional analyses present a space of creative tension with the potential for endless growth and possibility. Rather than aiming to “fix” food, feminist food studies takes food as a lens with which to articulate social injustice and to imagine a more socially just world. Feminist food studies, and its

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inherent demand for intersectional analysis and social justice, provides the space to explore those tensions and to activate our communal capacity to respond with love and support. In the end, feminist food studies is committed, in the words of radical dietitian and performance poet Lucy Aphramor (personal ­communication, 2018), to “doing love’s work.” Indeed, there is much work ahead of us.

NOTES 1. In theorizing food, we see food justice as an extension of social justice. For further reading, see: Sachs and Patel-Campillo (2014). 2. See work by Adams (2003); Avakian and Haber (2005); Barndt 2004, 2007; Bentley (1998); Bordo (2004); Charles and Kerr (1988); Counihan, 1999, 2012; Counihan and ­Caplan (1998); DeVault (1991); Inness (2005); Julier (2005); Lupton (1996); Thompson (1994). 3. Barndt’s edited volume, Women Working the NAFTA Food Chain: Women, Food and Globalization (1999), was reprinted in 2004 (2nd ed.). 4. See www.ted.com/talks/kimberle_crenshaw_the_urgency_of_intersectionality. 5. This was one critique of the second wave feminist movement. That is, women could not be theorized as a universal category based on gender. 6. See Signs, Special Issue, “Intersectionality: Theorizing Power, Empowering Theory,” guest edited by Sumi Cho, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, and Leslie McCall.

REFERENCES Adams, C. J. 2003. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. 10th ed. New York and London: The Continuum International Publishing Group, Inc.

Allen, P., and C. Sachs. 2007. “Women and Food Chains: The Gendered Politics of Food.” International Journal of Sociology and Food 15 (1): 1–23.

Avakian, A. V. 1998. Through the Kitchen Window: Women Explore the Intimate Meanings of Food and Cooking. Boston: Beacon Press.

Avakian, A. V., and B. Haber. 2005. From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies: Critical Perspectives on Women and Food. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press.

Barndt, D. 2004. Women Working the NAFTA Food Chain: Women, Food and Globalization. 2nd ed. Toronto: Sumach Press.

———. 2007. Tangled Routes: Women, Work and Globalization on the Tomato Trail. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc.

Beagan, B. L., G. E. Chapman, J. Johnson, D. McPhail, E. Power, and H. Vallianatos. 2015. Acquired Tastes: Why Families Eat the Way They Do. Vancouver: UBC Press.

Beal, F. 2008. “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female.” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 8 (2): 166–76.

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Bentley, A. 1998. Eating for Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity. Urbana, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Bordo, S. 2004. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Brady, J., B. Parker, S. Belyea, and E. Power. 2018. “Filling Our Plate: A Spotlight on

Feminist Food Studies.” Canadian Food Studies / La Revue canadienne des etudes sur l’alimentation 5 (1): 1–7.

Cairns, K., and J. Johnston. 2015a. Food & Femininity. London: Bloomsbury Press.

———. 2015b. “Choosing Health: Embodied Neoliberalism, Post-feminism and the ‘DoDiet.’” Theory & Society 44 (2): 153–75.

Carney, M. A. 2015. The Unending Hunger: Tracing Women and Food Insecurity Across Borders. Oakland: University of California Press.

Charles, N., and M. Kerr. 1988. Women, Food & Families. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Cho, S., K. Crenshaw, and L. McCall, eds. 2013. “Intersectionality: Theorizing Power, Empowering Theory.” Special Issue, Signs 38 (4, Summer).

Collins, P. 1989. “The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought.” Signs 14 (4): 745–73.

———. 2000a. “Gender, Black Feminism and Black Political Economy.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 568 (March): 41–53.

———. 2000b. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. 10th anniversary ed. New York: Routledge Classics.

Collins, P. H., and S. Bilge. 2016. Intersectionality. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Counihan, C. M. 1999. The Anthropology of Food and Body: Gender, Meaning and Power. New York: Routledge.

———. 2012. “Gendering Food.” In The Oxford Handbook of Food History, edited by J. M. Pilcher, 99–116. New York: Oxford University Press.

Counihan, C. M., and S. Caplan, eds. 1998. Food and Gender: Identity and Power. ­A msterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers.

Crenshaw, K. 1989. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1 (8): 139–67.

———. 1991. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43 (6): 1241–99.

Davis, K. 2008. “Intersectionality as a Buzzword: A Sociology of Science Perspective on What Makes a Feminist Theory Successful.” Feminist Theory 9 (1): 67–85.

DeVault, M. 1991. Feeding the Family: The Social Organization of Caring as Gendered Work. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Harper, B., ed. 2010. Sistah Vegan: Black Female Vegans Speak on Food, Identity, Health & Society. New York: Lantern Books.

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———. 2012. “Going Beyond the Normative White: Post Racial Vegan Epistemology.” In Taking Food Public: Redefining Foodways in a Changing World, edited by P. WilliamsForson and C. Counihan, 155–74. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

Hayes-Conroy, A., and J. Hayes-Conroy. 2013. Doing Nutrition Differently: Critical Ap-

proaches to Diet and Dietary Intervention. London and New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

hooks, b. 1984. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. New York: South End Press.

Inness, S. 2005. Secret Ingredients: Race, Gender & Class at the Dinner Table. New York: ­Palgrave Macmillan.

Julier, A. 2005. “Hiding Gender and Race in the Discourse of Commercial Food Consumption.” In From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies: Critical Perspectives on Women and

Food, edited by A. Voski Avakian and B. Haber, 163–84. Amherst and Boston: Univer-

sity of Massachusetts Press.

Kimura, A. H. 2013. Hidden Hunger: Gender and the Politics of Smarter Foods. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

———. 2016. Radiation Brain Moms and Citizen Scientists: The Gender Politics of Food Contamination after Fukushima. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Lupton, D. 1996. Food, the Body & the Self. London: Sage Publications.

Maracle, L. 1988. I Am Woman: A Native Perspective on Sociology and Feminism. Vancouver: Press Gang Publishers.

McPhail, D., B. Beagan, and G. E. Chapman. 2012. “‘I Don’t Want to Be Sexist But …’: Denying and Reinscribing Gender through Food.” Food, Culture & Society 15 (3): 473–89.

Moraga, C., and G. Anzaldúa. 1981. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Colour. Watertown, MA: Persephone Press.

Nettles-Barcelón, K. D., G. Clark, C. Thorsson, J. K. Walker, and P. Williams-Forson. 2015. “Black Women’s Food Work as Critical Space.” Gastronomica: The Journal of ­Critical Food Studies 15 (4): 34–49. DOI: 10.1525/gfc.2015.15.4.34.

Sachs, C., and A. Patel-Campillo. 2014. “Feminist Food Justice: Crafting a New Vision.” Feminist Studies 40 (2): 396–410.

Thompson, B. 1994. A Hunger So Wide and So Deep: A Multiracial View of Women’s Eating Problems. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Van Esterik, P. 1999. “Right to Food, Right to Feed, Right to Be Fed. The Intersection of Women’s Rights and the Right to Food.” Agriculture & Human Values 16 (2): 225–32.

Williams-Forson, P. 2006. Building Houses out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food & Power. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Williams-Forson, P., and A. Wilkerson. 2011. “Intersectionality and Food Studies.” Food, Culture & Society 14 (1): 7–28.

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CHAPTER 1

Critiquing Hegemony, Creating Food, Crafting Justice: Cultivating an Activist Feminist Food Studies Alice Julier

LEARNING OBJECTIVES 1. To identify the main goals of feminist and intersectional approaches to food studies 2. To summarize the scholarly contributions of women and women of ­colour to contemporary and historical food systems 3. To provide examples of how labour, community, and discourse are ­important areas of focus for intersectional food studies

KEY TERMS agrarianism, food regimes, HBCU, hegemony, intersectional feminism, intersectionality, pedagogy, standpoint theory, sustainable agriculture

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Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. —Chimamandi Adichie What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open. —Muriel Rukeyser, “Kathe Kollwitz”

INTRODUCTION In the months in which I have been writing this, there have been rapid and profound challenges to the hegemonic order, the structures of patriarchy and white supremacy that shape the lives of people in the twenty-first century. These challenges include the Black Lives Matter movement, which continues to push for the freedom of brown and black people globally to live without fear of violence; the activism of refugees and immigrants and supporters in the face of increasing xenophobia and nationalism; the student-led movement to end gun violence; and finally, the #MeToo surge of feminist response to sexual harassment and genderbased violence in the workplace and all manner of public spaces. These movements address all parts of our lives as people who are shaped by such constructs as race, gender, class, sexuality, and able-bodiedness. Because food and agriculture are the domain in which I work and write, I think about these movements as they relate to labour: how the work of sustaining ourselves, the paid and unpaid labour of producing food, the emotional and caring work that many of us do to support our families, communities, and countries is tied up in these structures of dominance, most overtly reinforcing hierarchies of race and gender. Both activism and academic work on food and agriculture in the late twentieth century have centred on the desire to create a just and equitable food system, to respect the cultural and economic sovereignty of peoples and their agricultural and culinary output, and to have people’s stories told, both in historical and contemporary contexts. While there are many limitations, I argue that, in fact, if an activist food studies is a possibility, then an intersectional feminist food studies is a necessity. Labour, productive and reproductive, is our central concern: social labour creates food; food helps sustain and create people; food creates, supports, and challenges the culture and politics that emerge from these arrangements. We are tied together— and pushed into conflict—by the need for sustenance. Women, and more specifically women of colour and immigrant women, do the heavy lifting in this work.

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Consider this: although black women of colour started the #MeToo m ­ ovement, it was recently galvanized by the admittedly privileged women who came forward about sexual harassment in the entertainment industry. In ­response, Latina farm workers from the Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, women whose day-to-day lives involve precarious economic and health situations, wrote a s­ upport letter on behalf of their members, the 700,000 women who work in agricultural and food production, in solidarity with women in other professions. We do not work under bright stage lights or on the big screen. We work in the shadows of society in isolated fields and packinghouses that are out of sight and out of mind for most people in this country. Your job feeds souls, fills hearts and spreads joy. Our job nourishes the nation with the fruits, vegetables and other crops that we plant, pick and pack.… In these moments of despair, and as you cope with scrutiny and criticism because you have bravely chosen to speak out against the harrowing acts that were committed against you, please know that you’re not alone. We believe and stand with you. (Time Magazine Staff 2017)

These women of colour have greater workplace vulnerabilities than other women and yet they offer solace, hope, and solidarity and point out how their labours are at the very heart of sustenance. They also demonstrate how intersectional and activist approaches should be inseparable. Like many other fields in academia, food studies emerged from both intellectual and activist engagement in a landscape that raised questions about existing boundaries: between material and mental activities, between disciplines, between public and private actions, necessities and luxuries, self and other, production and consumption. Any area of social and material life worth exploring is one that is contested, challenging dominant discourses about how things are grown, produced, distributed, consumed, and wasted. It seems fitting that the interest in sustenance—growing and creating food—arises at a time when inequality is also consolidating, increasing, and yet being challenged.  As a practitioner and perpetuator of the field, I have been interested in promoting opportunities and possibilities for an intersectional feminist food studies that centralizes and supports social change. Over the last two decades, I have explored this question by rooting it in aspects of my own narrative about being an activist and an academic whose interests evolved alongside the development of food studies, with my own engagement rooted in Western countries (Julier 2015a, 2017). As a feminist sociologist, I believe in reflexivity—the personal

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is political—but I also know, from sociologist Dorothy Smith, that such a stance is just a starting point, a place where one begins to develop concepts and knowledge before starting to look at structural conditions and comparative experiences that shape those standpoints. The methods of inquiry that we use to analyze social and material life must begin at the everyday level of lives, but also attend to structures that shape them (Smith 1987). In 2005, I wrote the following conclusion to an article using intersectional feminist perspectives to analyze what was being said about food and labour, and what counted as food studies literature: I want to end by thinking about the scholarship on food and eating that I hope to see in the future. Most emphatically, it seems essential that studies of food and social life must explore how gender and race and class collide to create both the local and the global. Such research would focus on how specific food behaviors and roles regarding commensality are given gendered and racial meanings, how paid and unpaid food labor is divided to express gender and race differences symbolically, and how diverse social structures—not just families or ethnic groups—incorporate gender and racial values and convey advantages. These books would analyze the construction of such packages, simultaneously emphasizing the symbolic and the structural, the ideological and the material, the interactional and the institutional levels of analysis. Perhaps then, my appetite would be satisfied. (Julier 2005, 179–80)

Since that time, some of that work has been done and the activist and social change climate often has an insistent and strong focus on these issues. In writing about where we are now, it is possible that I juggle too many ideas: that is often the dilemma with intersectional work, that we have so much to tell and leaving out any thread weakens the analysis. First, I tell a revised story about the parentage of food studies (a “fractured fairy tale,” if you will).1 Then I assert a pedagogy for the field that embraces material practice as well as historical and cultural analysis, but centring a narrative that is not about normative practices. And finally, I raise some issues for activists, practitioners, and community members in the world of food and agriculture who are pushing back to challenge those normative stories and encourage a revision of how we work, live, and create culture in the realm of agriculture and food. This will not do justice to all three of these threads, but at least establish that they are part of the woof and warp of a tapestry that others are also filling in.

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THE FIRST THREAD: ORIGIN STORIES In order to create a robust and activist food studies, we must raise the question: what is our origin story? Where did we come from? Knowing the lineage of this field helps us understand the paths we are on now, including what’s been left out and what’s been inscribed (Avakian and Haber 2005). In comparison, one origin story for gender studies revolves around political action with the rise of second wave feminism, and simultaneously its critique by women of colour, queer women, and working-class women. Similarly, with African American studies, Chicano studies, environmental studies, and disability studies, there were social issues in the twentieth century, both at the micro and macro scale, that galvanized people politically and eventually pointed to the paucity of knowledge from the perspective and experience of people who have been left out of the conversation. In this telling of the tale, policy, poverty, culture, and resistance to oppression are at the very core of why we need to examine food from a multidisciplinary lens. The study of food has existed prior to the existence of food studies—in anthropology, history, rural sociology, and comparative literature, to name a few. However, the birth of food studies was both politically and materially motivated to provide a new way of thinking about what had happened to these seemingly mundane daily activities. Food has always been an area of intellectual inquiry. Anthropology, history, food science, rural sociology, nutrition, and agricultural economics are just a few of the scholarly disciplines to understand food as a category of analysis. But, as Bourdieu would have it, food studies emerged as a field when relations of power became more obviously embedded in the everyday experience of sustenance. The Chronicle of Higher Education devoted its first article to food studies in the United States in 1999, calling it “scholarship lite,” with critics who claimed that since food is ubiquitous, it does not require a field of study (Ruark 1999). Since then, the critique has often been that food studies is “just another lens through which to examine oppression, sustainability, and multiculturalism” (Nestle 2014). But if we tell the tale a different way, perhaps in this story, the evolution of food studies and continuous pressure on a larger culture of inequality suggests that this is a strength, not a weakness. The story I would tell (and there could be other origin stories—I simply offer this as one option) goes as follows: Once upon a time, there were two women nutritionists who stepped outside the confines of telling people what to eat and began critiquing the food industry, consolidated agriculture or agribusiness, and the government for its long history

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of bad regulatory decisions that support the excesses and greed of corporate food production and global interference. In this story, Joan Dye Gussow and Marion Nestle are the activist mothers of invention. Gussow published critiques of the food system and its environmental impacts in the 1970s; her book, Chicken Little, Tomato Sauce, and Agriculture (1991), laid out arguments about consolidation, corporate control, and technology that have been demonstrated and reasserted by multiple authors in the ensuing decades (Boyers n.d.). Following her public policy critiques of the way food conglomerates influence nutrition and her aptly named book Food Politics (2002), Nestle birthed food studies within the public health and nutrition department at New York University and hired faculty specifically under that title. While other programs in gastronomy and agricultural food systems existed prior to that date, the formation of the NYU program in 1996 provided the gestation of academic food studies. In its earliest iteration, understanding food production as an intellectual and material skill was an important part of the program. For example, graduate applicants had to have a certain number of hours of experience in the world of food. Simultaneously, but arguably with even less attention in academia, black women of colour also shape the important beginnings of food studies, often straddling the academic and practice. There are also godmothers and culture preservers, such as Vertamae Grosvenor and Jessica Harris, both writers, scholars, and practitioners who demonstrated the role of African Americans and ­A fricans in creating, defining, and sustaining American foodways, challenging a dominant narrative about the paucity and unhealthiness of cuisines originated by people of colour (see Smart-Grosvenor 1970; Grosvenor 1972, 1990; Harris 1999, 2011). In 2007, Harris was the first occupant of the Ray Charles chair in African American material culture at Dillard University, the only historically black college or university (HBCU) to have an academic program focused on black culinary traditions and history. A decade later, the scholarly work of writers such as Toni Tipton-Martin, Psyche Williams-Forson, and Michael Twitty centrally situate African American contributions to food systems and build upon the germinal work of Harris and Grosvenor, who were early in the conversation about the complexity of southern foodways, race, and gender (see Tipton-­Martin 2015; Williams-Forson 2006; Twitty 2017). Vertamae Grosvenor’s writing, acting, and broadcast journalism often asserted the important heritage of black women’s experience, influencing people from filmmaker and novelist Julie Dash to cultural icon ­Beyoncé. While the diasporic experience exists globally, the specific experience of enslaved peoples in the Americas provides one of the most important touchpoints in understanding how food and culture have travelled, transformed, and been shaped by colonialist relations of power.

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It is not surprising that the long list of women and black women of c­olour who  contributed important insights into food systems and food studies have ­often been rendered invisible in public discourse. In his conversion from c­ ulinary to ­political food writer, Mark Bittman went around the United States and gave ­multiple public presentations, using a PowerPoint presentation about r­educing meat ­consumption that mirrored exactly what Frances Moore Lappe demonstrated in Diet for a Small Planet in 1971 (see Bittman 2011, 2016). While ­environmental studies, sustainability, and public health now claim ­territory in defining food systems, Harriet Friedmann’s food regime concept is the ­grandparent of all our contemporary ideas about food systems (see Friedmann and McMichael 1987; Friedmann 1993). Similarly, while US southern food ­scholars are more explicitly uncovering their racial roots, in the 1990s Rafia ­Zafar started a wave of research documenting how African American women were early ­publishers of cookbooks, despite the frequent and ongoing appropriation of their recipes, skills, and knowledge (see Zafar 1999, 2007). The feminist intersectional story about food studies also recognizes the artificial divides between agriculture and food. Even though Marion Nestle’s critiques were heavily focused on global food production and policy (see Nestle 2002), the emphasis in food studies has often been heavier on consumption and cuisine than on production and agriculture. In this story, Joan Dye Gussow emerges as the other mother whose contribution to the sustainable agriculture movement is well documented, but whose insights have only recently been integrated into what food studies can and should do (see Boyers n.d.). Along with Kate Clancy, who has tirelessly defined, measured, and explored regional food systems for many decades, Gussow’s work predates the popular writers2 who ask the public to think about farming itself as the culprit for a bad food system (see Clancy [2012] 2016; Gussow 1991). Gussow’s This Organic Life (2002), a memoir of both localized eating and the loss of her husband, predates the personal narratives of Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver, who popularized the organic food confessional. Her own affiliation has been more with agricultural ethicists, who understand that how we grow food affects what we eat. This work is also born out of an activist concern for the food system and constitutes a long-­ standing and intense critique of the consolidation and industrialization of agriculture that was largely ignored outside the narrow reach of rural sociology and agricultural economics until translated for a ready public by the likes of journalist Eric Schlosser and chef Dan Barber. As Julie Guthman (2007) so aptly illustrates, there is a price to be paid, both in terms of scientific veracity and ownership of the discourse, when faculty choose to have students read these men as the founders and key practitioners of

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an activist critique. Guthman (2007, 264) writes: “What is so painfully evident here and in many other of the new food books, is how food politics has become a progenitor of a neoliberal anti-politics that devolves regulatory responsibility to consumers via their dietary choices.” For many of these white male writers, their early and most popular advice suggested that individualized change and consumer ­behaviour—what you consume, or “voting with your fork”—overrides a collective and political response. Additionally, the labour at the very heart of food system problems was ignored or hidden in all their work until activists began to push back on the question of food justice as something that can be achieved outside of general changes to labour systems (see Bovy 2015; Kliman 2015). In particular, food and agriculture as part of “development” in non-Western countries were often ignored, even as activism around land tenure, labour, and hunger occurred across Southeast Asia and Latin America. Whether coming at the problem as a journalist or chef, these writers presume an audience of elite consumers who stand outside the constraints of sexist and racist structures. Feminists in and out of academia have critiqued these books for the ways in which they ignore or minimize women’s experiences, presume that farming is done by white men, and lack an understanding of the global impact of consolidated food and agriculture (Guthman 2007; Allen and Sachs 2007). The publication of Arlene Avakian’s edited volume, Through the Kitchen Window: Women Explore the Intimate Meanings of Food and Eating, in 1998 was a watershed in complicating the emergence of an intersectional food studies. Contributors included poets, activists, filmmakers, historians, and scientists and represented the most diverse collection of women’s voices about food that was available at that time—and perhaps still, in some ways. In 2005, she coedited a new volume of feminist food essays with Barbara Haber, historian and former ­ ibrary at Radcliffe, who was instrumental in preservhead of the Slesinger L ing and asserting that cookbooks were literature and a pathway to understanding culture and history. The introduction to From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies provides an invaluable survey of intersectional feminist themes and work within the field and were it not for that, I would be compelled to list all of those other scholars as significant characters in this tale (Avakian and Haber 2005). My own piece in that volume raised the following questions: What if we saw the construction of race and gender, of the “devalued Other” as a defining feature of both the production and the consumption of food? What if this insight were applied on both the large, commercial, structural scale and the intimate everyday scale of smaller communities, households, families, and partners? (Julier 2005, 164)

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Indeed, in the last decade, I see changes in the scholarship that fits into the food studies pantry, an increase in pedagogy that addresses some of these issues, and most definitely an activism that is driven by the needs of workers, women, people of colour, Indigenous peoples, as well as differently abled and LGBTQ+ communities. The structures of power and inequality are still in place, particularly in the ways that economic capacity is consolidated and cultural value is structured through markets and neoliberal frameworks that create hierarchies of need. But challenges to those structures are ongoing and multifaceted and the story we tell of food studies that includes who we are and how we got here also needs to be multifaceted and have many chapters.

THE SECOND THREAD: PEDAGOGY My idealized version of food studies (that is, the academic practice and teaching about food, agriculture, food systems, and culture) is one that is grounded in materialist practices and philosophies and helps create educated people who are able to engage in social change. I recognize that not all versions of food studies that live in academic institutions would openly embrace that ideal type, but having worked in and around the evolution of the field, I believe there are reasons to continue to assert it. Using my own experiences in creating and teaching in this program, I argue that grounding food studies in a material and experiential pedagogy is critical to its long-term utility and to addressing issues of labour. I began thinking about these issues in trying to more explicitly connect intersectional theories to interdisciplinary work. In 2009, a group of scholars from a variety of disciplines, myself included, helped organize a round table at the National ­Women’s Studies Association conference, with the backdrop of a revitalized and intersectional NWSA that had itself gone through a reckoning about race and inclusivity. We wanted to explore how our teaching on gender and food was intersectional and how the field of food studies was not as explicit about this as it could be. The title of the round table was “Food as More than Metaphor: Intersectionality, Pedagogy, Food, and Social Justice in the Feminist Classroom.” In the panel abstract, we wrote: While the study of food has given rise to a growing interdisciplinary body of work, both research and pedagogy has been slow to fully embrace the theoretical and substantive insights of critical theories that interrogate the complex reality of intersectionality (McCall, 2005; Witt, 2001). Ivy Ken (2008) has recently argued that food … “highlights how race, class, and gender are produced, used, experienced, and processed in our bodies, human and institutional.” (NWSA conference, Atlanta, Georgia, 2009)

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Immediately after this conference, I became the director of an interdisciplinary graduate program in food studies, housed within a School of Sustainability at a small college in western Pennsylvania. I was hired to develop this program, utilizing both our urban college in Pittsburgh and a newly acquired 388-acre farm and retreat that has become our new sustainability campus. Our educational mission is to train the students to be knowledgeable and skilled actors in the food system and advocates for change, although I have had to point out repeatedly that we don’t tell them what to advocate. For the last nine years, my colleagues have been training cohorts of about 20–30 graduate students. This is not a huge number of people, but their impact has been significant, particularly in the Pittsburgh area, where many of them have stayed and had an impact on the local and regional food system. In those nine years, I have participated in countless round tables and academic sessions on food studies pedagogy, consulted for large universities and small colleges in their curriculum development for food studies programs, and listened to students and faculty to determine what skills, tools, knowledge, and theories they need in order to create a means of analyzing and affecting the food system. We start by teaching about the history of agrarianism, colonialism, industrialization, the gender-race-class politics of food access and availability, and the cultural contexts that shape choices in these environments. We also teach the science and practice of food production, from agriculture to culinary, from foraging to fermenting, spending time in fields but also in the kitchen, the classroom, the slaughterhouse, the community bread oven, the food factory, the government offices, and, of course, the supermarket. The main approach is to embed these explorations into specific classes that have some kind of application and skills acquisition. For example, in teaching greenhouse production, our agricultural faculty take students to different sites, urban and rural, to talk about the constraints and opportunities in a site, both agriculturally and socially. Students demonstrate techniques and run workshops so that they start to understand the limits of top-down education and training. One of the things we talk about is our own capacity to grow things since the university owns the land and any agriculture we engage in is thus essentially subsidized in terms of labour, supplies, and land costs. There are lower risks economically—and in terms of food security for our population—if we fail to grow something. Indeed, the trustees end up with maple syrup and honey more frequently than the students, staff, or faculty who work at the university. In terms of classes and skills, we push to engage simultaneously in the conceptual and the practical. Students learn integrated pest management; how to

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build a high tunnel; how to care for goats; how to ferment, can, cook, test soil, and market new products. They develop food guides for regions and for low-­ income budgets; they study and experiment with historical culinary traditions and argue about appropriation versus appreciation in their contemporary manifestations. They develop products using regional agricultural products and help small to mid-sized companies figure out how to market and support those food systems. They visit regulatory agencies, lobbyists, pesticide sales managers, organic certification agents, and corporate food producers to understand the perspectives and constraints that each of these groups experience in trying to get their version of a working food system, in the micro- or macrocosm of their work landscape. Students go on to jobs in antihunger work, in nonprofits designed to increase economic viability for local agriculture, in companies that would like to increase their sustainable practices or figure out what sustainable practices might entail. They start their own businesses and third-party certification groups focused on animal welfare or farmer-driven standards. They work for the US ­Department of Agriculture, Seattle Tilth, the Food Project, as journalists in print and other media, at large food corporations and small farm co-operatives. These are critical thinking skills that shape all the practices we lump under the heading of food systems and food studies. So, when we look at the question of why service work is underpaid, we break down the skills of cooking and serving and caring and talk about what circumstances allow us to value or undervalue those labours. When we look at sustainable agriculture, we log hours in vegetable and animal production and can see why stewardship is more time consuming than resource extraction. Our goal is to make them articulate how and why certain practices make sense. Recognizing the political economy of food  and agriculture demands that we help create practitioners who can take a critical and engaged (hands-on) stance in evaluating where we have been and where we are going as producers, consumers, and citizens in a global food system. In short, their interests and capacities are very diverse, but the main concepts and perspectives that they share are the same. Whether the class is on food systems or sustainable meat or greenhouse production, the key questions are: how is this part of a larger system and in what ways is that system shaped by conflicting or consensual economic, social, material, and cultural goals? And, equally important, who benefits? How is power—and inequality generally—inscribed in these skills, practices, ways of organizing sustenance and social life? Intersectional analysis is hard to do (Cho et al. 2013). Don’t let anyone fool you—what often happens is that one dimension or axis of intersectionality is foregrounded instead of looking closer at the intersections—and this leads to

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oppression. And so, being immersed in feminist and critical race perspectives, I find myself returning to older sociological analyses of inequality, particularly those that explore social class and power. The roots of the analysis are in the work of G. William Domhoff, who has explored the network of wealth, culture, and politics for many decades (Domhoff 2013). For Domhoff, there are four primary indicators of power: who benefits, who governs, who wins, and who shines? These questions originally framed Domhoff’s analysis of the power elite, an early look at how those with privilege are able to leverage politi­ cal, social, and cultural capital to maintain economic dominance. In exploring intersectionality, it is worth taking a more complicated analysis of class that understands power as a combination of cultural and social factors, with economic outcomes. Domhoff ’s analysis of the elite is useful in thinking about agriculture and food practices, and of the questions he asks, “who shines” and “who benefits” work in almost every possible social problem related to food. Consider how the celebrity spokespeople like Michael Pollan, Mark Bittman, and Dan ­Barber all gain financially from books, often receive academic appointments at elite universities despite not having the usual advanced degree, and influence policy without the credentials that comparable women and people of colour need for equal influence. Most importantly, they can make mistakes and not lose status. In a now-infamous article in the New York Times, Michael Pollan decried food television, suggesting that “we” should stop watching other people cook and go back to cooking ourselves (Pollan 2009). Many feminist writers jumped all over this, especially since Pollan quoted a US historian who suggested most of the fault was with women (more specifically white middle-class women) who got jobs in the paid labour force after World War II (Hernandez 2013). This had little to no impact on his publishing and credential as a spokesperson for change. Very recently, Pollan has begun including charitable donations as part of his speaking engagements. But this is at a time when he has benefited financially for two decades from speaking engagements and book publications. The Omnivore’s Dilemma (Pollan 2006) is about to become a movie, and his family members have received collateral success (see Shaw 2015; Simeon n.d.). Former New York Times columnist, cookbook author, and critic Mark Bittman was recently taken to task by black farmers for promoting a land reform policy that was not developed in tandem with any farmers of colour (Bloch and Bonhomme 2017). The National Black Food and Justice Alliance responded not only to the Stone Barns conference organizers who chose to invite and assert Bittman’s viewpoint, but

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also to the media for framing the encounter to support the idea that white men are movement leaders (National Black Food and Justice Alliance 2017). To focus on “who shines” and “who benefits” as part of the economic impact of this framing allows us to situate what happens when white male food celebrities blatantly benefit financially and symbolically in status from other people’s work and lives, claiming to do so in the name of improving the world, but setting the parameters around what counts. The activities that have been christened an “alternative food movement” render all others invisible. These circumstances are not unique to food studies, but the genesis of food studies as a field has contributed to a construction of knowledge that privileges white male perspectives, which is problematic. The fact that like many studies, food studies was part of a slowly emerging social movement around a contested field of knowledge and practice means that it has a relationship to lived experience and everyday life that is more visceral than some other academic fields. Certainly, the parallel to gender studies is about the embodied practice, the way the social constructions that shape our options are tied to materially experienced practices, like sex and dinner. And so it is incredibly important to acknowledge that we can be critical thinkers and actors about things that are both a source of pleasure and oppression. To want to know how to change something is not to devalue the aspects that are a source of sustenance—quite literally, materially, but also culturally. I have repeatedly drawn parallels between my own emergence as a scholar of gender and eventually of food, the types of scholarship and pedagogy that I have supported and produced, and the way these fields have come to be in a reciprocal relationship with activism. My point is that as food studies evolves as part of academia, it will have many shapes and multiple life trajectories and my hope is that there is not just one right way, but that all the ways are inextricably tied to social change. At the same time, we cannot take for granted the relationship between the academic analysis of food, the grounding in material practices, and the lived, activist experience of fighting for a better food system.

THE THIRD THREAD: ACTIVISM Here, I return to the parallels to the movements that brought women’s and then gender studies to academia out of activism. Feminist responses to structural inequality and everyday sexism began to resonate as academic subjects when activists fought to bring them to public attention—and in studying gender movements, especially in the West, women from different class and race backgrounds

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had always been involved in antiracist, antisexist activism, but much of the early attention and scholarship focused on white women feminists and their concerns. Sociologist Benita Roth argues that there were concurrent movements, often working toward gender equity while also concerned with antiracism and class oppression. At the same time, public perception and media constructions—and then subsequent scholarship—created a sense that there was a singular movement. She writes: There is sometimes an explicit definition of feminism as being about organizing about gender unencumbered by thinking about other oppressions. The feminist organizing of white middle class women in the US has been seen as a kind of model for feminist activism, such that a real feminist movement must be one that makes claims only on the basis of gender. (Roth 2004, 9)

Roth, among others, suggests that it is the media’s portrayals that establish the narrative of a single focused movement—that subsequent scholarship was not sufficient to counter that impression. White feminists in and out of the academy bear some of that responsibility, and contemporary scholarship and activism speak to accountability and change. One key acknowledgement is that there were—and have been—multiple movements to challenging gender oppression, many of which have engaged simultaneously with disability, racism, classism, and heterosexism. But for a variety of reasons, as this activism is framed as a set of social problems, as it gets studied and supported within academia, it often gets reduced. Women’s studies and feminism, both in and out of academic settings, needed to evolve, to be shaped more by transnational and anticolonialist perspectives, engaged with science, and attendant to a larger narrative about gender and sexuality. This has happened, but the struggle is not over. When I look at food studies and the topics that have been resonant and important—and how they do or do not connect up to a social change agenda within or outside academia—I feel a cautionary tale. It was easy for movements for social change around food and agriculture to be reduced to single-issue topics championed by public figures of stature, usually white men and sometimes white women. How can we, as academics and activists and practitioners, prevent that from happening again? On the one hand, the fact that mainstream activists and the media are now paying attention to issues of wages, autonomy, and satisfaction in food service industries, and economic viability and diversity among farmers, is important. However, those who are helping to contribute to both sides of that equation—to

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the activism that helps bring about equity and change and to the academic treatise and studies that help build and promote appropriate knowledge—have a responsibility not to misrepresent this as a singular activity driven by popular media and individuals who have the symbolic capital to publish books. What the activist movements of this moment tell us—whether they are about food or something else—is that the old narrative cannot stand in for a means to change. Pollan has argued that it takes someone from a background with some cultural and economic capital to be able to draw attention to what’s going on (see Johnson 2013). Similarly, when chefs of colour critique the system that elevates certain food, certain ways of dining, and in particular the training of certain kinds of chefs, the pushback is that they are opening doors for others. They helped out a lot of people on the way up. While it’s always good to put your money to good use supporting those who start without it, the current moment calls into question this whole trajectory, the entire approach to considering what is culturally and economically important. If you put food producers of colour at the centre of your analysis, as the main characters in the story, the story changes.

CONCLUSIONS To summarize, there are three categories of analysis that are key to feminist food studies: First, centralizing labour, both paid and unpaid. Any study of food must focus on the way we think about and support people’s labour in creating, growing, cooking, distributing, serving, and disposing of food. It cannot be an add-on. Some of these are skills that everyone should have, regardless of whether they use them. Ideally, as a society, we teach written literacy and basic math to everyone and do not assess whether this is a good idea based on the amount it’s used. While it seems disingenuous to think that everyone should grow and cook their own food, as a society we lose something when the skills involved in those processes are removed and not taught to a wide range of people. To know how plants and animals grow, how they are transformed by cooking, fermenting, preserving, and how to re-establish the conditions to do it again—are highly significant skills that all people should have whether they choose to exercise them or not. Knowing how much or how little work it takes to produce the things one consumes is a necessary precondition for making moral and ethical arguments about whether we as a society, community, or individual need to be consuming those items. Second is to teach about and focus on community—not necessarily as a ­predefined entity or a rhetorical device, but based on how a community defines

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itself and how we define ourselves as part of smaller-scale and larger-scale (global) communities. Consider how transnational migration has shaped racialethnic identities, creating new ones where old ones are finally feeling imposed and outdated, and creating opportunities for shared cultural knowledge. The push for local and regional is powerful and necessary, but we are increasingly and always part of a global community as well, and it is reactionary and dangerous to insist that all relationships that foster sustenance have to happen in your own backyard. How community is enacted is often intertwined with food. Third is to focus on discourse—who defines the debate? Who has a say in it? Who promulgates the ideas? So much discourse in everyday life is about how people need to educate themselves to eat better. What would it look like to tell the food stories of people without judgment? How can we look at these issues as encompassing both pleasure and oppression, luxury and necessity, convenience and care? How do we talk about the desire for a better society and the actions we take to make it so? I am most aggrieved by the mistaken belief that it’s okay to characterize this as a movement in the singular, without history or complexity, led by some white men writing books, giving talks, and providing rules for eating, and someone telling you that the kitchen and the farm are now free of the oppressive qualities that made a commercial food system and unequal treatment in the paid labour force more attractive than servitude or housework. In both food and feminism, I believe there are really good reasons to engage in reclaiming control—over our bodies, over our material and economic generative capacities, over what we grow, eat, and consume—and over our ability to define ourselves beyond binaries. Certainly, for me, one great example of that within feminist movements has been newer histories like Benita Roth’s (2004) Separate Roads to Feminism, which explores black and Latina activism as concurrent and coequal with white second wave feminism. As Beverly Guy-Sheftall (1995) s­ ummarizes, activism through an intersectional lens means engaging in an emancipatory ­vision and acts of resistance among a diverse group who ­attempts to articulate the complex nature of our experiences and the interlocking nature of oppression and struggle. I think our main job is to get more people engaged in naming, practising, and telling about how they believe we should sustain ourselves and others—and do it loudly and with political power.

NOTES 1. Fractured fairy tales were originally a creative and silly retelling of classic fairy tales as animated on the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon in the 1950s. Since then, authors have taken on classic tales and reworked them, for example, the retelling of the three little

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pigs told by the wolf. These are often humorous, but they also can employ signifiers that upend expected hierarchies. 2. Indeed, although Pollan and chef Dan Barber occasionally credit Joan Dye Gussow for raising these issues before they did and she is generally in support of their work, at another Stone Barns event, Gussow moderated and asked both authors, “Are you both out of touch with the average eater?” when she noted the cost of the meals they both supported (www.epicurious.com/archive/blogs/editor/2008/01/elitism-in-the.html).

READING QUESTIONS 1. What global actions, beyond the ones cited in the article, can you pinpoint that demonstrate how women and people of colour are defining social change and food justice? 

2. What material skills from agricultural or culinary practice do you consider to be important

for people to master in order to understand the labour demands of a food ­system—and why? 

3. What intersectional tools would you use in order to explore a contemporary food or agriculture problem? 

4. Why does the author compare gender studies to food studies? Can you think of a different or better comparison to another academic field? 

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Williams-Forson, P. 2006. Building Houses out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Witt, C. 2001. “Feminist History of Philosophy.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of ­Philosophy, Fall 2001 Edition. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2018/entries/feminism-femhist/.

Zafar, R. 1999. “The Signifying Dish: Autobiography and History in Two Black Women’s Cookbooks.” Feminist Studies 25 (2): 449–69.

———. 2007. “Recipes for Respect:  Black Hospitality Entrepreneurs before World War I.” In African American Foodways, edited by A. Bower, 139–52. Champlain-Urbana: ­University of Illinois Press.

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CHAPTER 2

“The Bees Wore Little Fuzzy Yellow Pants”: Feminist Intersections of Animal and Human Performativity in an Urban Community Garden Teresa Lloro-Bidart

LEARNING OBJECTIVES 1. To explain how theories of intersectionality and performativity can be applied to understand relationships with other animals in food systems 2. To describe how feminist intersectional pedagogies can extend and yet limit care for other animals involved in food systems 3. To identify invisible participants in food systems and also discuss the significance of making these subject positions visible

KEY TERMS intersectionality, multispecies ethnography, multispecies pedagogies, performativity, posthumanism, relationality, socio-ecological learning, speciesism

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INTRODUCTION Although the urban community garden literature is interdisciplinary in scope and engages scholarship in environmental and nutrition education (Crosley 2013; Reis and Ferreira 2015; Swan and Flowers 2015), community development (Draper and Freedman 2010; Firth et al. 2011; Wight 2013), and research on food access, justice, and sovereignty (Alkon and Agyeman 2011; ­Buckingham 2005; Gottleib and Joshi 2010; Levkoe 2013), scant scholarship examines how community gardens or other forms of urban agriculture might foster intersectional understandings of community in urban spaces (Di Chiro 2006). In this chapter, I draw on student gardening vignettes from a critical food studies course I teach to conceptualize community as inclusive of human inhabitants, other animals, plants, fungi, and microbes, and the nonhuman-built environment (Heynen, Kaika, and Swyngedouw, 2006).1 I frame this research project using feminist posthumanist interpretations of intersectionality and performativity (Deckha 2012, 2013; Hovorka 2015) and theories of socio-ecological learning (Fawcett 2005; Lloro-Bidart 2018c; Neves 2009; Nxumalo 2015). By using ethnographic data (interviews, participant observation), student service-learning autoethnographies, and other student coursework, I explicate how two of my students, as the title of this article v­ ividly illustrates with the description of bees “[wearing] fuzzy little yellow pants,” come to view invertebrate animals they encounter in the garden as active, communicative participants in urban food production (see Lloro-Bidart 2018c). This chapter thus specifically examines how human performances (care, empathy) and invertebrate performances (aerating soil, cycling nutrients, pollinating flowers) converge in an urban community garden to change “the very notion of what constitutes a [human] self … into a holistic concept of the self—that is in turn understood as always relationally and dynamically connected to the surroundings of which the person is a constitutive part” (Neves 2009, 147).2 Since most animals my students care for and empathize with are common, nonnative invertebrate animals and invisible participants in food production, these findings have important implications for feminist intersectional pedagogies. Eco-feminists, humane educators, and critical animal studies scholars have, for example, drawn analytic and pedagogical attention to the plight of factory-farmed animals, analyzing how the oppression of food animals is connected in complex ways to racism, sexism, and sizeism (Adams [1990] 2015, 2014; Harper 2013; Kahn 2008, 2011; Ko and Ko 2017; Russell and Semenko 2016; Twine 2014). Yet feminist intersectional scholarship has not examined

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how intersectional pedagogies can influence students to develop compassion and care for other animals often ignored in urban food production, especially invertebrates like bees, roly-polies, and even snails (Boileau and Russell 2018; Derby 2016). While a focus on invertebrates is seemingly insignificant given pressing social inequalities, Boileau and Russell emphasize that “Insects matter ­intrinsically … They are subjects of their own lives.… and their existence need not be justified on human terms” and also highlight how vital insects are to sustaining the balance of ecosystems (2018, 2–3). Given the worldwide decline of myriad invertebrate species, which is so significant that journalists, lay people, and scientists are now referring to their disappearance as the “insect apocalypse” or the “insect Armageddon,” a focus on invertebrates is critically significant (Jarvis 2018, para. 10).

RESEARCH SITE: CRITICAL FOOD STUDIES COURSE AND THE CENTER STREET COMMUNITY GARDEN I currently teach and spent two years conducting research on a critical food studies service-learning course in a Liberal Studies Department at a large public university in southern California, United States. In California, liberal studies is a degree that has historically served precredential elementary schoolteachers, yet only 60–70 percent of my students actually pursue postgraduate certification and degrees in teaching. Although my department does not collect statistically rigorous demographic data, most of my students are women of colour, with the majority being of Hispanic/Latinx descent. Besides meeting in the university classroom twice per week, my students have to complete eight service-learning hours at the Center Street Community Garden (CSCG), as well as visit a working polycultural farm or petting farm so they can interact with animals considered food in most Western cultures (cows, pigs, chickens, goats, ducks). In the course, I embrace an intersectional pedagogical approach that explicitly requires students to consider “how the combination or intersection of specific economic, social, and environmental conditions might enable or dis-able an individual’s or community’s ability to grow up in a clean and healthy environment, to earn a decent livelihood, or to develop the social capital (through a good education, for example) to actively participate in civic life” (Di Chiro 2006, 2). Further, drawing on feminist posthumanist intersectionality, my students must also critically question how cultural and social structures might simultaneously enable or disable nonhuman individuals and communities.

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The CSCG is located in an underserved suburban city on the eastern edge of Los Angeles County, California, where approximately 25 percent of residents live at or below the US federal poverty line, which equates to an annual income of $25,100 or less for a family of four in 2018. Thus, many people in the city also experience food insecurity. Urban blight and high crime rates, including sex trafficking, have impacted the city to a greater degree than surrounding municipalities, despite recent efforts to gentrify the downtown area with trendy bars, restaurants, and shops located beneath more costly than average apartment units. A small cadre of staff operate the garden through the nonprofit organization Pomona Hope, which also provides a free after-school program for children. The mission of the garden, which is located just a few blocks north of downtown, is “to grow food, people, and hope.” Like many community gardens, the CSCG is land insecure and will close or relocate this year due to a developer purchasing the land from the city to build housing units.

THEORIES OF INTERSECTIONALITY AND PERFORMATIVITY In her Jan Monk Distinguished Annual Lecture, “Feminism and Animals: Exploring Interspecies Relations through Intersectionality, Performativity, and Standpoint,” geographer Alice Hovorka (2015, 2) synthesizes theories of intersectionality, performativity, and standpoint with interdisciplinary scholarship on animals to explore and theorize why “animals need feminism” and “feminism needs to take animals seriously.” Here, I briefly discuss how Hovorka (2015) and other feminist posthumanist scholars (e.g., Deckha 2006, 2012, 2013; Harper 2013; Ko and Ko 2017) theorize intersectionality and performativity. I then synthesize these theoretical concepts with theories of socio-ecological learning to establish a theoretical framework to interpret my students’ intersectional and transformative learning experiences.

INTERSECTIONALITY Intersectionality is a theory, methodology, and pedagogical approach with roots dating back to the nineteenth century in Maria Miller Stewart’s (1830) Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality, Harriet Jacobs’s (1860) slave narratives, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Anna Julia Cooper’s (1892) A Voice from the South (Hancock 2016). These contributions—as well as the now classic writings of the Combahee River Collective ([1977] 1982), Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989, 1991),

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and Patricia Hill Collins (1990) over a century later—began to visibilize the unique positions of black women in American society. Crenshaw (1989, 1991) and ­Collins (1990) in particular showed how mainstream feminism and antiracism failed to adequately consider the experiences of black women, whereas the Combahee River Collective ([1977] 1982) also included class and sexuality as key axes of difference.3 In the 1970s, eco-feminists began to write about the co-occurring oppressions of women, animals, and the environment, though much of this early scholarship tended to view women as an essentialized category and failed to include class, race, and sexuality as part of the eco-feminist project (Deckha 2012).4 Contemporary theorists now consider a variety of intersecting social and environmental inequalities such as ability, age, class, gender, race, sexuality, size, and even species as crucial axes of difference (Deckha 2013; Ko and Ko 2017; Lloro-Bidart and Finewood 2018; Nightingale 2011; Russell and Semenko 2016). Hovorka (2015, 4) describes intersectionality as a “theory and approach of studying the relationships amongst numerous dimensions of social relationships, subject formations, and categories of power.” Of particular interest in this chapter, given the focus on human-animal relationships, is Hovorka’s (2015, 5) acknowledgement that “the ideology which authorizes oppressions based on gender (class, race, ethnicity, age, etc.) is the same ideology which sanctions the oppression of animals and nature” (see also Adams [1990] 2015; Harper 2013; Ko and Ko 2017; Rowe 2013, 2016). Feminists who interrogate the interconnectedness of social axes of difference with animality and species emphasize that this does not mean that animal (e.g., speciesism) and human oppressions (e.g., ­racism and sexism) are the same or that all humans equally oppress other animals. Instead, it points to the interconnectedness of the ideologies and structures that marginalize other animals and some groups of people (e.g., Deckha 2006, 2012; Harper 2013; Kim 2015; Ko and Ko 2017). It also illuminates how social constructions of animality and species are used to oppress some humans erroneously viewed as closer to animality or nature than others (Bailey 2007; Deckha 2012; Kim 2015; Ko and Ko 2017; Rowe 2013; Russell and Semenko 2016). Colonizing and civilizing projects all over the world, for example, have enacted violence “against colonized human beings through differentiating the logic of animalization, racialization, and dehumanization” (Deckha 2012, 539).

PERFORMATIVITY Hovorka (2015, 7) draws on Judith Butler (1990, 1993), Elizabeth Grosz (1995), and Robyn Longhurst (2005) to describe performativity broadly as “the process

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through which social subjectivities (lived experience of a body) and spatialities (bodies embedded in a particular place) are produced and reproduced.” More specifically, she identifies several salient aspects of animal performativity that challenge behaviourist views of animal action. First, Hovorka posits that animal “otherness” is not an innate quality or characteristic, but rather is socially, culturally, and discursively constructed through doings and becomings with humans. Second, like many other contemporary theorists (see also White 2013; Pedersen 2012), she emphasizes that human language is not the only means for understanding animal lives and our relationships with them, particularly because matter is generative and causal in the “formation of bodies and performance” (Hovorka 2015, 7). Researchers thus must engage with tools and methods that attempt to discern animal identity, as well as how animals experience the world in various contexts. Finally, Hovorka (2015) also theorizes agency, highlighting that agencies do not necessarily belong to individual entities. Instead, agencies are intertwined and can be leveraged to capture animal performativity, human performativity, and the performativity of human-animal relationships. It is important to emphasize here that such a focus highlights the subjecthood of animals rather than “denying them rationality, agency, and history (relative to men and humans) and enabling a moral detachment that creates and perpetuates oppressive practices and institutions” (Hovorka 2015, 5). However, recognizing that animal agency is highly constrained in certain contexts is also critical. This is especially true given that myriad socio-political contexts specifically aim to strip animals of agency and power in order to exploit them for the use of some humans (Pedersen and Stănescu 2012; Pedersen 2013) or banally inflict violence through everyday practice (Yusoff 2011).

SOCIO-ECOLOGICAL LEARNING Synthesizing intersectionality and performativity with writings on socio-­ ecological learning, I thus define socio-ecological learning in this chapter as an ongoing process of relational becoming whereby humans negotiate how to develop a more ethical sense of self through participation in mutable and scalar collectivities of living and nonliving entities, recognizing that power relationships and socio-political contexts shape subject positions within these collectivities (Lloro-Bidart 2018c). Rather than embracing postpositivist views of learning focused on endpoints and goals, or socio-cultural theories that account only for human action, this view of learning recognizes that human and nonhuman identities are relationally formed with other living entities and continually

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evolve throughout one’s lifetime (Milton 2002; Taylor and Pacini-Ketchabaw 2015). From an intersectionality perspective, socio-ecological learning also recognizes that ideologies create systems of oppression operating along various axes of social difference (for example, class, gender, race, and sexuality), as well as the axes of species and animality, recognizing that living entities do not experience these systems of oppression equally. Incorporating an animal performativity lens specifically sheds light on how socio-ecological learning involves social, cultural, and material constructions of animal and human action, as well as intertwined agencies.

METHODOLOGY: MULTISPECIES EDUCATIONAL ETHNOGRAPHY Briefly, multispecies ethnography grew out of the animal or more-than-human turn in the social sciences and humanities during the last two decades, especially in anthropology and geography. Although the theoretical frameworks employed in multispecies ethnographies tend to influence the research questions asked and the methods employed, multispecies ethnographies generally aim to decentre the (monolithic, Western) human; conceptualize living entities, the environment, and humans as bounded; and reconsider the role of other living entities in what social scientists have historically characterized as strictly “social life” (Kirksey and Helmreich 2010; Lorimer and Srinivasan 2013; Ogden, Hall, and Tanita 2013). In this project, I engage the methodology of multispecies educational ethnography informed by a feminist posthumanist theoretical framework as outlined earlier in this chapter. As such, I used the following methods: 1. Participant observation in the garden while my students complete their service-learning hours (I focus explicitly on human interactions with nonhuman animals, nonhuman animal action and lived experience, as well as how these relationships are shaped by wider socio-political contexts. I also engage with research in animal cognition, behaviour, and ethology when appropriate.) 2. Participant observation at garden events and meetings 3. Meetings with garden director and nonprofit staff 4. Postcourse interviews with students (19 total) 5. Collection of coursework (service-learning autoethnographies and student-composed field notes, in-class assignments, etc.) 6. Document collection (CSCG website; City of Pomona website)

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A RELATIONAL SELF In this section I feature the experiences of two young women who took my course during the 2015–16 academic year. Although many of my students discussed their relationships with animals in the garden in their course assignments and postcourse interviews, I highlight Maria and Katie below for several reasons. First, both young women of colour display intersectional thinking to the degree that they understand how the processes of growing food often rely on and yet can also be harmful to many living beings and nonliving entities through, for example, the use of synthetic pesticides.5 That is, they recognize that systemic oppressions intersect. Second, Maria and Katie, like many of their classmates, came to the realization that communities are comprised of human beings, as well as many nonhuman entities, including invertebrates and plants. And finally, both women also discussed concrete actions they had already taken to live in ways they consider more ethical in the world.

MARIA (WINTER COHORT) In the postcourse interview excerpt below I converse with Maria, a 26-year-old Mexican American undergraduate student planning to pursue a career in higher education. Throughout Maria’s interview, she reflected considerably on course content, discussing how the class called on her to pay attention to and engage “the workers” at local ethnic markets, whom she used to “ignore,” and also challenged her to reconsider various kinds of interspecies relationships. Interview: Maria Date: April 20, 2016 Teresa: Yeah. Based on what you have learned in this course, what is or could be the role of urban community gardens in addressing issues of food access, food injustice, and/or food sovereignty? Maria: I think … what I learned … can be a learning process where they can appreciate not just gardening and regrowing plants itself, but also what else is needed like water, animals, … bugs or even … the squirrels that are around, or cats or dogs, like everything takes impact on that. And then also … we can … learn about health reasons.…

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Teresa: Okay. Describe the contact that you had with plants and animals in the course—and again, you talked about this already. For example, insects.… Maria: But uh, down there on the other side of the Bookstore and BSC [the student centre], and there’s the old gym, and that’s where my dance class is. So I have to go down this like, long pathway and there’s tons and tons of those little roly-polies. There’s tons of them! So now, before I would just like, “Oh, roly-polies on the floor, whatever, I’ll just walk over them,” but now I feel like I’m standing on [inaudible] and I don’t wanna step on them. And they’re just, you know, walkin’ along and I’m like, “Oh, where’re they going? They’re going to their [friends].” It’s cool, so … yeah.

Maria includes a variety of other animals (bugs, squirrels, and even dogs and cats) as members of the garden community and also discusses how being affected by these animals has led her to enact some behavioural changes and consider others. That is, Maria’s own agency, or ability to act in particular ways, is indelibly intertwined with animals she met in the garden, including seemingly insignificant others like roly-polies (pill bugs). Her intentional avoidance of stepping on roly-polies, for example, can be interpreted through a socio-ecological learning lens as an overt rejection of “banal violence,” which often unintentionally leads to violent acts against nonhuman others (Yusoff 2011, 580). Maria emphasizes in her service-learning autoethnographic journal field notes that roly-polies coconstitute and affect our worlds in multiple ways, especially because of how “important they are to plants.” In her field notes (not depicted here), she draws on course readings (Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring) to go on to express what can be characterized as intersectional concerns for a multiplicity of living entities (Lloro-Bidart 2018c). Maria recognizes that pesticides not only kill bugs that she discursively and materially constructs as good because of their performative actions (being important to soil and plant health through nutrient cycling), but also harm human health and disrupt important processes in growing food. In this way, through mutual becomings with garden animals, as well as her understanding of greater socio-political contexts (e.g., industrialized agriculture’s use of synthetic pesticides), Maria engages in a kind of socio-ecological learning whereby she develops a more ethical human self who grasps how systems of oppression intersect in complex ways. (See Lloro-Bidart 2018c for a more extended analysis of Maria.)

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KATIE (SPRING COHORT) Katie, a 20-year-old Taiwanese American undergraduate who is considering a career in education but also pondering various graduate school options, reflects not only on her preconceived notions about what it means to be a garden worker (i.e., the expectation that this sort of person would not support a large corporation like Starbucks), but also makes intersectional connections between course readings and her service-learning experiences in an analytic memo. She notes, for example, that pesticides and synthetic fertilizers are harmful to people and animals. In the excerpt below, Katie is not necessarily fleshily affected by a particular animal in the garden or even a particular animal in course readings/class discussions. Instead, she synthesizes her in-class course experiences with her service learning to visibilize oppressive social and ecological locations inclusive of humans who produce food, animals, and the environment more generally.6 Analytic memo: Katie Date: April 16, 2016 Being surprised that Isabel [the garden director] had bought Starbucks before going just shows that I had a misconception as to who would be working at a garden. I expected anti-corporation hippies to be running a community garden apparently, when instead I was reminded that Isabel was just another person doing good for the community. The fact that the garden is a GMO, pesticide, synthetic fertilizer-free environment reminds me of the different readings that we had during week two of class. My group had synthetic fertilizers and I learned a lot about how that affects not only people through the food, but the environment as well because of how poisonous [they are] to animals on both land and sea.7

After her second service-learning experience, Katie writes more extensively in her field notes about the sunflowers and bees whom she actually fleshily interacts with in the garden space: Field notes: Katie Date: May 7, 2016 When we went back to the bed that Qui [her classmate and friend] was working on, there were sunflowers growing close by and they looked amazing. Jay’s [her

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girlfriend] favourite flower is a sunflower, but the ones bought in the store are nothing compared to seeing the tall stalks growing. Bees were all over it and I thought about how amazing bees are and how sad it is that they are in danger of dying out. There was one bee that had pollen all over its legs and it looked like it was wearing little fuzzy yellow pants.

She then follows up this field note with an analytic memo whereby she connects course content (knowledge about pollinators and their ­importance in ­agriculture, as well as an understanding that some bees are listed as ­endangered species) to her service-learning experiences. Here, she recognizes how ­human and bee agencies and performances are linked. Bees pollinate crops for humans and we sometimes kill them because they sting us. She also notes, intersectionally, how community gardens are not just communities of people, but also can include other animals and the environment. Analytic memo: Katie Date: May 7, 2016 It filled me with joy to see the bees and sadness when I thought about their endangered status because I know that people will kill bees just because they can sting them and this is causing a huge problem for the world. Bees are so important to the success of pollination and growing food for the planet that without them, humans would slowly die out too. I was happy to see that not only was CSCG [Center Street Community Garden] helping the community, but also it is helping the environment by planting plants that bees like, such as sunflowers.

In the following section, I draw out the implications of these data for the field of feminist food studies as I consider how feminist intersectional pedagogies both extend and limit care for other animals involved in food production.

IMPLICATIONS: VISIBILIZING INVISIBILIZED SUBJECTS IN FOOD PRODUCTION As the cases of both Maria and Katie highlight, intersectional pedagogies can offer students the tools to explore how food production is not just a tightly

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Figure 2.1: Photo of garden sunflowers included in Katie’s autoethnographic journal. (Source: Katie, student)

controlled and industrialized human endeavour, but one that also involves and relies on multiple living and nonliving entities in various places and spaces. Critical animal studies and eco-feminist scholars have drawn significant attention to the role of farm animals in food production. However, there is little published research examining how intersectional pedagogical approaches in critical food studies courses might uniquely illuminate student understandings of other invisibilized subject positions (e.g., that of insects, mollusks, and crustaceans, as well as marginalized human groups like farm workers and factory farm workers). ­Further, there is scant literature exploring the development of human relationships with animals in community gardens, despite the critical role many play in food production and notwithstanding the fact that many nonhumans, including dogs, cats, squirrels, rabbits, insects, and birds, simply share community garden

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spaces with humans without actually contributing to food production in any significant way.8 One of the principal aims of environmental and critical food systems education is to foster the development of a more critically informed citizenry that understands the interconnectedness of humans and the environment in food production, as well as the gendered, racialized, and classed ways in which food is consumed and produced. Further, many educators and theorists embrace critical pedagogies that “attempt to modify or transform how we act, feel, and think” for more just and transformative futures (Swan and Flowers 2015, 148; see also Meek and Tarlau 2015). By participating in this 10-week critical food studies course, both Maria and Katie transformed their thinking and action through ongoing processes of socio-ecological learning. As noted earlier, Maria is now more acutely aware of previously invisible subject positions—that of people who sell food in what she refers to as “ethnic markets” and that of the invertebrates who contribute to soil and plant health. She cites purposely avoiding stepping on roly-polies and greeting employees when she visits food markets. Further, in the summer of 2017 she shared via email that the course (along with a few others she took as an undergraduate) “opened up my eyes about the environment and about my health.” Since then she became vegan. As critical vegan scholars and activists have emphasized (Harper 2010, 2012), a vegan diet is not necessarily synonymous with an orientation toward social justice. However, Maria’s veganism, interpreted in conjunction with her greater compassion toward people who sell food, as well as other animals in the garden, suggests that Maria’s veganism is connected to her ability to intersectionally understand issues related to food production, as well as her compassion for a variety of living entities, including invertebrates. Besides recognizing that some invertebrates (bees) are critical members of food production, Katie discusses how actions that hurt animals and the ­environment (e.g., the application of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides) also harm ­human beings. Her descriptions of bees wearing “little fuzzy yellow pants” ­suggest that she connected to garden bees in a sensorial fashion, recognizing that their performative actions (pollinating crops) are integral to the survival of many species on the planet, including humans. Further, while not explicitly connecting her own behavioural changes to animals or people she encountered in the ­garden, Katie described transforming her own (and her family’s) decision m ­ aking as a r­esult of greater awareness of previously invisibilized subject positions—­ workers in the global South who produce food, as well as the “environment”

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more broadly. When I asked her what she learned about global food production in the class, she noted, for example, that:

Postcourse interview: Katie Date: November 2, 2016 It definitely opened my eyes to the fact that it’s a lot more about money now and a lot more about big corporations and the fact that corporations are so powerful they can have their hand in anything, even the production of food, especially the production of food. And … like anything else they take advantage of cheap resources.… they look at it in such a corrupted way that they don’t care about the producers and how, what harm it does to them and their environment and our environment. On top of that they don’t care about the harm it does to the actual consumers of the food.

Katie then goes on to explain how she views her own capacity to effectuate change through knowledge of fair trade products:

[Fair trade might be] some sort of trend but I think people will slowly do their research out of curiosity and understand.… My mom actually asked me what it was … we were online buying toilet paper and stuff, they had coffee and it was fair trade and it had a bunch of words and it was a lot of the terms that we learned in class. So she was wondering what it meant … so I was able to use that knowledge and actually bring it into my own life and she was really excited to see stuff like that actually being labelled. So she was a lot more for getting that kind of coffee and for helping them.9

Although changing consumption habits is only one means to effectuate positive environmental and social change, the passage above interpreted within the larger context of Katie’s experiences in the course suggests that she intersectionally recognizes that industrialized food systems disproportionately harm human producers of food, animals, and the environment. For her, knowledge of fair trade products has provided some tools to help her family be more ethical in relation to their food consumption practices.10

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IMPLICATIONS: ASYMMETRICAL INTERSECTIONAL PEDAGOGIES Despite the fact that Maria and Katie both demonstrated intersectional thinking, as well as the development of more ethical selves who act more compassionately toward other living beings, the data presented here reveal two clear limitations of the current pedagogical approach. First, posthuman attempts to “go beyond the human” are incredibly complex since anthropocentric thinking pervades Western cultures and indelibly influences which beings are included in spheres of compassion and care (Bell and Russell 2000). As I unpack further elsewhere (Lloro-Bidart 2017a, 2018a, 2018b, 2018c), a performativity lens sheds important light on the ways in which other animal (or other nonhuman) action

Figure 2.2: Photo of a garden bed from Katie’s autoethnographic journal. Her caption reads: “The bed we cleared of Bagrada bugs.” (Source: Katie, student)

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can be better understood as contextual and relational, rather than innate, as well as connected to greater socio-political contexts. Although Maria extended her sphere of compassion to roly-polies after learning they contribute to soil health and plant productivity, and Katie became sensorially affected by bees “wearing little fuzzy yellow pants” made of pollen, neither of them (or their classmates) discussed having empathy for the garden’s resident invasive species: the Bagrada bug and the Asian citrus psyllid.11 The only exception was Patricia, a 20-year-old Mexican American woman who notes that she “felt bad for wanting to kill the beetle [the Bagrada bug] because it was really pretty and it was crazy how this bug is creating a lot of problems” (Service-learning journal, February 20, 2016). The finding that most students extended their care and compassion to other entities who perform in desirable ways is perhaps unsurprising, yet also raises important pedagogical questions for feminist food studies scholars. When educators aim to teach their students to act more ethically in relation to other living entities, including diverse groups of human beings—who is included and excluded? As Pitt (2017, 12) notes, nonhuman others who do not “collaborate with gardeners’ goals” are typically excluded from community membership in gardens. In this particular case, my students certainly tended to plots in the garden, but their short time there (eight hours total) and the fact that none actually rented their own plot suggests that lack of collaboration is not the only reason for limited care. Rather, their limited care was also intimately connected to pedagogical practices influenced by wider political ecological and economic understandings of how nonhuman entities come to matter (or not matter). The garden director, Isabel, for example, often discusses how problematic the Asian citrus psyllid is not only for local citrus growers, backyard gardeners, and community gardeners, but also for the citrus industry more generally. So, while my students might never viscerally encounter an Asian citrus psyllid and experience its refusal to collaborate, they come to know that Asian citrus psyllids can have devastating economic consequences for citrus industries at multiple scales. This knowledge then tends to preclude that particular insect from being included in their sphere of concern or compassion. While I do not mean to suggest here that all human beings should care equally for all nonhuman others or that all human beings equally inflict violence on nonhuman others, it is also important to consider nonhuman lives intersectionally—that is, as occupying varied subject positions influenced by wider political ecological and economic contexts. As Franklin Ginn compellingly notes, focusing on relations with seemingly insignificant others (like invertebrates) might appear as an “indulgent distraction from more widespread and acute human and non-human suffering and

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inequalities” (Ginn 2014, 541), yet if human beings can learn to extend their care and compassion to previously invisibilized or unloved others, “might this not bode well for other creatures?” (Ginn 2014, 541). Finally, given that that there are multiple and varied human and nonhuman subject positions, it is difficult for any curriculum or pedagogy to adequately visibilize them all without flattening complex categories of difference. Although Maria and Katie both demonstrated intersectional thinking with respect to how industrialized food systems can simultaneously harm humans, other animals, and the environment, neither displayed sophisticated understandings of the gendered and racialized aspects of food production outside of understanding that many workers in the global South often produce food for the global North under oppressive conditions and without receiving a fair wage. Clearly there are pedagogical moves to address such gaps, such as incorporating curricula into critical food studies courses that require students to confront and learn about these issues. When I taught the course the following year (2016–17), for example, I included resources from the Food Empowerment Project in my curriculum.12 The “About” section of this US-based organization reveals, for example, that “Food Empowerment Project is a vegan organization founded by a woman of color [Lauren Ornelas]. Our values include a stance against racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, ageism, and body shaming.” The organization also works to “prevent injustices against animals, people, and the environment” (Food Empowerment Project 2018, para. 2 and 4). Far more students in that cohort discussed an awareness of the racialized dimensions of food production and were deeply concerned with workers’ rights. Some students even generated lists of resources to help others figure out how to take action. Nevertheless, as Collins and Bilge (2016) highlight, questions about who and what counts in the intersectional project loom large.

NOTES 1. From this point forward, I use the term animal to refer to all members of the animal kingdom besides humans, including mammals, birds, reptiles, and invertebrates like insects, crustaceans, and mollusks. The term nonhuman denotes all living entities besides human beings. In so doing, I recognize that the term nonhuman has been rightfully contested, but I find other terms also open to contestation. 2. The foundations of intersectionality in black feminist and multicultural feminist thought will also be discussed (e.g., Collins 1990; Combahee River Collective [1977] 1982; ­Crenshaw 1989, 1991).

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3. Ange Marie Hancock (2016) also writes of the contributions of multiracial feminists, including Bonnie Thornton Dill, Ruth Enid Zambrana, Maxine Baca Zinn, and Lynn ­Weber (in sociology) and Mari Masuda, Adrien Katherine Wing, Margaret Montoya, and Trina Grillo (in legal studies), as well as Cherríe Morraga and Gloria Anzaldúa. 4. As Susan Mann (2011) notes, women of various classes and races did embrace ecofeminist thought. Their contributions, however, initially went unnoticed in mainstream academic writing. 5. In this chapter I include both women’s ethnic identities because they emerged as salient in their autoethnographic write-ups and postcourse interviews. Also, in my research I hope to include the voices of those traditionally marginalized in academic work, including women of colour and members of the LGBTQ+ community. Maria, for example, discussed the challenges of trying to be vegetarian as a Mexican A ­ merican woman because she indicated her family places high value on meat eating. Katie highlighted how her Taiwanese cultural background allowed her to bond with other Mandarin-speaking volunteers in the garden in a way that she could not bond with people unfamiliar with her language and culture. Katie also self-identified as queer and brought her girlfriend, Jay, to the garden to share the gardening experience with her. 6. See Carastathis (2014) for a discussion of inclusivity in intersectional theory. 7. Interestingly, many of my students come to believe that the garden is “organic,” as well as free of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Although the garden director, ­Isabel, encourages gardeners not to use synthetic fertilizers or pesticides, the garden is not officially labelled an organic urban agricultural space, nor are synthetic chemicals or GMO seeds officially banned. 8. For exceptions, see Nxumalo (2015) and Pitt (2017). 9. In the course we also discussed some of the limitations of eco-labelling programs like fair trade, so Katie was critical of them as well. When she references fair trade being “trendy,” she is referring to how the alternative food movement often advocates the purchasing of eco-labelled and other high-cost food products without consideration of the cultural and economic barriers that low-income communities face when purchasing food (Guthman 2003). 10. As I have discussed elsewhere (Lloro-Bidart 2017a), a strict focus on individual behavioural changes, especially those that are expected to leverage change almost entirely through the market, problematically resonates with neoliberalism. Katie’s discussion of changing her family’s consumption habits, however, must be interpreted within the greater context of the work she completed in the course, which also entailed volunteering her time in a community garden where she had the opportunity to forge social

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and ecological connections with other gardeners and nonhuman garden inhabitants, as well as increase her own awareness of food insecurity issues in the local community. 11. The University of California Integrated Pest Management Program (UCIPM) characterizes the Bagrada bug as an invasive pest species native to the continent of Africa that infests gardens or fields quickly, inflicting damage especially on cruciferous crops like cauliflower, broccoli, and cabbage. The UCIPM describes the Asian citrus psyllid as a tiny insect that poses a serious threat to California’s citrus trees, a $2-billion industry. The insect directly feeds on new leaves and is a vector of the bacterium Candidatus Liberibacter asiaticus, which causes the fatal disease huanglongbing. 12. See, for example, Food Empowerment Project (www.foodispower.org/factory-farmworkers/); Lauren Ornelas, founder of the Food Empowerment Project (www.youtube .com/watch?v=mgxpNWVKqG0); and Grace Communications Foundations (www­ .sustainabletable.org/273/workers).

READING QUESTIONS 1. How do theories of intersectionality and performativity applied to nonhuman living entities (like insects) challenge anthropocentrism?

2. How do socio-ecological theories of learning differ from postpositivist and socio-­ cultural theories of learning?

3. What kinds of people and nonhumans occupy invisible subject positions in food systems? Why is it important to visibilize these subject positions?

REFERENCES Adams, C. [1990] 2015. Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. 1st and 25th eds. New York: Continuum Press.

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Alkon, A. H., and J. Agyeman. 2011. Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class, and Sustainability. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Bailey, C. 2007. “We Are What We Eat: Feminist Vegetarianism and the Reproduction of Racial Identity.” Hypatia 22 (2): 39–59.

Bell, A., and C. Russell. 2000. “Beyond Human, Beyond Words: Anthropocentrism, Critical Pedagogy, and the Poststructuralist Turn.” Canadian Journal of Education ­

25 (3): 188–203.

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Boileau, E., and C. Russell. 2018. “Insect and Human Flourishing in Early Childhood Education: Learning and Crawling Together.” In International Handbook on Childhood Na-

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Buckingham, S. 2005. “Women (Re)construct the Plot: The Regen(d)eration of Urban Food Growing.” Area 37 (2): 171–79.

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———. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” London: Routledge.

Carastathis, A. 2014. “The Concept of Intersectionality in Feminist Theory.” Philosophy Compass 9 (5): 303–14.

Collins, P. H. 1990. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge.

Collins, P. H., and S. Bilge. 2016. Intersectionality. Malden, MA: Polity.

Combahee River Collective. [1977] 1982. “A Black Feminist Statement.” In All the Women

Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies, edited by G. Hill, P. B. Scott, and B. Smith, 13­–22. New York: Feminist Press at CUNY.

Crenshaw, K. W. 1989. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum 140: 139–67.

———. 1991. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43 (6): 124–99.

Crosley, K. 2013. “Advancing the Boundaries of Urban Environmental Education through the Food Justice Movement.” Canadian Journal of Environmental Education 18: 46–58.

Deckha, M. 2006. “The Salience of Species Difference for Feminist Theory.” Hastings ­Women’s Law Journal 17 (1): 1–32.

———. 2012. “Toward a Postcolonial, Posthumanist Feminist Theory: Centralizing Race and Culture in Feminist Work on Nonhuman Animals.” Hypatia 27 (3): 527–45.

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Fawcett, L. 2005. “Bioregional Teaching: How to Climb, Eat, Fall, and Learn from Porcu-

pines.” In Teaching as Activism: Equity Meets Environmentalism, edited by L. J. Muzzin and P. Tripp, 269–80. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Firth, C., D. Maye, and D. Pearson. 2011. “Developing ‘Community’ in Community Gardens.” Local Environment 16 (6): 555–68.

Food Empowerment Project. 2018. “About F. E. P.” www.foodispower.org/about-f-e-p/.

Ginn, F. 2014. “Sticky Lives: Slugs, Detachment, and More-Than-Human Ethics in the Garden.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 39 (4): 532–44.

Gottleib, R., and A. Joshi. 2010. Food Justice. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Grosz, E. 1995. Space, Time, and Perversion. London: Routledge.

Guthman, J. 2003. “Fast Food/Organic Food: Reflexive Tastes and the Making of ‘Yuppie Chow.’” Social & Cultural Geography 4 (1): 45–58.

Hancock, A. 2016. Intersectionality: An Intellectual History. New York: Oxford University Press. Harper, A. B. 2010. “Race as a ‘Feeble Matter’ in Veganism: Interrogating Whiteness, Geopolitical Privilege, and Consumption Philosophy of Cruelty-Free Products.” Journal of Critical Animal Studies 8 (3): 5–27.

———. 2012. “Going Beyond the Normative White ‘Post-racial’ Vegan Epistemology.” In Taking Food Public: Redefining Foodways in a Changing World, edited by P. WilliamsForson and C. Counihan, 155–74. New York: Routledge.

———. 2013. “Vegan Consciousness and the Commodity Chain: On the Neoliberal,

Afrocentric, and Decolonial Politics of ‘Cruelty Free.’” PhD diss., University of California–Davis.

Heynen, N., M. Kaika, and E. Swyngedouw. 2006. “Urban Political Ecology: Politicizing the Production of Urban Natures.” In The Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and

the Politics of Urban Metabolism, edited by N. Heynen, M. Kaika, and E. Swyngedouw, 1–20. New York: Routledge.

Hovorka, A. 2015. “Feminism and Animals: Exploring Interspecies Relations through In-

tersectionality, Performativity, and Standpoint.” The Gender, Place, and Culture Jan Monk Distinguished Annual Lecture. Gender, Place, & Culture 22 (1): 1–19.

Jarvis, B. 2018. “The Insect Apocalypse Is Here: What Does It Mean for the Rest of Life

on Earth.” New York Times Magazine, November 27, para 10. Digital ed. www.nytimes

.com/2018/11/27/magazine/insect-apocalypse.html.

Kahn, R. 2008. “Towards Ecopedagogy: Weaving a Broad-Based Pedagogy of Liberation for Animals, Nature, and the Oppressed People of the Earth.” In The Critical Pedagogy

Reader, edited by A. Darder, R. Torres, and M. Baltodano, 552–40. New York: Routledge.

———. 2011. “Towards an Animal Standpoint: Vegan Education and the Epistemology of Ignorance.” In Epistemologies of Ignorance in Education, edited by E. Malewksi and

N. Jaramillo, 53–70. Charlotte, NC: Information Age.

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Kim, C. J. 2015. Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age. ­Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

Kirksey, S. E., and S. Helmreich. 2010. “The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography.” Cultural Anthropology 25 (4): 545–76.

Ko, A., and S. Ko. 2017. Aphro-ism: Essays on Pop Culture, Feminism, and Black Veganism from Two Sisters. New York: Lantern Books.

Levkoe, C. Z. 2013. “Learning Democracy through Food Justice Movements.” In Food and

Culture: A Reader, 3rd ed., edited by C. Counihan and P. Van Esterik, 587–601. New York: Routledge.

Lloro-Bidart, T. 2017a. “Neoliberal and Disciplinary Environmentality and ‘Sustainable

Seafood’ Consumption: Storying Environmentally Responsible Action.” Environ-

mental Education Research 23 (8): 1182–99.

———. 2017b. “When ‘Angelino’ Squirrels Don’t Eat Nuts: A Feminist Posthumanist Pol-

itics of Consumption across Southern California.” Gender, Place, & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 24 (6): 774–93.

———. 2018a. “A Feminist Posthumanist Ecopedagogy in/for/with Animalscapes.” Journal of Environmental Education 49 (2): 152–63.

———. 2018b. “A Feminist Posthumanist Multispecies Ethnography for Educational Studies.” Educational Studies 54 (3): 253–70. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131946.2017.1413370.

———. 2018c. “Cultivating Affects: A Feminist Posthumanist Analysis of Invertebrate and Human Performativity in an Urban Community Garden.” Emotion, Space, and Society

27: 23–30.

Lloro-Bidart, T., and M. Finewood. 2018. “Looking Outward and Inward: What Feminist

Theory Offers the Environmental Studies and Sciences.” Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences (2): 12–51. DOI: 10.1007/s13412-018-0468-7.

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Lorimer, J., and K. Srinivasan. 2013. “Animal Geographies.” In The Wiley-Blackwell Com-

panion to Cultural Geography, edited by N. C. Johnson, R. H. Schein, and J. Winders, 332–42. West Sussex, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Mann, S. A. 2011. “Pioneers of U.S. Ecofeminism and Environmental Justice.” Feminist Formations 23 (2): 1–25.

Meek, D., and R. Tarlau. 2015. “Critical Food Systems Education and the Question of Race.” Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development 5 (4): 131–35.

Milton, K. 2002. Loving Nature: Towards an Ecology of Emotion. New York: Routledge.

Neves, K. 2009. “Urban Botanical Gardens and the Aesthetics of Ecological Learning: A

Theoretical Discussion and Preliminary Insights from Montreal’s Botanical Garden.” Anthropologica 51 (1): 145–57.

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of Multispecies Ethnography.” Environment and Society: Advances in Research 4 (1): 5–24.

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ence, Contagion, Critique, and Potential.” Other Education: The Journal of Educational Alternatives 1 (1): 152–65.

———. 2013. “Follow the Judas Sheep. Materializing Post-qualitative Methodology in the

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ity and Eating Animals as Gastro-aesthetic Pedagogy.” In The Educational Significance of Human and Non-human Animal Interactions, edited by S. Rice and A. Rud, 31–49. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Twine, R. 2014. “Ecofeminism and Veganism: Revisiting the Question of Universalism.”

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White, K. 2013. “And Say the Cat Responded? Getting Closer to the Feline Gaze.” Society and Animals 21 (1): 93–104.

Wight, A. 2013. “The AgroEcological-Educator: Food-Based Community Development.” Community Development Journal 49 (2): 198–213.

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CHAPTER 3

How Veggie Vlogging Looks Like: Intersections of Gender, Race, and Class in Western Mainstream Veganism Daniela Pirani and Ella Fegitz

LEARNING OBJECTIVES 1. To understand the role that race and gender have in defining eating practices 2. To problematize how gender enters the interplay between ethical diets and the will to health 3. To establish a continuity between the femininity of vegan vloggers and of Victorian fasting women on the basis of gender performances

KEY TERMS discourse, femininity, governmentality, heteronormativity, masculinity, ­neoliberalism, race-conscious approach, subjectivity, Victorian, will to health

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INTRODUCTION In one of her vlogs,1 Unapologetically Bria Bea complains about the comments and questions that black vegans are subjected to. Among these are: “How does your mum feel about you and this whole vegan thing?” “Your family is in Louisiana, what are you going to eat when you go there?” “Wait a second, so you’re black and vegan? How can you possibly be black and vegan? How can you be vegan and care about the animals when black people are going through so much?” and “You black vegans are weird” (Unapologetically Bria Bea 2016). These comments and questions clearly indicate how blackness and veganism are perceived as almost mutually exclusive in popular imagination. Indeed, as we aim to expose, the dominant discourse of veganism is implicitly and explicitly white and middle class. Black bodies are represented rather differently in the media, where blackness, and especially black femininity, has been constructed as closely connected with rich and fatty foods with plenty of animal protein, especially chicken (­Williams-Forson 2006; Opie 2008; Lawrence 2008). This chapter contextualizes the analysis of veganism within feminist literature concerned with representations of class, gender, and race. We employ scholarship produced by black feminist activists to investigate mainstream veganism and vegan vloggers. We discuss how feminist scholars have talked about veganism, but also how they have problematized food practices based on voluntary food restraint, and reproduce social exclusion and controversial body standards. We focus on vlogs as a form of cultural production that enables otherwise marginalized practices and identities to gain mainstream visibility. Vlogs are relevant for two different and yet interrelated reasons: they enhance inclusivity in the public discourse while providing visibility to a variety of identities (Burgess and Green 2018; Morris and Anderson 2015). Vlogs allow marginalized practices and identities to participate in the public discourse, contributing to making vegan practices more popular. Vlogs sit within the tradition of cookbooks and diaries, where nonprofessional and mundane self-narratives are collected and shared along with more mainstream food content. Vlogs not only contribute to public discourse about veganism but they give visibility to the identities and practices of this diet. Unlike cookbooks and diaries, vlogs enable sustained digital and real-life identities that develop through the immediate interaction with the audience while competing for visibility. Vlogs, along with blogs, video streaming, and social media, facilitate visual consumption (Schroeder 2002), which blurs the lines between private content, entrepreneurship, marketing, and public content.

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The following analysis is based on 31 vegan vloggers who have been selected on the grounds of their popularity, through a snowballing effect from one channel to the other, cross-checking views and their subscribers. We focused mainly on anglophone channels due to linguistic limitations. Thus, the majority of vloggers analyzed here are from Australia, the United States, and England. The work by Harper (2010, 2012) and Ko and Ko (2017), as well as that of other black feminist scholars, help us analyze mainstream veganism’s effacement of class and race in a way that implicitly re-establishes whiteness and middle-classness as the norm. Our analysis employs an intersectional framework inspired by the work of black vegans to decentralize the dominant discourses about veganism, and therefore shows that veganism is not neutral but instead raced, classed, and gendered. While neither Harper (2010, 2012) nor Ko and Ko (2017) ignore the gendered dimension of veganism, we argue that this aspect needs to be further unpacked. The analysis of vegan, vegetarian, and plant-based vloggers’ texts and posts show that the vegan subject is explicitly and implicitly gendered. It is explicit because the vast majority of these vloggers embody normative femininity and it is implicit because of a long-standing association between femininity and vegetables, and because of a traditional discourse of feminine propriety via self-management, restriction, and limitation. It is important to stress how both discourses speak to white middle-class femininity, constructed in relation and opposition to black and working-class femininities. As will be unpacked further below, this chapter draws a connection between the contemporary construction of femininity in vegan diets and the Victorian concern with women’s bodies and diets. This connection between two different eras is based on existing feminist and nonfeminist literature that looks at Victorian practices of taming the body and the appetite, and how they resonate with contemporary ideals of self-scrutiny and restraint. For example, we look at the work of Krugovoy Silver (2002), who documents how writers contributed to making anorexia nervosa paradigmatic for young middle-class women in ­Victorian Britain. Similarly, Bordo (1993) investigates eating disorders in Western culture, mentioning Victorian practices of fasting and hunger taming as an ideological restriction of appetite. Brumberg (1997) explicitly connects contemporary messages on body image and diets with the cultural environment of the nineteenth century. However, our focus is not on eating disorders but on performances of gender and class through food. Specifically, we look at how diets of avoidance and the research on purity at the table become the expression of middle-class white womanhood. We aim to show how a very specific model of femininity, which

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now we witness in contemporary vlogs, picks up the heritage of Victorian ideals. In this chapter, the concept of diets of avoidance refers to voluntary restraint from certain foods that are considered unhealthy or polluting. Rather than prescribing which diets can be included in this category, this concept highlights the role that abstinence, discipline, and avoidance have in defining what can be eaten. Both veganism and Victorian diets are considered diets of avoidance, not only for their shared refusal of meat, but also for an implicit training of appetite and hunger toward what should not be ingested. Furthermore, while Harper (2010, 2012) and Ko and Ko (2017) claim mainstream veganism is characterized by a concern for animal welfare and environmental issues, we argue that the recent trend in vegan and vegetarian diets is little characterized by ethical and political concerns but is strongly related to a neoliberal focus on the self as an autonomous and self-regulating subject. Harvey (2005, 2) argues that “neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterised by strong private property rights, free markets and free trade.” Harvey (2005) continues by stating that neoliberalism has become so pervasive as to affect all fabrics of modern living, from economics to politics and institutions, and eventually the way individuals make sense of the world and act accordingly. From a different perspective, Foucault (2010) and Brown (2005) have argued that the rational, autonomous, and self-regulating individual is intrinsic to neoliberalism. Higgs et al. (2009) have applied this framework to the area of public health, arguing that public policy under neoliberalism—in the United States and elsewhere—has moved the responsibility of people’s health away from the state and onto the individual in a way that privatizes health, which individuals take up as the “will to health.” In this chapter, we argue that the vegan diet becomes part of the “will to health.” In other words, veganism is incorporated in neoliberalism by reproducing cultural discourses that understand the subject as autonomous, self-reliant, and self-governing, making individuals solely responsible for their own health and well-being.2 First, our chapter will outline our approach to intersectionality, grounded in black feminist critiques of white feminism. Then we analyze vegan vloggers’ YouTube videos, as well as other social media, through which we explore the intersection of gender, race, and class. As part of this analysis, we develop our argument by contextualizing the vegan vlogging trend as a matter of neoliberal governmentality.

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EMPLOYING INTERSECTIONALITY TO DECENTRE WHITENESS The origin of the concept of intersectionality is generally attributed to the work of the American lawyer Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991). The term was also then used by feminist theorist Patricia Hill Collins (1998), both of whom were influenced by earlier American black feminist critiques of second wave feminism, such as the work of bell hooks, Angela Davies, and the Combahee River Collective. They argued that the feminist movement, in its attempt to show a homogeneous movement, had neglected and excluded other experiences and subjectivities and had marked white middle-class femininity as the norm. Women of colour were unrepresented within the feminist movement, as well as in the antiracist movement, where advocating for women’s rights took a back seat. Given the fundamental role of black feminists in the development of intersectionality, we endeavour to explore the work of some of these critics to show how challenges to Western white feminism can be similarly employed to uncover the white and middle-class bias of representations of vegetarianism and veganism. In fact, the challenges to Western feminism are not new. This is evident in Sojourner Truth’s critiques, which go back to 1851, when she pointed out the exclusions of the feminist movement in her speech, “Ain’t I a Woman.” In an address given at the Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio, in 1851, she ­exposed the fundamental difference between the experiences of white suffragettes to that of black female slaves, and that the demands of first wave feminism did not align with the needs of black women (hooks 1981). Similar critiques were then advanced to Friedan’s (1963) Feminine Mystique, which was one of the fundamental texts that enlivened the feminist movement in the 1960s. Indeed, the affirmation that women’s domestic role and their exclusion from employment was the basis of their oppression ignored the way black women had little choice regarding employment and domesticity, almost always having to carry both (Williams-Forson 2006). Similarly, black feminist writers such as bell hooks (1981) and Hazel Carby (1982) have critiqued the second wave for ignoring and perpetuating racist ideology by neglecting and denying that racism affected their feminist practices. This body of work allows us to interrogate the absences and silences in dominant discourses, and the way these work to reproduce the status quo. In line with the early work of black feminists, we also focus on issues of class and race to “displace the colonial construction of Whiteness as an ‘empty’ cultural space, in part by refiguring it as constructed and dominant rather than as norm”

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(Frankenberg 1993, 457). Thus, to us, the term intersectionality describes “the complex, irreducible, varied, and variable effects which ensue when multiple axis of differentiation—economic, political, cultural, psychic, subjective and ­experiential—intersect in historically specific contexts” (Brah and Phoenix 2004, 76). The work of black vegans and black vegan feminists grounds our analysis of vegan and vegetarian blogging and vlogging below as it allows us to deconstruct dominant discourses about veganism with respect to its ability to reproduce/ perpetuate dominant perspectives.

ENRICHING RACE-CONSCIOUS APPROACHES TO VEGANISM Among the number of vegan vloggers that circulate online, whiteness is overwhelmingly represented (26 out of 31 vlogs we analyzed are by white people, and only one is by an African American woman). But whiteness is not only expressed visually. Harper’s (2012, 159) race-conscious approach uncovers how class, race, and privilege intersect in access to veganism, claiming that veganism “has the connotation of being a lifestyle of White socio-economic class privileged people.” In her analysis of vegan-themed books, Harper points out how all these publications bear a colour-blind racism that fails to address the way race impacts the experience of veganism, generalizing what is indeed a white and middle-class experience. On the other hand, black vegan writings—such as those collected by Harper (2010) in The Sistah Vegan Project—document how race, class, and geographical location affect access to transportation, shops, and restaurants, leading to different embodied experiences of veganism. Indeed, many working-class and black communities are often located in areas in which access to healthy foods is limited and expensive, such that a holistic plant-based diet is virtually impossible to sustain (Harper 2012). The acknowledgement of social and economic privilege is entirely absent from race-neutral writing, which assumes that going vegan is an easy choice, accessible to all. We find this in our analysis of female vegan vloggers as well, who are not only mostly white but also assume access and affordability to vegan foods to be commonplace. The emphasis on food that detoxes instead of being characteristically filling reproduces the social privilege of the middle class who can preach limitation and a diet of avoidance. Furthermore, veganism is only a part of the lifestyle that these women portray on their social media; videos about “night routine” and “morning routine,” makeup, fitness tips, and regimes are all part of

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the package.3 These women do not appear to work, but are able to travel to exotic locations, where they take stunning pictures and videos in beautiful places. One is shown doing yoga, alone, in front of a waterfall; another is sipping a freshly made smoothie at sunset on an empty beach; the third is seen on top of a mountain, overlooking a beautiful panorama. Glamour, beauty, spare time, and leisure strongly characterize the stylistic choices and content of these vloggers’ social media output.4 While it is important to stress race and class, and social and economic privilege, in the analysis of popular vegan vloggers, these cannot be detached from a discussion of gender. The work of black feminists such as bell hooks (1981) and Hazel Carby (1982) remind us that not only do differences intersect, but they are mutually constitutive. While race-conscious approaches to veganism do not ignore gender, the correlation between gender, class, and race needs to be further developed. We unpack this correlation below.

VICTORIAN LEGACY IN VEGAN VLOGGING Most of the vloggers we analyzed are white and also mostly female. A survey of the 31 most popular vegan channels on YouTube indicates that roughly 61 percent of bloggers are female, only 16 percent are male, while the remaining 23 percent are couples or family focused. Another illustration of this lies in the number of subscribers: the most popular male vegan vlogger (Jon Venus) has only 262,000 compared to the most popular woman (FullyRawKristina), who has 916,000 subscribers ­(October 15, 2017). However, femininity is not only reproduced visually but also at a symbolic level. This is manifested in two distinct ways: first, vloggers’ femininity reproduces a long-standing cultural association between women and vegetables; and second, vegan vloggers embody a feminine ideal based on restraint, deprivation, and self-management. The gendered division of food has been widely documented in Western ­culture (Lupton 1996; Counihan 1998; Inness 2006; Counihan and Van ­Esterik 2008). The focus has been mostly on masculine food and manly eating, with a ubiquitous agreement that meat is the signifier of masculinity at the table (­Lupton 1996; Parasecoli 2005; Brownlie and Hewer 2007; Rozin et al. 2012). In the symbolic spectrum of gendered food, vegetables sit on the opposite end of red meat: “there is a symbiotic metaphorical relationship between femininity and vegetables: the eating of vegetables denotes femininity while femininity denotes a preference for vegetables” (Lupton 1996, 107). Eating vegetables, then, is the negation of virility in the heteronormative discourse as confirmed by studies that

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look at how vegan men are mocked for their lack of sex drive in popular culture (Potts and Parry 2010). Incidentally, the food and drink that are often erased from the vegan vloggers’ diet are those associated with masculinity: not only meat but alcohol (Peralta 2007), coffee (Reitz 2007), and dairy (Bourdieu 2001). It is not accidental, then, that male vegan vloggers have a different attitude toward veganism than women vloggers. While issues of weight loss and fitness characterize both genders, male vegan vloggers are generally more concerned with muscle building, fitness, and intensive exercise in line with recent pressures on building a lean and muscular body for men (Wykes and Gunter 2005; Gill 2008). Indeed, in comparison to the past, where only women’s bodies were exposed, scrutinized, and policed, men are now increasingly being required to have a muscular, lean, and sculptured figure, while also experiencing insecurities and a lack of self-confidence (Wykes and Gunter 2005). However, even though both men and women are subjected to increasingly narrowing canons of beauty, it is women’s bodies that are seen to be the most problematic and always on the verge of getting out of control, thus in constant need of attention and restraint (Bordo 1993; Wolf 1991; Wykes and Gunter 2005). The unruliness of the female body and the need to control it have a longstanding history. This is grounded in Western culture’s association between the feminine and everything that pertains to flesh, body, and desire (Stevens and Maclaran 2008). While masculinity is bound to traits such as control and rationality, the feminine body goes against it, acting “as animal, as appetite, as deceiver, as prison of the soul and confounder of its projects” (Bordo 1993, 3). Captivated by this uterine dimension, the female subject can express her potentially dangerous appetite only if she sublimates it. While men’s appetites are voracious and legitimate (Bordo 1993; Hollows 2002), feminine cravings are socially dangerous and have to be tamed. The unruliness of the female body also characterized Victorian gender norms, where women had to learn to eat with contempt, in opposition to constructions of working-class and black femininities (DeVere Brody 1998; Krugovoy Silver 2002; Cinotto 2006). The women who populate vegan vlogging reflect the legacy of bourgeois Victorian women; like bourgeois Victorian women, their subjectivity emerges from the intersection and interplay of gender, class, and race. In Victorian times, food became key in constructing an ideal femininity; women’s role in society started to overlap with their role in the house, and the management of domesticity developed as a class marker (De Grazia and ­Furlough 1996). As family meals became class rituals, they also became a source of potential embarrassment and loss of control: “bourgeois society generated anxiety

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about food and eating—especially among women. Where food was plentiful and domesticity venerated, eating became a highly charged emotional and social undertaking” (Brumberg 1997, 168). A rich number of prescriptive manuals, publications, and handbooks produced offered instructions to women on how to perform their middle-class femininity within the house (Cinotto 2006). Domesticity built a protective environment where women could be safeguarded from any form of pollution, from social corruption to hygienic contamination. Victorian women had to learn to eat in a way that was suitable to their status, showing modesty, lack of morbid cravings, and appropriate manners at the table (Brumberg 1997). Women were trained to eat little and with little desire, making their food choices frugal and plain (Bordo 1993). This was not a personal preference but rather the adoption of a moral standard, as “[o]ne of the most convincing demonstrations of a spiritual orientation was a thin body—that is a physique that symbolised rejection of all carnal appetites. To be hungry, in any sense, was a social faux pas.… appetite was the barometer of a woman’s moral state” (Brumberg 1997, 170). Feminine cravings were socially dangerous and had to be tamed to preserve decency and modesty. Purity at the table is not a prerogative of Victorian gender ideology but was rooted in class as well. A moderate appetite and good table manners were indeed one of the strategies adopted by the bourgeoisie to mark its status. In the ­Victorian culture of anorexia and abstinence, class played an important role, dividing those women who chose not to eat from those who could not afford to, so that slenderness was read as a sign of affluence (Krugovoy Silver 2002). The dining table was a notorious setting to display one’s gentility, and table manners became important for everyone, not just for women. A general restraint about food was a common practice to sustain that gentility, so everyone knew that “food was not to be spoken of at the table, not even in praise; and indeed all references to the act of eating itself were tabooed” (Murtha 2008, 16). Furthermore, fasting rituals and symbolic pollution through food have been documented beyond the scope of this chapter (Douglas 1984; Montanari 1994). However, among these women, scanty eating and the refusal of meat was a very common practice, while they tolerated only a limited set of visually pleasant food. According to Brumberg (1997, 167), who focuses on young Victorian women, “the repugnance for fatty animal flesh among Victorian adolescents ultimately had a larger cultural significance. Meat avoidance was tied to cultural notions of sexuality and decorum.” The disgust for animal flesh was the epitome of a social wariness toward food: the only praise a woman could reserve for food had to be of an aesthetic nature.

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Vegan vloggers reproduce the same principles: that a woman should train her appetite, knowing what to choose and especially what should be avoided.5 The menace of unruly cravings survives in the narrative of these vloggers, who carefully build distinctions between what can and cannot be eaten, sanctioning foods ­ ebecca and practices that are unhealthy. Declaring her love for pizza, Bonny R (2017a) makes a clear distinction between regular and vegan ones: “Pizza was always a favourite but before I went vegan it used to make me feel so SHIT afterwards! Nowwwww days I eat these on the regular and feel amazing after everytime! I used to blame it on the ‘gluten’ but the real culprit was the cheese and the dead animal flesh. No meat, no cheese, NO worries.”6 The appetite needs to be trained to select “the right” kind of food in order to avoid consequences. At the same time, the visual appraisal of food becomes extremely important, so that the carefully curated Instagram pages are not as different from the aesthetic sensibility of Victorian girls, who displayed “extraordinary interest in the appearance and colour of their food, in effect of fine china and linen and in agreeable surroundings” (Brumberg 1997, 170). Like the Victorian girls, contemporary vegan vloggers value the aesthetic aspects of food. The food presented is not only good and nutritious but also pretty, made appealing through styling of the image, from the props used and the way food is arranged, to the postproduction of the final picture. Instagram images, YouTube thumbnails, homepage banners, and blog pictures show a range of pretty things: a jug embellished by a bracelet; a plate of fruit beautifully arranged; a jar brimming with technicolour “Nice-Cream,” 7 and so on. Prettiness requires staging, meant as a constant management of the “way it looks” and a focus on the aesthetic qualities of the food presented. Titles such as “When Your Food Looks Like Art” (Bonny Rebecca 2017b) are quite revealing of this attitude. Furthermore, the importance of appearance permeates every aspect of the lifestyle these bloggers broadcast: from the food to the kitchen, the house, the outdoors, and back to their own bodies. As the preferred location for indoor shooting, kitchens are always tidy and clean. These settings owe a lot to the existing tradition of immaculate kitchens of food celebrities such as Martha Stewart, whose light and bright kitchen felt as if “there was place for everything and everything was in place” (Brundson 2005, 110). Not as ambitious as Martha Stewart, High Carb Hanna (2018) is a vlogger who focuses on vegan recipes presented as a good way to save money, time, and calories. Despite not influencing weight loss, presentation is equally important. Hanna moves in a clean space set for purpose, with neat surfaces and already portioned ingredients that give the impression that everything is under control

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and easy to execute. Tidiness, along with prettiness, is a permanent marker of vegan vloggers’ aesthetic, to the point that followers pick them out whenever vloggers do not tidy up. This is what happened to Freelee, who took a picture of her new outfit and received harsh comments on the untidy bedroom behind her.8 A frequent topos in vloggers’ narrative is a tour of their vegan pantries, where nicely stored essentials for a healthy diet reproduce the feeling of accessibility, ­tidiness, and visual reward. Instagram posts such as “What’s in My Fridge” (Bonny Rebecca 2017c) or YouTube videos such as “My Vegan Pantry Essentials + Shopping List” (Rawvana 2017) demonstrate this theme, in which each item is talked through in terms of qualities and possible use, while often showing middle-class, white, and shiny domestic interiors. The reproduction of ­tidiness demands a perennial involvement in order to keep nonlegitimate food and ­untidiness outside their kitchens, their Instagram profiles, and their vlogs. ­Animal products are treated as a form of symbolic pollution (Douglas 1984; Dion et al. 2014), whose existence is almost never mentioned, concealing the tension ­between allowed and not-allowed products. There are parallels between the Victorian obsession with tidiness and hygiene in the kitchen and the construction of a femininity that has to be selective toward what comes into contact with the body. In fact, diet is the first and most important dimension that needs to be tidied up, and vloggers offer their expertise to followers who look for a way to change their messy and unhealthy eating habits. Purification is expressed through abstention as a means to moral elevation, just as per the Victorian ideal of femininity. Animal-free, gluten-free, dairy-free, cruelty-free, low-fat, hormone-free, and uncooked all refer to a diet of subtraction, through which women may reach purification and cleanliness. Hence, moral elevation is achieved by being able to choose what to introduce in one’s body or, even better, what not to introduce. However, it is important to point out that all of the above concerns represent white middle-class femininity. The Victorian bourgeois woman is the epitome of whiteness, constructed in relation to working-class femininity as shown above, as well as black femininity. Indeed, black women are discursively depicted as u ­ nable to control their sexual impulses, failing to organize their domestic life and thus condemned to poverty (Reed 1992). The “Mammie,” whose role is to feed and ­preserve the domestic organization of white people, is potentially the only exception to this idea. However, the food she feeds is too heavy to be proper: “[a] large-bodied Black woman is still often identified with family and community sustenance, expressed by the preparation of large, if unhealthy, meals” ­(Parasecoli 2010, 458). The ­appetite of black women is naturalized as uncontrollable (Gilman 1985) and thus their bodies

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are conceivable only as fat (Witt 1994), in sharp contrast with the docile appetite of white women and their ability to fast. Unable to restrict appetite, the feminine black body becomes itself the object of others’ lust. As shown by the comparison with licorice and chocolate ­(Parasecoli 2010), black bodies are put into an inferior position of power through their reduction to edible objects. The desire to consume the black body not only results from a desire to dominate but also from a sexual tension toward the Other. Unlike the white middle-class female body, which is an agentic consumer with clear limitations, the black body is offered as a commodity to be consumed, “the seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream White culture” (hooks 1992, 366). The sexualization of the black body accentuates with class given that working-class women are always imagined as sexual objects (Skeggs 2005); black working-class women are the epitome of this symbolic consumption. This symbolic association is one of the facets black vegan activists resist. Indeed, some of the political motivations behind the uptake of a vegan diet are the refusal to reproduce the same dynamics of oppressions that black subjects have endured and the healing of the body from illnesses resulting from racial oppression (Afua 2000; Ko and Ko 2017). Ko and Ko (2017) explain how black people have been oppressed also via their identification with animals. By rejecting the discourse that animals are inferior to humans and consequently can be similarly exploited, black people stop supporting the same oppression they have endured. A different approach is offered by Afua (2000), who sees womb-related illnesses as caused by centuries of racialized violence and oppression. To her, veganism is a tool to decolonize individual bodies from a collective trauma. Thus, the work by black vegans illustrates how race strongly influences the experience of veganism, which includes empathy for racialized suffering of human beings, the animalization of black people, environmental racism, or food security. Interestingly, the importance of a curvaceous body line in black women beauty standards persists among black vegan writers such as McQuirter (2010), who makes the vegan diet appealing by suggesting that it is possible to lose weight without losing curves. Indeed, fat has been addressed as a site of postcolonial resistance, making the unruliness of the black female body an embodied performance of political disobedience (Shawn 2006). Curves, especially the booty, are recognized as the mark of an authentic black body (Durham 2012). This perspective, however, also confirms that the black body is constructed in opposition to white slenderness. However, the work by Harper (2012) and Ko and Ko (2017) needs to be updated in order to grasp more recent developments in dominant discourses of

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veganism and vegetarianism. Indeed, while Harper (2010, 2012) argues that mainstream white veganism is characterized by a focus on animal welfare and environmental issues, what characterizes the recent popularity of these dietary choices is the move away from ethical and political motivations. While animal and environmental issues are, at times, mentioned by female vegan vloggers, going vegan is more often articulated in terms of achieving a healthy and beautiful body. In these terms, veganism becomes one of the many choices in consumer culture whereby individuals participate in an individualist project of the self, in line with a neoliberal focus on the self as a choosing agent, fully responsible for the outcomes of these choices (Giddens 1991; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002). But more specifically, the contemporary trend of plant-based diets belongs to a more widely distributed neoliberal discourse about health, by which the subject is required to strive for a healthy body (and mind) and is made fully responsible for achieving it (or for failing to do so). This “will to health” is explored below.

NEOLIBERAL GOVERNMENTALITY AND THE WILL TO HEALTH In simple terms, neoliberalism is characterized by the privatization of public enterprises, shrinking of the welfare system, devolution, and deregulation. However, a more complex understanding of neoliberalism was developed by Foucault (2010) in his lectures printed as The Birth of Biopolitics. To understand fully this work, it is important to briefly summarize his previous work on the genealogy of the subject (Foucault 1976). In his early work, Foucault (1976) contrasts a notion of power as repressive, limiting, and constricting with one in which power not only regulates but also creates institutions, forms of social organization, and even subjectivities. He argues that since the seventeenth century the West has experienced a shift from forms of sovereign power, or power over life and death, to what Foucault calls bio-power. In contrast to sovereign power, which works by means of deduction (of wealth, of goods and services, of labour, and even of life), bio-power works by production: “[i]t exerts a positive influence on life, endeavours to administer, optimise, and multiply it” (Foucault 1976, 137). Hence, instead of power being exercised through restraint, coercion, and violence, biopower employs normalization by means of biological, psychological, and social technologies. Governmentality is a concept Foucault developed later in his life and that can be seen as bridging his previous work on political rationalities and the “­genealogy of the state” and the aforementioned focus on the genealogy of the

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subject (Lemke 2002). In the lectures printed as The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault (2010) presents a connection between technologies of the self (which indicate the mechanisms through which individuals act upon their bodies, mind, thoughts, conduct, and lifestyle) and the technologies of power (the ways in which power submits the subject to certain forms of domination). He argues that technologies of the self are not separate or independent from the technologies of power, but may work in combination with these through governmentality, a system of governance that relies not on repression and punishment but on the control and regulation of life, as well as self-disciplining individuals (Foucault 1991, 2010). Brown (2005, 37) elaborates on Foucault’s work and describes neoliberalism as “a mode of governance encompassing but not limited to the state, and one that produces subjects, forms of citizenship and behaviour, and new organization of the social.” Young women vloggers such as those explored in this article appear to fully embody the subject of neoliberalism in a way that confirms McRobbie (2009) and Gill’s (2007) claims that young postfeminist women are the ideal subjects of neoliberalism. Indeed, according to these authors, the postfeminist woman is capable, rational, entrepreneurial, autonomous, and fully in control of her life, her body, and her health. Thus, women are encouraged to engage in a self-­reflexive “project of the self ” (Giddens 1991; Lull 2006), which is performed through consumption. However, McRobbie (2009, 5) has argued that the “aggressive individualism” of postfeminism and the consequent responsibilization of the individual works toward the mystification of social inequality as failures and setbacks are attributed to personal deficiencies and faults rather than the interlacing patterns of inequality and disadvantages that persist. Hence, women are made fully accountable and responsible for their own personal development and choices, their “self ” and their body becoming an ongoing project for the achievement of happiness and fulfillment. In a context in which neoliberalism has affected the shrinking of the welfare system and the increasing privatization and commercialization of health, dominant discourses that emphasize choice and individualization play within a system that moves accountability and responsibility for people’s well-being from the state to the individual. In these terms, neoliberalism strives to create a diffused “will to health”—good health becoming a fundamental and required goal of a good and moral citizen (Higgs et al. 2009). As Brown (2005, 15) argues, “neoliberalism … figures individuals as rational, calculating creatures whose moral autonomy is measured by their capacity for ‘self-care.’”

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Thus, the choice of going vegan becomes part of a “will to health” (Higgs et al. 2009), where dietary choices (such as, but not limited to, veganism) are understood as a means to achieve a healthy body and mind. For example, Freelee (2014) advocates for a diet based mostly on bananas as an empowering choice to heal oneself: “Give your body what it really craves and you are going to feel fantastic. You are going to have health in your own hands. So do it!” Many of the vloggers analyzed here embraced veganism as a way to heal eating disorders, addictions, and lifestyle-related illnesses. Gaining a lean and fit body is understood as the means and result of living in sync with the natural environment and of one’s own spiritual dimension. For instance, Rawvana (2016) reveals how a raw vegan diet made her feel “so connected to nature, something I never had before.… An elevated state of spirituality, not of this world.” A common tale (visual or narrative) employed is about the physical transformation these women vloggers underwent through the vegan diet, ranging from brighter eye colour, clearer skin, shinier hair, healthy bowel movements, weight loss, to improved stamina and concentration, higher energy levels, and so on. Thus, while the achievement of hegemonic beauty standards is unequivocally part of becoming vegan, this is also articulated in terms of personal development and spiritual elevation. Veganism is believed to facilitate a deeper connection with the environment as well as other living beings, with the effect of a happier and healthier life. The kind of spirituality these women embrace is not a disembodied one but rather achieved through bodily control and dietary practices. Hence, while animal rights and environmental issues do not disappear completely, they become secondary to a focus on the self fully integrated in the neoliberal “will to health.”

CONCLUSION This chapter employs an intersectional approach to analyze mainstream veganism through the case study of vegan vloggers. By employing a race-­conscious approach derived from the critical work of black vegan writers and black feminists, we explored how mainstream discourse of veganism is mainly female, white, and middle class. Race-conscious approaches are effective in decentring whiteness and middle-class privilege in media representations of veganism. However, we unpacked how the dominant vegan subjectivity is not only classed and raced but also always gendered. In addition, we argue that veganism, as articulated by female vegan vloggers, rather than being concerned with animal

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welfare and environmental issues is reduced to an individual choice, virtually devoid of political or ethical commitment. Through the analysis of vegan vloggers, we explored how the vegan subject is explicitly and implicitly gendered. Explicitly, as the vast majority of vegan vloggers embody normative femininity. Implicitly, due to the symbolic association between femininity and vegetables, and because of the Victorian feminine ideal they embody through constant self-management and restraint. Indeed, vegan vloggers reproduce a discourse of femininity grounded in the control of what enters the body, as well as the kitchen, as well as an emphasis on the aesthetic qualities of food in line with normative Victorian gender discourses. In Western culture, this feminine ideal is constructed in opposition to black femininity and the black body, which is understood to be unable to restrain its appetites and objectified for exploitation and consumption. Black vegan writers employ veganism as a political tool to decolonize black bodies from white supremacist culture, illustrating how race affects the experience of veganism, raising awareness of the racialized suffering of human beings, the animalization of black people, and environmental racism or food security. Harper (2012) argues that black veganism brings a different set of concerns to the uptake of a vegan lifestyle to mainstream literature—that it is only concerned with animal welfare and environmental issues. However, in our analysis we uncover how, while these issues do not fully disappear, they become secondary to the achievement of a healthy body and mind, fully participating in the neoliberal “will to health.”

NOTES 1. Vlog is a shortening of video blog. It is a form of user-generated content that has become commonplace with the advent of YouTube and similar online video platforms. 2. Not all female vegan vloggers analyzed in this chapter prioritize health at the expense of ethical and political commitments. Indeed, there are exceptions; however, the clear majority do follow the patterns we identify in this chapter, especially vloggers with the most subscribers. 3. See, for example, Melissa Alexandria (2018), Naturally Stefanie (2018), Rawvana (2018), among others. 4. This is not to say that female vegan vloggers do not work; on the contrary, their work consists in live-streaming their experiences, thoughts, routines, intimacy, and so on. In the past five to ten years, vlogging has become a highly profitable industry, which in many ways overlaps with celebrity culture. Much like celebrities, successful vloggers

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are models of consumption practice and aspiration as through lifestyle choices and product endorsement they legitimate consumerist values that are fundamental to the commercial interests not only of the media market but of the capitalist economy at large (Turner 2004; Redmond 2014). 5. We are not arguing here that men are fully excluded from these discourses. However, not only are they fewer in number but they also reproduce masculinity through the employment of discourses around muscle building and fitness. 6. Instagram post from June 18, 2017, www.instagram.com/p/BGzH6KAoFWv/?hl= en&taken-by=bonnyrebecca. 7. In one of her Instagram posts, FullyRawKristina (2017) explains to her followers that Nice Cream is “nice” because it does not contain dairy products and thus respects the environment, all living beings, and the body. 8. The episode concerns Freelee’s (2016) Instagram post: www.instagram.com/p/ BKhvziCBl-q/?hl=en&taken-by=freeleebananagirl.

READING QUESTIONS 1. Can you think of other examples of mainstream culture in which femininity, whiteness, and being middle class are the norm?

2. What subjectivities are they set against, if any?

3. Is the argument brought forward in this chapter applicable more widely? How might it change depending on geographical location?

4. Besides dieting, are there any other spheres of life in which the individual is held responsible for his or her own health and well-being?

5. Can you think of any cultural phenomena that resist the “will to health”?

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———. 2017b. “Bonnyrebecca: When Your Food Looks Like Art.” [Instagram post, ­January 24.] www.instagram.com/p/BPoPSieBfFy/?hl=en&taken-by=bonnyrebecca.

———. 2017c. “Bonnyrebecca: What’s in My Fridge.” [Instagram post, September 12.] www.instagram.com/p/BY9NH82Fgbq/?hl=en&taken-by=bonnyrebecca.

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Douglas, M. 1984. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge.

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Durham, A. 2012. “Check on It.” Feminist Media Studies 12 (1): 35–49.

Fegitz, E., and D. Pirani. 2017. “The Sexual Politics of Veggies: Beyoncé’s ‘Commodity Veg*ism.’” Feminist Media Studies 18 (2): 1–15. http://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2017.1358200.

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by C. Burchel, C. Gordon, and P. Miller, 87–104. Hemel Hempstead, UK: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

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Frankenberg, R. 1993. “White Women, Race Matters.” In Theories of Race and Racism, edited by L. Back and J. Solomos, 447–61. London: Routledge.

Freelee. 2014. A Day in the Life of a High Carb Vegan with Freelee the Banana Girl. [Video file.] www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRuytGHlpNc.

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Giddens, A. 1991. Modernity and Self-Identity. Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. ­Cambridge, MA: Polity Press.

Gill, R. 2007. “Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a Sensibility.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 10 (2): 147–66. http://oro.open.ac.uk/9508/.

———. 2008. “Empowerment/Sexism: Figuring Female Sexual Agency in Contemporary Advertising.” Feminism Psychology 18 (1): 35–60. http://oro.open.ac.uk/9508/.

Gilman, S. L. 1985. “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature.” Critical Inquiry 12 (1): 204–42. http://doi.org/10.1086/448327.

Harper, B. A. 2010. Sistah Vegan: Black Female Vegans Speak on Food, Identity, Health, and Society. New York: Lantern Books.

———. 2012. “Going beyond the Normative White ‘Post Racial’ Vegan Epistemology.” In

Taking Food Public: Redefining Foodways in a Changing World, edited by P. WilliamsForson and C. Counihan, 155–74. New York: Routledge.

Harvey, D. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Higgs, P., M. Leontowitsch, F. Stevenson, and I. R. Jones. 2009. “Not Just Old and Sick— the ‘Will to Health’ in Later Life.” Ageing and Society 29 (5): 687–707. https://doi

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High Carb Hanna. 2018. “High Carb Hanna: Recipes, Weight Loss, Tiny Living.” YouTube. www.youtube.com/channel/UCs1uwp7bB1J_3r5xN2ioL_w.

Hill Collins, P. 1998. “It’s All in the Family: Intersections of Gender, Race, and Nation.” Hypatia 13 (3): 62–82. www.jstor.org/stable/3810699.

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hooks, b. 1981. Ain’t I a Woman? Boston: South End Press.

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Morris, M., and E. Anderson. 2015. “‘Charlie Is So Cool Like’: Authenticity, Popularity and Inclusive Masculinity on Youtube.” Sociology 49 (6): 1200–17.

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Witt, D. 1994. “What (N)ever Happened to Aunt Jemima: Eating Disorders, Fetal Rights, and Black Female Appetite in Contemporary American Culture.” Discourse 17 (2): 98–122.

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CHAPTER 4

Is Veganism a Queer Food Practice? Alissa Overend

LEARNING OBJECTIVES 1. To explore the connections between queerness and veganism and to question how veganism as a queer food practice upholds, maintains, and resists dominant food relations 2. To define a relational food framework and understand its role in countering strictly substance-based understandings of food 3. To understand how soy contributes to normative food projects, despite its association with veganism

KEY TERMS hegemonic masculinity, masculinity, normalizing discourse, nutritionism, queer, relational food framework, veganism

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INTRODUCTION In 1906, a meat-eating journalist for the New York Times frequented a vegetarian restaurant in New York City to question, in his words, whether “queer food make[s] queer people.”1 Drawing on the familiar adage that we are what we eat, the journalist links queerness (here, in the sense of oddness) with vegetarianism. Throughout the article the journalist seems especially concerned with what he sees as the clientele’s pathological demeanour, describing the 25-person assembly as one marked by a “vegetable calm” and “determined meekness” as they “solemnly ate their hygienic meal[s].” The solemn and hygienic meal on offer that night included a nectar of raspberry juice, lemon, and water; nut chowder; asparagus; potatoes; stuffed protose, a meat substitute popular in the early twentieth century; olives; bread and butter; fruit salad; and dessert and coffee. Much of the article includes excerpts of his interviews taken at the restaurant that detail various aspects of vegetarian eating, including the role of bread in meat-free diets, which nuts are best and why, and broader considerations of animal well-being. Depicting an exclusive vegetarian society to which he seemed both relieved and annoyed to not be privy, he adds, “they talked in whispers, they looked hungry, and they sighed much.” One must question, however, whether those dining that night were sighing because they were hungry or because they were unable to eat their meal without having to defend their food choices. As this more than 100-year-old article confirms, the links between queerness and veganism 2 are not new, despite the fact that their meanings in contemporary Western foodscapes have changed. Laura Wright (2015, 2) also documents that as early as the 1840s, vegetarianism was associated with a kind of social crankiness. I raise the historic links between vegetarian food practices and queerness as an entry point to think through contemporary strategies by some to queer (in the sense of a radical disruption) food and eating practices. I am interested in the symbolic connections and tensions between queerness and veganism and question what can, or does, veganism offer a queer and feminist political practice. What resistive, counternormative promises does vegan eating enable? What dangers does it resurrect? And how might we think differently about the claims of ethical veganism? As detailed in the New York Times article, the concept of queerness was used to refer colloquially to oddness. In contemporary Western culture, the concept of queerness has come to take on a more complicated and politically charged meaning as a radical disruption from dominant and/or normative ideals. Emerging

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out of gender and sexuality studies, queerness has been an important ideological position since, at least, the term queer theory was coined in 1990 by Teresa de Lauretis (Loveless 2019). As Ruth Goldman defines, “to queer … is to alter [dominant] discourse and [to] challenge the normative” (quoted in Ehrhardt 2006, 92). The normative can include any mainstream, dominant, or t­ aken-for-granted understanding of a social phenomenon. For example, over the past four decades, ­gender and sexuality studies has sought to deconstruct the normative discourses of biologically determined gender roles, gender dichotomies, and heterosexuality. Only quite recently have scholars used queerness in the context of food studies to challenge normative assumptions of food and eating, such as those that reproduce healthist, ableist, heterosexist, and white-centric food practices (Atkins and Brady 2016; Guthman 2009, 2011, 2014; Hall 2014). While much has been written on the cultural links between food and ­gender—for instance, the symbolic associations of meat with masculinity, discussed later in this chapter—the connection between food and queerness has ­received much less attention, despite its emerging role in some contemporary food practices. I believe that insights from queer studies have the capacity to deepen and expand critical understandings of the complex relationships between food and social inequality by encouraging a rethinking of common conceptualizations between them and the dynamics of power they uphold and normalize. To explore the question of how to queer food, I ask not whether queer food makes queer people but instead how a queer food ethos can reorient how to eat and how to think about what to eat.

PERSONAL SITUATEDNESS As a queer person who toggles between veganism and omnivorism, I uphold the body and identity as deeply political projects. During my initial foray into veganism, I noticed that I had more energy and that I rarely got sick—embodied phenomena I assumed were related to an increase in the vitamin-rich foods I was eating. I also began to notice more acutely the ubiquity of meat-centred discourse in a parallel way to when I first noticed the many permutations of societal heterosexisms. I noticed the supremacy of meat in commercials, at the grocery store, at the centre of holiday meals, on restaurant menus, in most cookbooks, and at a variety of food festivals. I found this perspective surprisingly myopic, perhaps especially in Alberta, Canada, where meat (and specifically beef) is much more central to industry and regional identity than in other parts of the world

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(Blue 2008). I was not only surprised at the omission of so many other kinds of food but also at the banality of meat’s environmental, economic, and animal rights–based evils that circulated without much pause. As my initial foray into veganism progressed, however, I noticed two things began to shift. First, I noticed my initial energy boost was replaced by a deep, lingering hunger. After much trial, I deduced that my body was craving meat. I say this not as an objective truth for all people (ergo meat is “normal” or “natural”) or claim that this will always be a truth for me. Second, and central to this chapter, my attention shifted from the normalizing discourses of meat eating to the normalizing discourses of veganism. As Dianna Taylor (2009, 47) defines, “a norm is normalizing if … it links the increase of capacities and expansion of possibilities to an increase in and expansion of the proliferation of power within society.” While typically situated as counternormative, I was struck by the normalizing judgments of vegan ethics. In particular, I struggled to accept the rigid, simplistic dichotomy between animal-based and nonanimal-based foods at the core of vegan eating practices as the only means of measuring a food ethic. Epitomized in images such as “vegan diets explained” (see Figure 4.1), I grew skeptical of a food politic that was so narrowly defined, especially considering the myriad of ethical and environmental compromises found in contemporary, nonmeat, food, and eating practices. Heeding Laura Wright’s (2015) caution that vegans are far from a homogeneous group, my critique is not aimed at vegans as an imagined whole, but rather at what I see as a dominant discourse of ethical eating within veganism. If ethical eating is measured solely on an animal/nonanimal food divide, we obscure and negate other forms of food politics, including but not limited to the conditions

VEGAN DIETS EXPLAINED

No

Does it come from an animal?

Eat it

Yes

Don’t eat it

Figure 4.1: Vegan diets explained (Source: adapted from http://vegans.uk/)

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of migrant workers who produce vegan food; how vegan food production affects local people, environments, and ecosystems; and how some vegan food movements overwhelmingly feed an affluent white middle class. I am not the first to point out the paradoxes of veganism as an ethical food practice,3 but my argument is novel in its application to a growing movement of queer food strategies. In offering a critique of queer veganism as an ethical food strategy my aim is not to shame vegans, enable carnivores, or otherwise tell people what and how to eat. I am a strong believer that people should eat what makes them feel good, broadly defined. With consumers facing dichotomous, purist-based approaches to eating (i.e., ones that advocate all-or-nothing dietary approaches), my aim is to reorient the discussion of queer veganism from one that is tied to a substancebased politic to one that is more strongly relationally framed in order to better account for the compromised ethical contexts we find ourselves in. To do so, I first track the parallels between queerness and veganism in order to tease out their shared positionalities. Next, I articulate the shift from a substance-based food framework to a relational-based understanding of food—a framing that reorients what to eat (or not eat) to how to think about and conceptualize what to eat (Heldke 2012). Lastly, I apply these theoretical questions to the case of soy as one example to rethink and reconceptualize dominant conceptualizations of ethical veganism. A widespread meat alternative, soy is particularly productive for opening up singular stories about veganism so commonly at the forefront of queer food projects.

QUEERING FOOD While there is acknowledgement in popular and academic discourse that food is a key ingredient in the gendered, gendering, sexed, and sexualized relations that make up contemporary culture, there remains much ambiguity (and perhaps necessarily so) about what a queer food project might entail. David Mehnert (2002), a popular food blogger, contends that food on its own is not queer and that the queerness of food comes only after effort has been made to change the food from its original form. Raw ingredients like meat, flour, and spices are queered only once they have been morphed, minced, or altered in some way (Mehnert 2002). By this directive, the more changes and stranger combinations a food can undergo, the queerer the food becomes. Baked Alaska4 is humorously presented as an archetypal queer food because, in Mehnert’s (2002) words, “it breezily mocks the threat of damnation, goes to hell and back, and lives to tell the story. [Its] very identity, in fact, depends on

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having suffered an accusation of weakness, on surviving a trial by fire.… What could be queerer than that?” Mehnert (2002) adds that foods “in drag,” such as radishes cut as flowers, are obviously queer; as are “queer camp foods” like highballs with tiny umbrellas and Jell-O moulds; and finally that many foods are queer by virtue of their names: “green goddess dressing,” “puffs, tarts, and crumpets,” and the “Twinkie”—“you cannot out a Twinkie since it has never been in the closet.” Another popular food blogger contends that it is not the food itself that renders a food ethic queer, but rather a queer aesthetic in and through which the pleasures of food and eating are taken seriously (Klassen 2016). A queer food aesthetic aims to queer food by normalizing the desire of eating beyond normative health framings. The aim to queer food by focusing on the pleasure of food can be seen in parallel to the ways in which gay and lesbian liberation movements normalized queer sex desire outside heterosexual reproduction. While many food products, politics, and practices may effectively (and affectively) queer food, in contemporary Western culture, it is typically veganism at the vanguard of queer food projects. Building off the now-classic work of Carol Adams ([1990] 2010), a pioneer in the field of feminist food studies, queer food practices also tend to reject meat eating as a political strategy. In her influential book The Sexual Politics of Meat, Adams ([1990] 2010) makes a convincing case for the ways that gender oppression is intricately linked to the oppression of nonhuman animals. As she details, sexism and animal cruelty are fuelled by patriarchal dominance where, too often, women and animals are regarded as little more than “meat” for male pleasure and consumption. She traces the ways in which animal meat became a euphemism for female sexual parts and vice versa. Consider, for example, the common question posed between heterosexual men of whether they prefer the breasts or the thigh. She also documents the widespread Western cultural associations between the consumption of red meat and masculine, heteronormative identities. Not only are heterosexual men assumed to be carnivorous, but anyone deviating from meat eating (and specifically red meat eating) is considered feminine, weak, and inferior. Such deep-seated cultural norms exclude those whose traditional diets focus on beans, grains, and vegetables as well as those who reject meat eating for various personal, financial, health, environmental, ethical, and/or political reasons. For Adams ([1990] 2010) and the many others who have taken up her work, ethical eating must question the presumed normalcy of meat-eating practices and cultural discourses and take into account the freedom of nonhuman animals.

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Women as well as other marginalized groups will remain locked in systems of oppression until the centrality of meat-eating discourses are eradicated. It is precisely because meat eating has become emblematic of masculinist, straight, middle-class, colonial culture that veganism as an avoidance of these normative practices (at least to some degree) becomes a common queering strategy—an attempt to eat and think about food differently. In her blog project and edited book Sistah Vegan (2010) and in her article “Doing Veganism Differently” (2013), Amie Breeze Harper advocates for the political possibilities of veganism, in her words, “as a tool that simultaneously resists institutionalized racism, environmental degradation, and high rates of disease plaguing the black community” (Harper 2013, 138). Drawing on the expertise of vegan soul chefs, Harper (2010, 2013) aims to make soul food healthy again in order to counteract the growing health disparities between racialized and nonracialized communities in the United States and globally. By educating black communities about vegan food through what she frames as a raceconscious approach, Harper (2013, 133) hails veganism as a practice that can “decolonize the negative effects of colonialism on our bodies and minds” and as a potent political tool that can help dismantle dominant, racialized, and systemic health structures. Megan Dean (2014) makes a similar claim that veganism is an ethical ­practice of freedom for its ability to resist patriarchal eating norms. ­Analyzing the blog Choosing Raw and specifically a series of posts called “Green R ­ ecovery,” Dean (2014) contends that veganism can be a means of recovery from t­ raumatic, ­disordered histories with food such as anorexia and bulimia. Drawing on the work of Susan Bordo, she claims that veganism can “shrug off some of the ‘unbearable weight’ of patriarchal normalization” (Dean 2014, 144). While Dean (2014) concedes that the practice of veganism cannot fully step outside of all systems of oppression, specifically those of healthism, she maintains that veganism is “less governed by normalizing, patriarchal power” (138) than omnivorism and that as an ethical practice of freedom, veganism “allows us to eat with the least amount of domination possible” (144; emphasis added). For Dean (2014) and Harper (2010, 2013), veganism, akin to queerness, is framed as counternormative and as a ­radical departure from oppressive colonial and ­patriarchal power relations. In his Queer Vegan Manifesto, Rasmus Simonsen (2012) further traces the synergies between veganism and queerness and argues that another similarity they share is their continued resistance to medical and medicalized frameworks. Mainstream psychology, with its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), has a long history of medicalizing “nonnormative” dietary habits and gender and

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sexual expressions. Avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder (ARFID) and gender dysphoria (formerly gender identity disorder) deviantize veganism and gender variance by labelling them as illnesses as opposed to purposeful, even fulfilling, political acts.5 ARFID is newly classified in the DSM-5 (American Psychiatric Association 2013) as an eating or feeding disturbance marked by a lack of interest in eating, avoidance of particular food or food groups, and concern about the consequences of eating. Also described as “restrictive eating,” “selective eating,” “choosy eating,” and “chronic food refusal,” food avoidance and restriction is often based on extreme sensitivity to the appearance, colour, smell, texture, temperature, or taste of a food or food group, and can also manifest as the refusal to tolerate the smell or sight of particular foods when eaten by others (American Psychiatric Association 2013). While veganism is not formally included in the diagnostic criteria, it shares many “symptoms” with ARFID, and may in turn be taken as a symptom of disordered eating in itself. A further rubbing up against the status quo that queer-identified people and vegans share is in the act of having to “come out.” As Valerie Korinek (2012) details, k. d. lang—the award-winning Canadian singer—faced more hostility coming out as vegetarian in Alberta in 1990 than she did coming out as queer a few years later. Lang “outed” herself as vegetarian through a sponsored People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) commercial entitled “Meat Stinks,” which openly denigrated the beef industry (Korinek 2012). The act was seen as an attack on the economy, culture, and lifestyle of rural Alberta, as well as a direct betrayal of her hometown roots in Consort, Alberta, a small ranching community. The public reaction in response to her activism was extreme. Many local radio stations refused to play her music; the town sign, which used to read “Consort, home of k. d. lang,” was defaced with “I ♥ Alberta Beef ” stickers and a graffiti message that read “eat meat dyke.” Her mother, who still lived in the town, received multiple threatening phone calls (Korinek 2012). The heated responses also extended beyond the borders of the town itself as many angry Albertans submitted hateful comments to province-wide newspapers. As Korinek (2012, 344) articulates, “her vegetarianism, then her lesbianism—made for an untenable situation in a region noted for valorizing farm families, virile cowboys, appropriately heterosexual women and small ‘c’ conservative political values.” Queerness and veganism as indexed through k. d. lang’s coming out and in borrowing Sara Ahmed’s (2010) useful phrasing are “killjoy practices”6 —­ denaturalizing and threatening the presumed innateness of heterosexual and meat-eating practices.

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Perhaps the strongest parallels between veganism and queerness can be read through the recent claiming of vegan sexuality, defined by Potts and Parry (2010, 2014) as a lifestyle preference where vegans engage in sexual relations only with other vegans. Collapsing the already blurry distinctions between eating and intimacy, vegan sexuality becomes at once a politic of food and sex. As one vegan sexual describes, I could not be in an intimate relationship with anyone who was eating animals. Our worlds would just be too far apart and the likelihood of the relationship succeeding would be very low. I couldn’t think of kissing lips that allow dead animal pieces to pass between them. (Quoted in Potts and Parry 2010, 54)

Another vegan sexual similarly contends that Non-vegetarian bodies smell different to me … I wouldn’t want to get close to someone in a physical sense if their body was derived from meat. For me, this constitutes my very personal form of ethical sexuality. (Quoted in Potts and Parry 2010, 54)

As these quotes confer, ethical eating is framed strictly and exclusively along meat-eating divides; veganism, by contrast, is positioned as an ethical eating alternative somehow completely disconnected from other forms of compromised eating practices common to advanced capitalist cultures in the twenty-first century. Not unlike many expressions of queer sexuality, vegan sexuality is positioned as a response to a repressive status quo, and perhaps unsurprisingly, has generated a fair amount of negative backlash. Negative reactions to vegan sexuality, as summarized by Potts and Parry (2010), pursue one or more of the following themes: (1) hostility to the rejection of heteronormative masculinity—e.g., “I can’t date a girl who doesn’t put sausage in her mouth”; (2) threatening descriptions of punishing dietary deviance—e.g., “I recommend the Halal method to slaughter your vegan”; (3) claiming vegans as deficient lovers—e.g., “vegans are notoriously bad lays”; and (4) accusations of reverse marginalization—e.g., “being [somehow] victimized by vegan sexuality.” These popular responses to vegan sexuality smack of the same defences to queer—and specifically lesbian—­ sexuality, which has long threatened the presumed naturalness of heterosexuality (Fegitz and Pirani 2017).

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Queerness and veganism occupy similar discursive positions: they challenge masculinist paradigms and resist dominant patriarchal, heterosexist, colonial, and medicalized power structures. In an age of rampant Americanization, unbridled neoliberalism, and a terrifying legitimization of the “alternative” political right, these strategies are both useful and welcomed. However, while I am sympathetic to and supportive of the politicization of veganism as a queer eating practice, I also find myself intellectually uncomfortable with the rigid, binary-based, often purist framing of “ethical” and “nonethical” eating that so commonly pervades queer veganism. The maintenance of such a binary to me is anything but queer and dangerously resurrects the many pitfalls of identity politics that overstate the differences between omnivore and vegan subjectivities in advanced capitalist food systems. While I uphold the moral, environmental, economic, social justice, and health-based stances against eating animals and animal by-products, I am wary of a substance-based food politic often maintained by claims of ethical veganism.

BEYOND NUTRITIONISM The Australian public health scholar Gyorgy Scrinis (2008, 2013) coins the term nutritionism to refer to a way of thinking that overemphasizes the role of nutrients as the sum of the food’s value.7 Through recently adopted scientific and quantified understandings of food, culturally many people are more likely to understand and even consume foods based on caloric, vitamin, mineral, and nutrient properties. For example, how many people know the caloric value of a glass of milk or consume meat solely because it is a good source of protein? While these practices are common to contemporary Western culture, Scrinis (2013) is ultimately critical of nutricentric ways of viewing food because they ignore the social, cultural, and political contexts in and through which food is produced and consumed. As he explains, “the role of nutrients has often been interpreted outside the context of foods, dietary patterns, and broader social contexts in which they are embedded” (Scrinis 2013, 6). Feminist philosopher Lisa Heldke (2012) is also concerned with the hyperfixation on the substance (i.e., the what) of food at the expense of analyzing food’s relational context. She contends that by obsessing over a food’s substancebased content, we fail to examine the how, when, and why of food and eating practices. Heldke (2012, 70) explains that “a substance ontology [i.e., framework] makes it easier to regard things as Other—to reify and separate them from me.” By focusing on the substance of food, we not only absolve ourselves of ethical

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responsibility for the many near and distant marginalized others involved in food production, but we also dangerously resurrect what Alexis Shotwell (2016, 11) calls “defensive individualism,” the assumption that the self is somehow separate from the world and yet simultaneously requires defense against it. Defensive individualism is evident through a range of individualist food strategies like veganism where “we are made responsible for our own bodily impurity” based on what we eat and do not eat, rather than look at the social, economic, and political conditions that produce food choices (Shotwell 2016, 7). To sidestep the pitfalls of a nutricentric, substance-based food framework, I draw on Heldke’s (2012) relational food framing to better contextualize ethical eating practices within the broader conditions in which we live.

FOOD’S RELATIONALITY Speaking to a similar bind to the one I encountered during my initial foray into veganism, Heldke (2012, 67) explains that she “quite regularly eschewed meat, [but] was painfully irresolute when it came time to reject the readily-available brands of chocolate that use enslaved children in their production.” She then goes on to question why she dutifully holds up some iterations of ethical eating while routinely overlooking or sidestepping others. In an attempt to reframe dominant conceptualizations of ethical eating through three case studies—what she calls the “cruelty-free” case of homegrown vegetables, the “cruel case” of foie gras production, and the “hard case” of humane lamb slaughter—Heldke’s goal is to render the moral assessments of [these foods] less sharp, clear, and unambiguous, by asking what else that we notice in them or how else we might view them. How can we complicate or nuance the stories we tell about these foods? What violence has heretofore been invisible to them? What compassion has been occluded? (2012, 70)

I think her questions are especially pertinent in the case of questioning and reframing claims of ethical veganism. Her analysis moves from the question of what we should eat to “how we should think about how we should eat” (Heldke 2012, 70) and is helpful for my thinking through the case of soy in the broader politics of claiming a queer food ethic. On the one hand, veganism is deeply relational. It places us, often uncomfortably, in relation to the social, political, economic, gendered, and colonial relations of meat-eating practices and norms. A core feature of veganism is the recognition

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that food connects us to systems and structures beyond ourselves: animal warfare; ecological relationships; environmental justice; and gendered, raced, and classed relations. As Kenneth Shapiro (2014) writes, veganism is a way of being and experiencing the world, associated with deep interconnections between self, animals, and nature. Similarly, Laura Wright (2015) upholds veganism as a “philosophy and way of living which … promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefits of humans, animals, and the environment” (quoted in Wright 2015, 2). On the other hand, paradoxically, veganism is premised on a substance-based framework where only some foods are acceptable and others are eschewed—a food politic that is committed in Heldke’s (2012, 78) words to the “thingness” of food. Veganism advances a relational attitude toward food and eating, but does so by upholding a substance-based approach. To move discussions of queer veganism beyond nutricentric, substancebased aims, I use the case of soy to explore its broader relational contexts. Rather than ethical eating being defined along carnist/vegan divides, I reposition these debates in order to open up the normalizing terms through which queer food practices come to be claimed. I am particularly interested in the case of soy for its ability to nuance the often-purist rhetoric of veganism. A widespread meat alternative, soy is a food in Mehnert’s (2002) words “that passes.”

SOY: THE ALL-AMERICAN BEAN? Eric Schlosser (2001) exposes the American fast-food industry for a range of egregious practices, including chemically altering the food, the deplorable working conditions in the meat-packing and fast-food industries, the environmental impacts of meat eating, and the global effects of the ubiquitous American fastfood industry. In contrast to “the dark side of the all-American meal” (Schlosser 2001), soy is often framed as a food with “ontological integrity” because of its association with veganism (Hall 2014, 178) and as an “ethical meat alternative” (Warkentin 2012, 502). Such a narrow framing of what was once dubbed “the miracle bean” (Prodhöl 2010, 111) obscures the dominant Americanized food pathways, cultural appropriations, healthist attitudes, and fears of feminization maintained through the discourses of ethical veganism.

DOMINANT FOOD PATHWAYS An ancient crop in China, soy was largely ignored in North America until the early twentieth century (Mintz, Tan, and Du Bois 2008). As Prodhöl (2010)

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documents, the initial demand for soy came about with the shortage of v­ egetable oils and fats in 1909. Following this, and up until World War II, soy was widely used in the making of soaps, oils, and margarines, as well as a range of industrial products such as animal feed, and touted by many, including Henry Ford, for its promises (quite literally) to fuel U.S. industry. Because of its mass production and myriad uses, alongside the aggressive USDA-imposed taxes on imported soy, by 1942, the United States surpassed China as the world’s ­largest exporter of whole soybeans, with much of that soy being exported back into China (­Prodhöl 2010). By 1973, the soybean overtook both wheat and corn to become the United States’ most important cash crop (Mintz et al. 2008). And, as of 2006, the United States, Brazil, and Argentina combine to produce 80 percent of the world’s soybeans—the latter having disastrous effects on nonrenewable rainforest ecosystems and the former further exploiting 350-plus years of slave labour in the United States (Mintz et al. 2008). Like corn, soy has reached near-ubiquity in commercially prepared foods such as breads, cereals, chocolate, sauces, and dressings to the point where “something like 70 percent of packaged food products in the U.S. now contain some soy derivative ingredient, such as lecithin, soybean oil or soy protein” (Mintz 2009, 6). If there was any question about the Americanization of soy, we need not forget that Monsanto’s Roundup-ready soy was at the forefront of genetically engineered (GE) commercial crops in the mid-1990s and is now “the plant with the largest percentage of its agriculture given over to GE varieties” (Du Bois and De Souza 2008, 74). Whether major economic player, GE crop, environmental hazard, or labour liability, the soybean is as complicit in Americanized food systems as Schlosser’s all-American meal.

CULTURAL APPROPRIATION Once appropriated from Asia to North America, the soybean was quickly diffused from its original uses (Mintz 2009). Valued for centuries in China and other Asian countries for its utility purposes, soy was and is widely used in its whole or fermented form as bean curd, tempeh, soy sauce, soy milk, and miso paste (He and Chen 2013). In North America, by contrast, it is predominantly crushed or mechanically separated and used as a bolstering ingredient for industrial or animal feed purposes. Most of the world’s soy crop ends up in feed for poultry, pork, cattle, and even farmed fish to the extent that only 6 percent of the world’s soy is consumed directly by humans (Oliveira and Schneider 2015). ­F lavoured by xenophobia, implicit racism, and ethnocentrism, soy was

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repackaged by North Americans as being more suitable for industry and animals than for humans and remains largely so to this day. Despite soy’s prevalence in North American diets and its economic significance to North American agriculture, “the soybean [has] hardly [ever] played a role in the realm of collective western imagination” (Prodhöl 2010, 112). We do not hail soy as a national source of pride the way we do with beef, wheat, or dairy, and many Canadians likely do not realize the extent to which soy is produced in Canada. According to the most recent statistics from Soy ­Canada (2017), there are over 30,000 soybean-producing farms, soy is the fourth­largest field crop, and the third-largest cash crop in the country. When soy is used in human products, marketing strategies often suppress its presence. Palmolive dishwashing soap, for example, is made from olive oil as its name indicates. Sunlight dishwashing soap, by contrast, is made from soybean oil, but makes no overt reference to soy. This pattern is equally ­evident in ­margarines. Becel Olive Oil margarine is, again as its name suggests, made from olive oil in addition to being packaged in an olive-green container, whereas Fleischmann margarine and Earth Balance buttery spread—both of which are soybean ­predominant—do not reference soy in any obvious or explicit way. D ­ espite ­soybean oil being one of “the most important edible fat[s] in the U.S., it is hardly ever marketed with the word soybean on the label” (Mintz et al. 2008, 5). Mirroring the colonial roots giving rise to soy, while perpetuating nationalist exclusions, the bean itself remains symbolically “invisible and ­unknown” (Prodhöl 2010, 116) in the West.

HEALTHIST ATTITUDES AND BELIEFS Where soy has received a fair bit of positive representation in North America is through health and illness-related discourses. Typically pitted against the presumed dangers of meat, dairy, and carbohydrate options, the soybean is touted for being high in protein, calcium, potassium, fibre, and vitamin C, and low in carbohydrates and saturated fats (Ahmad 2013). In 2000 the American Heart Association and the FDA formally endorsed the claim that “diets low in saturated fat and cholesterol that include 25 grams of soy protein a day may reduce the risk of heart disease” (Webb 2010). Over the course of the last couple of decades, many medical professionals have publicized the benefits of soy in fighting cardiovascular disease, cancers, osteoporosis, and diabetes. Soy contains the praised isoflavones (a plant compound that mimics estrogen), which have garnered tremendous attention for their potential to help reduce the risk of coronary

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heart disease and stroke, the risk of breast and prostate cancers, and to relieve menopausal symptoms, as well as to slow the effects of osteoporosis (Ahmad 2013; Konkel 2009; Webb 2010). Typical of many of the healthist discourses that pervade contemporary ­discussions of illness (Crawford 1980), soy consumption is presented as an individualized responsibility to counter increasingly structural health problems that emerge alongside the widespread use of herbicides and pesticides, aggressive food marketing and labelling tactics, government deregulation, and growing neoliberal agribusiness (Pollan 2008; Nestle 2013). The problem with diet-­ related health messages is that they oversimplistically equate healthy food with healthy people without considering systemic barriers in accessing and maintaining health, including ableist, sizeist, racist, and classist access to, knowledge of, and desire for “healthy” foods (Guthman 2007, 2009; LeBesco 2004). Healthist ideologies perpetuate and normalize politically limited preoccupations with self-help and individual choice, unfortunately seen in spades in many vegan health movements.

FEMINIZATION OF THE FOOD SYSTEM Some of the greatest perceived threats associated with soy stem from its association with femininity. Carol Adams (2015, xvii) writes that tofu is hated because it is representative of the vegan. But as Adams’s ([1990] 2010) earlier work has shown, as discussed above, the vegan is also representative of femininity because of its rejection of meat eating. Soy is thus feminized by its juxtaposition with the presumed hierarchy and masculinity of meat, as captured by the following Dodge Durango billboard advertisement, which situates the SUV as “a big fat juicy cheeseburger in a land of tofu” (see Figure 4.2).

Figure 4.2: Billboard ad for Dodge Durango (Source: http://caroljadams.com/examples-of-spom/)

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The thinly veiled gendered subtext of the ad positions masculinity’s ­performance as superior to that of feminized tofu. The ad also emboldens a brash, in-your-face type of hegemonic masculinity, perhaps responding to a wider culture that encourages cutting back on cheeseburgers and driving smaller, fuelefficient vehicles. The SUV, as depicted in the ad, mirrors that of hegemonic masculinity: it’s loud, takes up space, and fearlessly mocks “prissy” dietary advice. Soy is further, though more subtly, feminized because of its association with “Asian”8 cultures, which have a long history of feminization by the West. As the work of Edward Said’s (1978) Orientalism has importantly conveyed, the constructed image of Asian femininity is long rooted in the colonial gaze, which created the binary of the European and Western Occident as “modern” and “masculine” and the Eastern Orient as “traditional” and “feminine.” In contemporary American culture, Emy Takinami (2016) details that Asian men continue to be feminized through a range of popular representations as well as through the long-standing effects of twentieth-century immigration policies, which dictated the types of jobs many Asian men could get and hence their current rank in a deeply class-structured society. Feminized soy is both shaped by and contributes to ongoing gendered Orientalist discourses. In addition to its constructed inferiority to meat and its links to feminized Orientalism, soy is perhaps most strongly feminized as the ultimate f­emale food due its estrogen-mimicking compounds. While published data from over 150 clinical studies found that soy consumption has no effect on levels of testosterone or estrogen, sperm count, semen quality, breast size, or erectile function in men (Webb 2010), popular sources continue to sensationalize the perceived feminizing aspects of soy. The headline of a 2009 Men’s Health article, for ­instance, questions whether “soy is the most dangerous food for men?” (­Thornton 2009). The article goes on to attribute one man’s breast d ­ evelopment, dearth of body hair, flaccid penis, lack of sexual desire, lack of attraction to women, and even sentimentality to his overconsumption of soy milk. For ­heteronormative, ­cis-gendered men, soy is set up as the cause of castrating symptoms and as the threat of feminization itself—a vagina dentata of foods. In the author’s own words, “soy has the power to undermine everything it means to be male” (­Thornton 2009). Relying on biological fallacies that presume that male and female primary and secondary sex characteristics are mutually exclusive (Fausto-Sterling 2012), the fear of soy can be read more broadly as another tired instantiation of cultural misogyny, homo- and trans-phobias. By digging deeper into the discourses of ethical veganism, we can see how soy sustains an American-dominated food industry, cultural appropriations,

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and the whitewashing of Western diet, healthist, and individualist food cures, and xenophobic, misogynist fears of feminization—accounts that, as I argue, ­ultimately complicate veganism as queer and nonnormative food practice. While skeptics may question my use of soy as a case study because it is so complicit in wider food systems or because it is often used as a meat substitute and therefore reproduces meat’s symbolic dominance, for me, this is precisely what makes it such a compelling and productive case study. Further, I could offer a similar analysis of tomatoes, kale, quinoa, almonds, or other vegan foods to much the same effect: queer food practices in the twenty-first century have to be reframed beyond an animal/nonanimal dichotomy and beyond substance-based politics. In short, what’s needed is a queering of queer food practices—one that radically reframes food’s often complicit relationality with dominant power structures.

CONCLUSIONS: OF VIOLENCE AND EATING In the ongoing question of “how queer … appetites figure in the discipline of food studies” (Ehrhardt 2006, 91), I am not convinced that veganism, indexed in this chapter through the case of soy, offers a queer enough alternative. A major player in the agro-industrial food exchange, soy vacillates symbolically between a deep suspicion of both femininity and the racialized “other” on the one hand and a tired healthist food cure on the other. In advanced capitalist food production, as Heldke (2012, 68) starkly reminds us, “virtually all eating involves death” and veganism is not outside of this charge, despite its frequent claims otherwise. Wright (2015, 3) similarly remarks that “at its core, ethical vegetarianism does embody [the] paradox [that] one cannot live without causing death.” Without invoking a kind of food nihilism (i.e., if no food is ethical, we must avoid eating), my aim in this chapter has been to open up how to think about, conceptualize, and practice queer food strategies and to what personal and political effect. While vegans do not contribute to the 56 billion land-based animals that are killed every year in the global meat industry (Sorenson 2014), vegan foods remain complicit in the complicated networks we are drawn into by any and all consumption, whether burger or bean. Heeding Alexis Shotwell’s (2016) assertion that it is possible to live ethically in compromised times, aiming to reduce harm as much as possible is laudable. Even if strategies for ethical eating are not attainable, as Megan Dean (2014, 144) affirms, there may still be joys in trying. However, under an eating ethos that too simplistically equates queer food with queer people, veganism may effectively disrupt some normative

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power relations, but does so too often on a purity- and substance-based politic— a politic that is all too familiar to food studies and one that remains all too dangerous to queer studies. Gender and feminist studies have long worked to separate the matter of biological bodies from political and ideological determini­ sms and I think the same cautions should be adopted in a move away from overly ­simplistic ­substance-based food politics. Let’s ask fewer questions about the what or substance of food and more questions about the who, where, and why of food production and consumption. By asking relational-based questions about food and eating practices, I think we will generate more relational-based answers that more  effectively shift simplistic, dualistic, omnivore/vegan food ­divides ­commonly at the forefront of queer food practices. While we can never fully step outside the conditions of possibility that define and enable personal identity in political contexts, we can move toward more nuanced stories about the relational aspects of food in order to better situate and contextualize the bio- and geopolitical projects that reinforce various iterations of classism, racism, healthism, ableism, sexism, sizeism, and heterosexism. As Traci Warkentin (2012) asserts, [s]ince many of us exist in the messy areas in between … veganism, vegetarianism, and meat-eating and yet are still allied with the goals and values of animal [and social] advocacy in multifaceted ways … I want to be cautious about the emergence of a reverse dualism … that oversimplifies the choices people make as all-or-nothing, … generating a troubling mentality of you’re either with us or against us. (501–2)

Dismantling a dichotomous approach (i.e., meat eating/vegan) to e­thical ­eating can work against the polarization that purist, substance-based ­practices invariably erect. Despite our many individual and collective ethical eating ­efforts, “however the bounds of the ‘we’ are drawn, we are not, ever, pure. We’re ­complicit, implicated, [and] tied to the things we abjure” (Shotwell 2016, 7). ­However laudable queer, vegan eating practices may be, as long as they remain tied to purist, substance-based practices, they will continue to reaffirm (at least in some ways) the very political aims they aim to undo. In moving beyond the perhaps ­tempting—yet deeply misguided—idea that individual eating practices can or will remedy the compromised conditions in which we live, a framing that queer food can make queer people remains too complicit in many of the dominant power structures that queer and feminist studies continue to fight against. Queer theory and practice have long held deep commitments to radical relationality and the application of queer political aims to food studies should be no different.

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NOTES 1. Despite multiple attempts, I could not track down the name of the author of this historical piece. Given the paucity of female journalists in 1906, I am assuming the author of “Does Queer Food Make Queer People? An Hour with the Vegetarians” was male. 2. Because of their shared ideologies, I use veganism and vegetarianism interchangeably except when a distinction between the two is needed, or when a distinction is otherwise specified by an author I am referencing. 3. Tristam Stuart’s (2006) The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of Vegetarianism from 1600 to Modern Times and Colin Spencer’s (2000) Vegetarianism: A History also discuss the paradoxes of ethical vegetarianism. 4. Baked Alaska, an American dessert made to commemorate the purchase of Alaska in 1867, is made of ice cream and sponge cake and topped with meringue, which is then baked at a very high temperature long enough to brown the meringue before melting the ice cream (Martha Stewart Living 1996). 5. While not yet formally recognized by the DSM-5, orthorexia is another disease label that pathologizes veganism. Coined in 1997 by physician Steven Bratman, orthorexia describes an extreme obsession with healthy eating, in which veganism is often included (Wright 2015). 6. A killjoy is both a feminist identity and political project that wilfully denounces conditions of oppression even if that means robbing people of perceived joys and happiness (Ahmed 2010). 7. While the concept of nutritionism overlaps with aspects of nutritional science, the two are not equivalent. Scrinis articulates that “it is … important to make clear that nutritionism and nutritional reductionism … do not simply refer to the study or understanding of foods in terms of their nutrient parts. If this were the case, then all scientific research into nutrients, and all nutrient-specific dietary advice, would be necessarily reductive. Rather, it is the ways in which nutrients have often been studied and interpreted, and then applied to the development of dietary guidelines, nutrition labelling, food engineering, and food marketing, that are being described as reductive” (2013, 5; emphasis in original). 8. The manifold cultures assimilated under the category of “Asian” include but are not limited to Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Filipino. While each of these cultures is diverse, with its own unique histories, Asian groups tend to share similar experiences of othering when in Europe and North America (Takinami 2016).

READING QUESTIONS 1. After reading this chapter, do you think veganism is a queer food practice? Why or why not?

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2. How do queerness and veganism aim to accomplish similar political aims?

3. After reading this chapter, do you consider soy an alternative or “queer” food product? Why or why not?

4. What is a “relational food framework” and why is it a useful political strategy? What are the downfalls of a substance-based food framework?

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CHAPTER 5

Because … “Obesity”: Reframing Blame in Food Studies Jennifer Brady, Jacqui Gingras, and Katie LeBesco

LEARNING OBJECTIVES 1. To understand critiques of weight science 2. To analyze a variety of rationales for and critiques of the “obesity epidemic” 3. To interpret the function of mainstream views of “obesity” within food studies 4. To distinguish between mainstream and fat feminist food studies approaches

KEY TERMS critical weight science, fat bias, fat studies, food studies, “obesity epidemic”

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INTRODUCTION Fat bias is defined as the negative weight-related attitudes, beliefs, and judgments toward individuals who are fat. These attitudes are often manifested by false and negative stereotypes that cast fat individuals as unattractive, incompetent, unconcerned about their health, and noncompliant (Puhl and Heuer 2009; Puhl et al. 2015). Fat bias can lead to fat discrimination, which is the unequal or unfair treatment of people because of their weight. Fat bias is pervasive in health care, employment, and educational settings (Puhl and Heuer 2009; Puhl and Luedicke 2013; Puhl, Wharton, and Heuer 2009). The consequences of fat bias for fat people include impaired physical health, increased psychological distress, and diminished social support (Puhl and Heuer 2010; Schvey, Puhl, and Brownell 2014; Tylka et al. 2014). Despite the dubious ideological basis and undeniably negative consequences of fat bias, it persists and continues to permeate academic and popular attitudes toward food and health. The persistence of fat bias is rooted in several erroneous beliefs about body weight and health, including that an “obesity epidemic” is real; that fat people can and should lose weight to become healthier; and that weight conformity will save already stretched health care dollars. These beliefs persist even in the face of ample evidence indicating that measures of “obesity” such as the body mass index (BMI) are inaccurate and virtually meaningless in terms of assessing health (Flegal and Graubard 2009), weight loss is not only unlikely in the long term (Tomiyama, ­A hlstrom, and Mann 2013) but potentially dangerous (Mann et al. 2007) and that ­emphasizing weight loss grossly overlooks the impact of the social determinants of health on individuals’ and communities’ well-being. Unfortunately, food studies and the food movement have not escaped the biased thinking that perpetuates weight-based discrimination. Rather, in this chapter, we explore how fat bias and discrimination have taken on a unique ­character within food studies and the food movement that is nonetheless informed by the same ideologies that fuel weight bias and result in social and material discrimination against fat people. Some of the most recognizable public faces of the food movement, including Michael Pollan, Marion Nestle, Barbara ­Kingsolver, Eric Schlosser, and Jamie Oliver, have marked “obesity” as a symptom of the global industrial food system that overproduces cheap, nutritionally suspect food and have suggested that fixing the food system would solve “obesity” (Guthman 2007, 2011). However, as we show below, using “obesity” to justify calls for food system reform is also commonplace within the food movement among scholars and activists.

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For example, within food studies scholarship, the “obesity epidemic” is ­often framed as a natural manifestation of a highly problematic, undemocratic food system. The phenomena of “feast and famine” (i.e., the coexistence of the “obesity epidemic” and food insecurity/hunger) are often cited to highlight the unsustainable, unjust global agrifood system and to incentivize change among individuals, communities, and policymakers. Calls to change the food system are often justified with evocations of the moral panic surrounding health and “obesity.” Julier (2008) similarly observed that even within the progressive circles of the food movement, “obesity” is often cited as the problem to be solved, such as by school- or community-based food projects, rather than the social inequities that shape and are perpetuated by the food system. Ultimately, this view has perpetuated fat bias and led to missed opportunities for collaboration among those working for social justice, which includes those working to change the food ­system—food studies scholars and food activists—and those working to end (gendered, racialized, and classed) stigmatization of fat bodies—fat studies scholars and fat activists. While we support calls to end the injustices related to the global industrial food system, we assert that such calls must not be made on the backs of fat people, thereby exacerbating fat bias as one form of social injustice. Fat studies is an area of scholarly inquiry that seeks to illuminate and dismantle the workings of fat stigma, as well as to cultivate a community that supports fat identity (LeBesco 2004). Contemporary feminist ­scholarship, including that in fat studies literature, draws on intersectionality t­ heory to understand how the “interacting dimensions of inequality, such as race or ethnicity, class, and gender” produce and maintain health ­d isparities and recognizes that “individuals experience diverse health outcomes not only in terms of their gender, race or social class, but a joint composition of these attributes” (Crenshaw 1991 and Hill Collins 1990 as quoted in Ciciurkaite and Perry 2018, 21). Fat studies scholars have recently explored fatness as an axis of signification and a means by which people are intersectionally oppressed (Nash and Warin 2016). Such a “perspective on body size adds to our u ­ nderstanding of the layeredness and complexity of power d ­ ifferentials, normativities, and identity formations that c­o-produce inequalities” A msterdam 2013, 155). Intersectionality considers the ­ i nteracting (van ­ ­d imensions of social inequality and biases. For example, I­ ndigenous women may ­e xperience e­ levated levels of weight-based discrimination and added psychological ­consequences of weight stigma because of the intersectional effects of ethnic, size, and gender bias (Ciciurkaite and Perry 2018). What fat

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studies scholars, including the authors of this chapter, aim to contribute to intersectionality theory is a recognition of the way in which weight-based discrimination interacts with other forms of discrimination and oppression. In this chapter, we draw on fat studies literature to bring an intersectional perspective that is cognizant of weight-based oppression to a critical, feminist exploration of food studies and the alternative food movement. We aim to politicize the issue of weight and health within calls to revolutionize our food system. We assert that food system reform must not default to a moralizing argument that reinforces fat bias, uses fat people as targets, promotes individual responsibility and virtuous consumption instead of collective social change, and obscures many of the reasons that our food system is failing all of us, as well as the environment. We will end this chapter with a call to create a feminist food justice movement that addresses systemic issues through an intersectional lens, especially as a means to promote health and health equity as embodied social and material practices.

CRITICAL WEIGHT SCIENCE: WEIGHING THE EVIDENCE The relationship between body weight and health has become increasingly troubled by a growing body of scientific evidence that calls into question the common assumption that being fat means being unhealthy, and vice versa. While the impetus of this chapter reaches beyond critiques of weight science, we wish to draw readers’ attention to some highlights from this growing evidence as a way to underscore our argument that leveraging fatness, more specifically the negative health outcomes thought to result from “obesity,” is not only ineffective but frankly oppressive. In contrast to the common assumption that fatness and poor health are synonymous, the actual relationship is actually a lot less clear. While there appears to be a relationship between fatness and some negative health outcomes, scientific evidence shows that all categories of the BMI from “underweight” to “obese” are positively correlated with various diseases. Moreover, the observed correlation between body weights and poor health outcomes is simply that—an observed ­correlation—which is very different than determining body weight to have a causative impact on health and disease. Understanding the difference between a correlative and causative relationship is the first key to unlocking the assumptions emboldened in weight science. A causative relationship is determined mainly through randomized-control trials (RCTs) that measure the effect of an intervention (e.g., a particular diet or drug) on another variable (e.g., blood sugar,

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cholesterol). RCTs are considered the gold standard of scientific research because potential biases of the researcher and participants are thought to be eliminated. However, weight science is based mainly on studies that are only able to find correlation between two variables. This is a problem because studies that reveal correlation do not account for the multiple confounding variables that are likely to impact the research results. In this case, studies that report finding a correlative relationship between fatness and ill health typically do not account for some important confounding variables, including past and present fitness and activity levels, diet quality and nutrient intake, socio-economic status or any other social determinants of health, self-care practices, weight bias and discrimination, access to adequate nondiscriminatory health care, and participant histories of dieting and weight cycling. Yet, each of the variables just listed are known to have an independent impact on people’s health, regardless of their weight, and that when accounted for in weight science research, the risk of disease due to “­obesity” disappears or is significantly reduced (Campos et al. 2005; Lissner et al. 1991; Matheson, King, and Everett 2012; Montelli et al. 2006; Strohacker and ­McFarlin 2010; Rzehak et al. 2007). For example, a study published in the Journal of the American College of ­Cardiology, which many are taking to be definitive proof that you cannot be fat and metabolically healthy, failed to control for the impact of dieting and weight ­cycling, which have both been shown to negatively impact one’s health independent of weight or BMI (Rzehack et al. 2007; Strohacker and ­McFarlin 2010). In their 2010 guidelines document, “Management of Obesity,” the Scottish ­Intercollegiate Guidelines Network states that “Weight cycling is a risk f­actor for all-cause mortality and cardiovascular mortality” (18). This study also failed to ­account for the impact of weight bias, which also negatively impacts fat individuals’ health because of the bio-physiological impact of the experience of stigma ­itself, but also because such stigma significantly decreases fat individuals’ ability to a­ ccess evidence-based, quality health care (Puhl and Heuer 2010; Puhl, ­W harton, and Heuer 2009; Puhl et al. 2015; Puhl and Luedicke 2013). ­Additionally, the usefulness of this study is plagued by the same problem that plagues much weight science; it reveals only an already known correlation b­ etween fatness and health. In other words, this study does not show that fatness causes ill health, only that they are positively correlated. In sum, the results of this study, as with other “anti-obesity” research, are significantly compromised, and should not be taken as evidence that it is impossible to be fat and healthy. Moreover, although increased fatness and type 2 diabetes mellitus (­TIIDM) are positively correlated, this does not mean that fatness causes TIIDM.

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Rather, increased fatness has been found to be protective against various diseases, including TIIDM (Køster-Rasmussen et al. 2016), some cancers (­Bhaskaran et al. 2014; Munsell et al. 2014), advanced kidney disease (Kalantar-Zadeh et al. 2017), and hemodialysis (Aoyagi et al. 2001). What is more, the body mass index on which people are categorized as “underweight,” “normal weight,” “overweight,” and “obese” has been shown to be a grossly inaccurate way of assessing individuals’ health, yet it continues to be used to inform the methodology of weight science research (Flegal and Graubard 2009). In short, the methodological underpinnings of weight science are fundamentally flawed. Still, there are other reasons to critique weight science. Another important finding that has been replicated numerous times in the scientific literature is known as “the obesity paradox” within the weight science research community (Hotchkiss and Leyland 2011). The “obesity paradox” describes the finding that statistically people in the “overweight” BMI category outlive those in the “normal weight” BMI category, and that the incidence of death among those in the “normal weight” and “obese class I” categories is equivalent. Indeed, it is not until BMI of 40 and above (“obese class III”) that a significant impact on risk of death is seen. In short, the findings of weight science that have come to be known as the “obesity paradox” reveal that increased fatness is not associated with greater risk of death. What is also telling about the “obesity paradox” is related to the name itself. As several fat studies scholars and fat activists have pointed out, the “­obesity paradox” is paradoxical only if one first makes the ­assumption that fatness and ill health are synonymous (Aphramor 2010; Biltekoff 2013; ­Campos et  al. 2005; Guthman 2013, 2014; Pausé 2014; Saguy 2013). Rather than ­dispelling the idea that higher weights cause ill health, or changing the health risks associated with each BMI category, in light of these findings, weight science researchers have simply renamed this phenomenon the “obesity paradox,” which reifies weight bias. In other words, the “obesity paradox” reveals the deep weight bias that characterizes weight science. A final highlight from the weight science literature to which we would like to call readers’ attention here is related to a phenomenon described as “the biochemistry of discrimination” (Aphramor 2004; Brady forthcoming; Gingras forthcoming; Tylka et al. 2014). The “biochemistry of discrimination” describes the physiological impact of individuals’ everyday experiences of marginalization (Butler et al. 2002; Muennig 2008; Tylka et al. 2014). The “biochemistry of discrimination” describes the pathway that connects social problems (e.g., racism and weight stigma) and physiological outcomes (e.g., cardiovascular disease). In other words, the “biochemistry of discrimination” identifies the way in which social

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exclusion and oppression literally get “under the skin” (Gingras ­forthcoming) to negatively impact individuals’ physical health. This research demonstrates that the mechanism by which discrimination and internalized stigma take their toll on the bodies of marginalized people is via the physiological response to chronic stress. Hence, to the extent that calls for food system change leverage the inherently stigmatizing language of “obesity,” the food movement is contributing to the social and physiological harm of fat people. Stress has long been known to have negative health consequences, but it is only recently that the stress from stigma generally, and weight stigma specifically, have come into view as a significant predictor of poor public health outcomes. Hatzenbuehler, Phelan, and Link (2013) emphasize that stigma is a fundamental cause of poor public health, building upon earlier work by Link and Phelan (1995) that suggested socio-economic status as a fundamental cause for poor health. Fundamental cause theory suggests that social factors are associated with health inequalities because they influence multiple disease outcomes due to multiple risk factors; fundamental social causes are associated with limited access to resources such as knowledge, money, or power. With this latest work, Hatzenbeuler et al. (2013, 813) “argue that stigma is in fact a central driver of morbidity and mortality at a population level.” Stigma is defined as the co-­occurrence of labelling, stereotyping, separation, status loss, and discrimination in a context in which power is exercised (Link and Phelan 2001). As such, stigma as a social phenomenon gets “under the skin” (Gingras forthcoming) to exercise very specific negative consequences on groups of people. These consequences include those related to the stress response such as high blood pressure, increased cortisol output, impaired insulin responses, increased inflammation of blood vessels, diminished temperature regulation, and increased appetite. There is substantive evidence that these health consequences are strongly associated with other chronic conditions such as heart disease and diabetes. Additionally, weight stigma negatively influences mental health, leads to reduced employment/ income opportunities, negative educational outcomes, and diminished social relationships (Puhl and Heuer 2009). Weight stigma and shame and their negative outcomes are being increasingly understood as greater public health crises than actually being fat (Farrell 2011). The imperative in highlighting the impact of weight stigma is not to occlude the necessity of revising the food system, but to point out that by stigmatizing fatness, we are reproducing and reinforcing the negative conditions that we suspected a problematic food system elicited. In other words, we are making matters worse. The way forward is to develop policy that addresses the fundamental

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social causes, such as stigma, and not further blame the individuals living within those problematic social conditions.

THE “OBESITY EPIDEMIC” AND FAT STUDIES Over 10 years ago, Paul Campos and a group of colleagues (2005) led a counternarrative to the “war on obesity” by asking if the epidemiology of overweight and “obesity” was indicative of a “public health crisis” or if perhaps the growing anxiety about body weight was yet another example of “moral panic.” Campos and colleagues’ (2005) work was one contribution to the emerging field of fat studies, which grew out of decades-long efforts by fat activists to resist fat stigma. Since then, activists and scholars have established fat studies as an important field of inquiry that illuminates how fat stigma and ill health intersect with other forms of oppression to produce abject bodies. Fat studies as a discipline was marked with the publication of The Fat Studies Reader (Rothblum and Solovay 2009) and the Journal of Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society (2012). In their article, Campos and colleagues (2005) reveal the many flaws in the science that have fuelled the “war on obesity.” In a now extensive body of literature, others have similarly shown that the “war on obesity” has not only created a “shadow epidemic” of weight stigma, but is based on deeply flawed science that fails to account for many of the intersecting structural causes of ill health, including income and poverty, racism, sexism, and other forms of social exclusion and oppression (Cameron 2015; Nutter et al. 2016; Sabin, Marini, and Nosek 2012; Saguy 2013). Similarly, this science typically fails to account for the complexity of factors that determine body weight, including genetics, as well as the harm caused by dieting and weight cycling, which describes the typical pattern of weight loss and regain that has been revealed in reviews of weight-loss interventions (Aphramor 2005, 2010; Jette and Rail 2012; Mann ­et al. 2007; Muennig 2008; Pausé 2014; Tomiyama, Ahlstrom, and Mann 2013). As an ­acknowledgement of the flawed basis for health claims about fatness, words and phrases like “obesity” and “obesity epidemic” are often placed in scare quotes by fat studies scholars. In addition to critiques of the science that has fuelled the “war on obesity,” fat studies scholars have also illuminated the discursive and rhetorical manoeuvres that have constructed the “obesity epidemic” and integrated health and body weight as moral issues. One approach that fat studies scholars have taken to challenge fat stigma is to call into question the rhetorical frames that

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inform mainstream common sense about the causes of and solutions to “obesity” (Saguy 2013). In one vein, fat studies scholars have taken up and challenged the individualistic view that positions “obesity” as the result of individuals’ lack of knowledge and self-control: fat people eat too much of the wrong kinds of foods and do not balance this out with an adequate amount of exercise to burn the calories consumed. In this view, the solution to “obesity” is to educate and motivate fat people to simply eat less and move more. Fat studies scholars have responded by critiquing body weight as a verifiable marker for health, noting that by relying on body mass index as the putative indicator, larger people can be categorized as medically compromised when they are actually metabolically healthy (Gaesser 2002). Additionally, the critique is expanded to include other determinants of body size and health, including social determinants. An individualistic frame places the emphasis squarely on individuals to make “correct” lifestyle choices and follow dominant health orthodoxy to maintain a “normal” body weight. Consequently, when individuals gain weight despite the advice offered by wellintended health care professionals, those individuals are blamed for poor choices despite the context in which those choices are exercised. This approach is now known to be healthist, meaning the individual focus on health behaviour change is the priority to the exclusion of social influences, the most significant of which is poverty (Crawford 1980). Consequently, “the framing of ‘obesity’ as illness brought on by bad personal choices can and is being used to blame the poor, rather than poverty or inequality, for negative health outcomes” (Saguy 2013, 13) and neglects an intersectional perspective, which diminishes the importance of interdependent and additive influences of oppression. In another vein, fat studies scholars have also taken up and critiqued the view, often held by thinking progressives who are critical of such individualistic framing, that environmental triggers such as the availability of “unhealthy” food, lack of regulation on advertising, food deserts, built environments, and hormone-disrupting chemicals have caused or contributed to the so-called “obesity epidemic” (Guthman 2011; Kirkland 2011; LeBesco 2014). Solutions proposed in this view include changes to the built environment, improved urban planning and neighbourhood walkability, reduced availability and advertising of junk food, greater access to retailers of “healthy” food, and banning or taxing high-calorie foods and drinks. Proponents of the environmental position on body weight expect that with the correct policy measures, populations will be shepherded into making healthy choices. However, the environmental perspective, although intended to be a kinder, less blame-oriented approach, is no

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less stigmatizing of fat bodies (Kirkland 2011; Colls and Evans 2013). As such, the environmental perspective has already been critiqued by critical fat studies scholars. For example, Colls and Evans (2013, 1) propose that those concerned about the ways that space and built environments contribute to health and social problems should “redefine obesogenic environments not as environments that make bodies fat, but as environments that make fat bodies problematic.” Colls and Evans (2013) illustrate how the “obesogenic environment” approach is hindered by assumptions about the unfounded connection between weight, health, and place that are tinged with moralizing but also classist, racializing, and sexist ideas about what makes a neighbourhood “healthy” or “good,” and that ignore the embodied experiences of fat bodies. Each of these positions on fatness is based on the foundation that there exists an “obesity epidemic.” The moral panic regarding body weight that Campos and colleagues (2005) reference has been concretized by the antiobesity camp through appeals to health. Yet the “obesity epidemic” has been questioned and debunked in the critical literature. What frame exists to proceed if there is no such thing as an “obesity epidemic”? What would this mean for food studies scholars who rest the basis for changing the food system in part or whole on the premise that the current system is contributing to alarming levels of fatness? Where, if at all, would the blame need to fall instead? What motivation beyond eradicating fatness can food studies call upon to enhance global food systems?

“OBESITY” AND FOOD STUDIES Despite the social justice interests of many food studies scholars, food studies scholarship has not been untouched by the problematic assumptions underlying the “war on obesity” (Guthman 2011, 2014). Indeed, food studies scholars and food activists have too often leveraged the panic about “obesity” to justify calls to reform everything from school lunches to gardening (Biltekoff 2013), gendered food politics (Allen and Sachs 2007), and the food system (Patel 2012). Other scholars, contributing literature that spans critical food and critical nutrition studies, have similarly noted and critiqued the use of “obesity” as a cause célèbre for food system reform. For example, scholars such as Guthman (2014) as well as Kimura, Biltekoff, Mudry, and Hayes-Conroy (2014) have problematized the way in which “obesity” and the rhetorical moralization of ill health, poor choices, and lack of knowledge has been leveraged by food reformers to justify their calls for action. By way of contributing to these critiques and exposing fat stigma within the food

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movement and food studies scholarship we include three areas of discussion in this section: (1) we highlight some of the main rhetorical manoeuvres by which “obesity” is leveraged to call for food system reform; (2) we offer examples from recent food studies scholarship to further illustrate our case that fat stigma is too often present within food studies; (3) we consider how an uncritical acceptance of weight science by food studies scholars and food reformers underlies fat stigma within these movements. The view that “obesity” is a symptom of a broken food system is often couched in rhetorical arguments that juxtapose the so-called “obesity epidemic” with rising incidence of global hunger and food insecurity, which some have described as the “stuffed and starved” phenomenon (Patel 2012). This argument equates food insecurity and “obesity” as symptoms of the inequitable distribution of food on a global scale whereby some have too little food, while others overeat. Although food insecurity and hunger are no doubt the cause of insufficient access to or availability of food mainly in the global South, “obesity” is not simply the upshot of the opposite scenario—easy access to abundant food in the global North. Underlying the notion that abundant food is contributing to “obesity” is the unquestioned assumption that fat people are fat because they overeat, and that it is the easy availability of food that is inducing their overeating. This assumption grossly oversimplifies the relationships among body weight, food availability, and eating behaviours, and completely overlooks the complex physiological, psychological, social, cultural, and environmental systems that influence body weight. Moreover, the stuffed and starved framing of “obesity” exacerbates fat stigma for the very reason that it is effective as a rhetorical device; that is, the juxtaposition of those who are stuffed (i.e., the “obese”) and those who are starved (i.e., the food insecure) invokes shame and gluttony to underscore the point that the food system is not working. Another way that food reformers often frame “obesity” in calls for food system change is by seeing “obesity” as an indication of taste gone wild (Wansink 2007; Kessler 2010; Moss 2014). In this view, those who are fat overeat, and they overeat because they lack the knowledge and sense of good taste with which to appreciate wholesome quality food. Guthman (2008) argues that a cultural politics characterized by the phrase “if they only knew” is at the root of the exclusionary cultural practices with respect to race that pervade farmers’ markets and other alternative food outlets. Guthman (2008) shows that alternative food discourse and practice exudes middle-class whiteness that makes alternative food spaces closed to racialized others. We argue that a similar cultural politics is at play with respect to weight, particularly in the idea that when food is of “good”

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quality, people will eat less, and therefore not get fat. Hence, it is the abundance of unhealthy, processed, and convenience foods that induce overeating. Similar to the “stuffed and starved” framing of fatness, this view overlooks the relationships among eating, weight, and health, but also adds moralistic judgments about what is “good” to eat. The individualistic, behaviour-centred framings of “obesity” that we discuss above and that feature within food system reform rhetoric rest on ­neoliberal views of health that frame fatness as the result of individuals’ poor lifestyle choices. Paradoxically, these framings are being drawn upon in service of calls for system-level change. This contradictory logic that marries structural-level food system reform and moralizing, individualizing incitements of “obesity” limits the potency of calls for structural-level change; it also contributes to weight stigma, and further alienates critical scholars and activists working toward radical fat acceptance and recognition of fat identity as one aspect of a wider move toward social justice. Unfortunately, this facile deployment of “obesity” as a haunting spectre exists not only in the rhetoric of front-line food reformers but also within the academic field of food studies. For instance, in the most recent edition of Critical Perspectives on Food Studies (Koc, Sumner, and Winson 2017, xv), the editors indicate their volume is a “critical inquiry” that “examines how patterns of social inequalities, institutional arrangements, structures, and organizations such as the patriarchal family, corporations, governmental bodies, international treaties, and the media contribute to the farm crisis, hunger, the obesity epidemic, eating disorders, food insecurity, and environmental problems.” Additionally, applying political economic analyses and focusing primarily on class inequalities, the editors claim that their volume will provide “insights on how the expansion of capitalist relations of production destroys rural livelihoods (chapter 8), creates poverty and hunger (chapter 14), and contributes to ill health and obesity (chapters 12, 13)” (7). We contend that indeed this analysis is critical for calling attention to a global food system in disarray, but we note that the word obesity is in fact used uncritically throughout the volume, in at least eight of the 24 chapters. For instance, claims that “The growing evidence that the industrial food system is associated with climbing rates of obesity and diet-related disease prompts many consumers to seek out healthier alternatives” (244) and “the degradation of contemporary food environments in Canada plays a significant role in exacerbating weight gain and obesity in society and the serious health outcomes that have been linked to this” (186) reflect retrograde presumptions about obesity, thereby achieving the opposite effect of critical engagement.

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Such uncritical adoption of “obesity” as the sine qua non of an imperilled food system is evident in not only published food studies scholarship but in new work in the pipeline as well. A search of the 2017 Canadian Association of Food Studies (CAFS) conference program yields similar views on the relationships between the negative aspects of the food system and body weight. For instance, in her abstract entitled “Igniting Imagination for Sustainable Food Systems and Food Narratives,” Kevany (CAFS 2017, 27) states, “Links between diet and disease, obesity and local food environments are well established. Yet achieving reductions in obesity and improvements in sustainable diets have been elusive.” Likewise, Mees and Bellows Parsons (CAFS 2017, 44) explain, “The participatory design and self-built structures described herein reveal democratically derived objectives of autonomous urban land use that evolved without necessarily adhering to ‘normal’ or common design standards of urban agriculture, a strategy for obesity prevention, or even ‘urban beautification’ generally.” While the efforts to change the food system and how, why, and what we eat are laudable, the framing used to justify this work is inherently oppressive for fat bodies. We ask, aren’t these changes worth doing in their own right to advance the just practices and outcomes of the food system, and not because of “obesity”? As Kathleen LeBesco argued in the 2014 CAFS keynote address, efforts to reform the food system need not be made on the backs of fat people. At the core of the problematic use of “obesity” to justify food system reform is an unquestioned reliance on weight and antiobesity science by food studies scholars and members of the food movement. Brady, Parker, and Hite (in progress) argue that despite their critical perspective on the industrial agricultural and food manufacturing industries (i.e., Big Agriculture and Big Food), food movement reformers seem to uncritically accept the view of “obesity” promulgated by “big nutrition.” According to Brady, Parker, and Hite (in progress), big nutrition includes the “conglomerate of research, public health, health promotion, and nutrition experts that have biomedicalized food and eating and therein redefined food and eating primarily as health practices.” We assert that big nutrition has similarly framed body weight as a biomedical phenomenon wherein the body is understood in mechanistic terms, and body weight is seen as the outcome of one’s caloric energy balance (i.e., calories in and calories out). The biomedical framing of food, eating, and body weight rests on nutrition and health science to make its case that “obesity” is a health problem and the result of caloric imbalance. However, as others have shown, much of the nutrition and health science on which this view is based is not untouched by weight stigma (Aphramor 2005, 2010, 2016, 2017; Bacon and Aphramor 2011). In other words, despite claims to

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objectivity and evidence-based practice, big nutrition is rooted in science that is rooted in and promotes weight stigma.

FAT FEMINIST FOOD STUDIES As those concerned with bringing an intersectional analysis to the issue of fatness, we join the transdisciplinary call to critique the use of “obesity” as a marker for all that is wrong with the global food system. The strategies we encourage going forward are as simple and practical as placing quotes around the word obesity1 when opting to include the word in our writing to the more complicated manoeuvre of raising questions about the import of stigmatizing a group of individuals in the name of critiquing the food system. As a colleague recently asked, “When is a good time to rely on an approach that is known to produce stigma and shame?” (L. Aphramor, personal communication, August 11, 2017). The answer, of course, is never. As feminist fat studies and food studies scholars, we propose that any effort to critique and enhance the food system not perpetrate harm, nor further marginalize any group. Following on the work of Vandana Shiva, we call for a renewed fervor toward biodiversity of thought where our focus is on the systemic, not the consequent. In discussing her book, Monocultures of the Mind, Shiva (1993) reminds food studies scholars who rail against the destructive impact of monocultures that “the failure to understand biodiversity and its many functions is at the root of the impoverishment of nature and culture” (Shiva 2012, para. 11). In other words, if as critical food studies scholars we decry the devastating consequences of growing food in monocultures, we must also decry the impact of healthism and sizeism whereby the human body is seen to be acceptable if it looks and behaves in specific, moralistic, one-dimensional, and monocultural expressions. Food justice is indelibly related to social justice and working from a place of social justice places food studies scholars as responsible for upholding body ideologies that promote peace and compassion. O’Hara and Gregg (2012) insist that propagating a war on “obesity” is a human rights violation given the harms that have been done in the name of eradicating fatness. We believe that food studies scholars do not wish to do harm. Our effort to reveal the tensions within food studies that emerge when “obesity” is framed in this way is meant to redress this practice; we wish to see an end to the noncritical use of the word obesity in food studies scholarship. We believe this change is swiftly achievable and absolutely essential.

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We work from the perspective that fatness is not a crisis; rather, it is a natural human variation, and for a field like food studies, which generally recognizes the benefits of biodiversity, to fail to recognize this is stunning. Although food studies scholars and food activists have decried population-level weight gain as a sign of the apocalypse, these weight gains parallel other population-level changes in embodiment, like greater height and longer lives. Instead of advocating p ­ opulation-level interventions that have dire effects on fat people as individuals, we call for food studies scholarship and food activist work to maintain a measure of skepticism about any equation that posits health or weight as the measure of a person, and to invest in environmental change for myriad good reasons rather than the broken record that is reducing the “scourge” of fatness (Brady et al. 2017). We critique reform efforts that rely on the limited vehicle of consumer choice, with its fetish for virtuous individual consumption, as a tool for social and political transformation. Food studies scholars must ask ourselves why we are willing to beat people down—to shame and stigmatize them—in the name of health, which is the goal of much food system reform. We must ask what beliefs about morally appropriate behaviour and desirable aesthetics underpin our efforts that read to many (fat) people as “concern trolling.” A food justice movement that works on systemic issues could improve everyone’s health without shaming those whose bodies we read as failing to conform to our behavioural and aesthetic ideals. To surmount the obstacles that uncritical participation in fat panic discourse presents us, we must foster future collaborations among fat activists, food activists, food studies scholars, and fat studies scholars.

NOTE 1. Of course, the use of those quotes denotes a ready familiarity with the premise of critical weight studies, which requires ongoing efforts to understand the fallibility of antiobesity evidence and the harm that using the word obesity inflicts through shaming and stigmatizing of people with nonconforming body sizes.

READING QUESTIONS 1. What does “stuffed and starved” mean? Why do the authors object to this formulation?

2. Explain the role of correlation and causation in contemporary weight science research. What conclusion can you draw about “obesity” as a result?

3. Why do the authors use scare quotes around the word obesity?

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4. Compare and contrast individual and environmental frames for obesity. What frame do the authors suggest instead, and why?

5. How does mainstream food studies regard “obesity”? What alternative do the authors propose?

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A Reader, 2nd ed., edited by C. Counihan and P. Van Esterik, 482–99. New York: Routledge.

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Køster Rasmussen, R., M. Kildevaeld Simonsen, V. Siersma, J. E. Henriksen, B. L. ­Heitmann, and N. de Fine Olivarius. 2016. “Intentional Weight Loss and Longevity in

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———. 2014. “Food, Fat, Morality, and Mortality: Collaborating toward Justice.” Keynote address, Canadian Association for Food Studies Annual Conference, Brock University, St. Catharines, ON, May 26.

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CHAPTER 6

“Lose Like a Man”: Gender and the Constraints of Self-Making in Weight Watchers Online1 Emily Contois

LEARNING OBJECTIVES 1. To discover how gender is constructed through food, as well as through food-related practices like food shopping, eating, cooking, dining out, and dieting 2. To explain critiques of dieting, particularly from the perspectives of feminist food studies and fat studies 3. To consider the role of personal technology in foodways and dieting practices 4. To assess how marketing and advertising employ and manipulate conventional definitions of gender

KEY TERMS dieting, gender, hegemonic masculinity, masculinity

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“Inside every overweight woman is a woman she knows she can be.” “Really, I just want to be a better version of myself.” “It’s never too late to start anew.” “Weight Watchers changed my life.”

INTRODUCTION The diet industry convincingly feeds consumers not only weight-loss programs and products but also promises like the ones called out above.2 These vows of personal transformation assure dieters that weight loss forges a path to a new and better version of oneself. Despite the near total failure rate of diets—­ indeed, more and more obesity research indicates that long-term weight loss is next to impossible to achieve (Gaesser 2009; Fothergill et al. 2016)—the diet ­industry exerts a strong hold on Americans. In a country that boasts more than 100  ­million dieters, the commercial diet industry churns out approximately $60 ­billion in revenue annually (PRWeb 2013, 2014). A nexus of discourses on food, bodies, health, and cultural ideals, dieting encapsulates the paradoxes and conflicts at the core of American identity: abundance and restriction, freedom and containment, aspirations and expectations. Indeed, anxiety about food and eating—as exemplified through dieting—has been characterized as a quintessentially American and middle-class preoccupation (Biltekoff 2013; Guthman 2014; Peña 2010; Stearns [1997] 2002). Furthermore, neoliberal edicts strongly promote the pillars of self-improvement and personal responsibility, elevating “good health” to a “super-value” and venerated characteristic of good citizenship (Crawford 2006). Analyzing the public faces of commercial diet programs teases apart a segment of American identity, not through what we eat but through what we aspire so vehemently to limit and avoid. A leading player in the commercial weight-loss industry since 1963, Weight Watchers expanded its product portfolio into cyberspace with the new millennium, launching Weight Watchers Online in 2001. Featuring online tools and downloadable apps, the online program exists within the relative anonymity of the internet, divorced from the in-person weigh-ins, group meetings, and tangible resources that characterize the traditional Weight Watchers program—and the faceto-face social support credited for the program’s success (Dansinger et al. 2005). The new millennium ushered in another shift at Weight Watchers. Though 90 percent of the program’s clients had historically been female, Weight W ­ atchers expanded into the “under-tapped niche market” of male dieters (PRWeb 2013). In 2007, Weight Watchers followed Nutrisystem’s lead, which began ­Nutrisystem for Men in 2005, and created Weight Watchers Online for Men, a program

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“customized just for guys” (Schultz 2011). The company reported a 28 percent increase in male subscribers between 2006 and 2007 (Newman 2008) and hungered for more. In 2011, Weight Watchers heavily promoted Weight Watchers Online for Men with a $10-million campaign, including commercials aired during the NBA and NHL playoffs that year (Schultz 2011). Invoking the spirit of sport and the cachet of celebrity, ads featured former professional basketball player Charles Barkley as a spokesperson.3 With digital products designed to target male and female clients separately, Weight Watchers Online communicates, represents, and manipulates gender in its program pitch. Unsurprisingly, Weight Watchers upholds a strict gender binary, reinscribing traditional understandings of masculinity and femininity. Weight Watchers also attempts in specific ways to counter the cultural construction of dieting as feminine. According to the boundaries set by hegemonic masculinity (Connell 2005), male dieting is taboo and transgressive (Bentley 2005; De Souza and Ciclitira 2005; Gough 2007). As a result, Weight Watchers forcefully engages aspects of hegemonic masculinity in its men’s program in order to “masculinize” and “de-feminize” dieting. In this chapter, I demonstrate how Weight Watchers constructs “masculine” versus “feminine” dieting through contrasting depictions of food, the body, and technology use. For women, weight-loss technologies—such as Weight Watchers’ points tracking apps—are intended to further the emotional, psychological, and highly internalized project of self-discipline. This discipline fuels the pursuit of idealized thinness, which purportedly transforms the body and the self. Weight Watchers portrays female dieters on a difficult but actualizing and empowering journey toward a new and better self. For men, however, Weight Watchers portrays the same dieting technology as keeping the work of weight loss at arm’s length. Weight Watchers depicts male clients losing weight easily, even effortlessly, and retaining a stable and immutable masculine selfhood throughout the process. By analyzing the difference in the weight-loss experiences that Weight Watchers Online promises, I argue that limited types of self are made available to women and men. This constraint upon self-making exposes how patriarchy subordinates even the men assumed to profit the most from its power, as the male weight-loss promise withholds transformative potentials.

METHODS: INTERPRETING GENDER AND THE FOODSCAPE To investigate the gendered distinctions put forth by Weight Watchers Online, I conducted a side-by-side comparison of the “How Does It Work” videos for the

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“female” and “male” programs featured on each program’s website home page.4 These two short videos, each approximately 90 seconds long and following the same overall narrative, provide compact sources of evidence well suited to a comparative approach. I supplemented my readings of the videos with analysis of the additional text and images featured on each of the Weight Watchers home pages. These videos distill the Weight Watchers Online program as they summarize the plan, its attributes, and its tools, as well as the Weight Watchers promise and point of view. In these videos, Weight Watchers also constructs its own boundaries and possibilities for femininities and masculinities through depictions of food, the body, the process of weight loss, and the use of digital technologies. As Susan Bordo (1993, 110) argued in her analysis of food advertisements, these videos are cultural representations that do not just describe gender; rather, through the construction of strict binaries, they culturally reproduce gender ideology, difference, and inequality. To interpret gender within the videos, I applied the tools of critical discourse analysis, a method that provides a multidisciplinary view of how text, verbal exchange, and other communicative events influence social structures and power relations (van Dijk 1993). I use critical discourse analysis to assess the words, tone, and style used in these videos when communicating with men and women about dieting, food, bodies, and the self. I also position these discourses within the foodscape that each video depicts and alludes to. Building from Appadurai’s “scapes,” the foodscape is a concept that not only depicts the material realities of the global food system, but also engages relational and dynamic networks of power (Johnston and Goodman 2015). The foodscape concept analyzes together and at once food culture, political economy, representation, mediation, space, and environment. Josée Johnston and Michael Goodman argue that food media plays a significant role in both framing and mediating the foodscape: Foodscape mediation is, therefore, a fraught and multifaceted process. It equally contains the expressions of social resistance and acceptances. It crosses the realms of the mind, unconscious tastes, desires, and visceral embodiments with those of socially constructed ideals of fit bodies, optimal health, good taste, and responsible consumers. (2015, 209)

In this chapter, I use the foodscape concept to further contextualize and extend the theoretical reach of critical discourse analysis as the foodscape situates text, words, and language in space, in time, in culture, and within dynamic hierarchies. Using these methods, I endeavour to identify and interpret the

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relationships of power within Weight Watchers’ gendered promises, as depicted in these online videos.

BACKGROUND: THE GENDERING OF DIETING, THE BODY, AND TECHNOLOGY This analysis engages literatures addressing gender and its intersections with dieting, the body, and technology. Taking their theoretical foundation from ­Michel Foucault’s (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, scholars have applied his concepts of self-surveillance, panopticonism, gaze, confession, and the potential for resistance to the study of dieting and bodies. Much of this scholarship on dieting has focused on women and femininities. Past feminist scholarship has explored how dieting enforces patriarchal power, exerts control, and conducts surveillance over women’s bodies (Bartky 1990; Bordo 1993; Stinson 2001; Heyes 2006). The female dieter is simultaneously a subject and subjected in the pursuit of socially mandated thinness. In his history of diets, Hillel Schwartz draws connections between gender, fatness, and dieting, as he argues that fat men have been represented as gluttons and monsters, and fat women as patients and freaks. Turn-of-the-century diet programs operationalized these conceptions in gendered terms: “Campaigns directed at men have been framed as adventures, romances that will provoke an immediate change in the world: physical prowess, political action, business success. Campaigns directed at women have been framed as rituals of watchfulness in response to external threats” (Schwartz 1986, 18). These gendered constructions of dieting continue to the present day, due in part to dominant constellations of masculinity, which frame dieting as supremely feminine. “Hegemonic masculinity” is defined as the currently accepted and normative form of masculinity that secures men’s dominant position, while subordinating all women and any men who are not heterosexual, white, and middle class (Connell 2005; Connell and Messerschmidt 2005, 832). In contemporary Western societies, the idealized masculine character is typically “a White, ­middle-class, breadwinning man” who is “strong, competent, in control, competitive, assertive (if not aggressive), rational/instrumental, and oriented toward the public rather than the private sphere” (Grindstaff and West 2011, 860). Nutrition and health knowledge, healthy eating, concern for weight, and weight loss are each considered feminine and in conflict with hegemonic masculinity (Courtenay 2000). Because of this, when commercial diet programs market their products to men, they must refute the claim that “real men don’t diet” (Gough 2007).

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The cultural construction of gender also affects social perception of bodies, particularly fat bodies. Fat studies scholars assert that contemporary negative assumptions about fatness—as well as fat stigma and its resulting material and ideological oppressions—are rooted in a historically specific and socially constructed view of the fat body as a social malignancy (Braziel and LeBesco 2001; Farrell 2011; Hill 2011; Kulick and Meneley 2005; LeBesco 2004; Rothblum and Solovay 2009). These forces judge women’s bodies more severely than men’s, based on stringent notions of ideal beauty and motherhood (Bergman 2009; Van Amsterdam 2013). In his study of men and dieting, Lee F. Monaghan (2008, 6) complements the work of feminist fat studies scholars, arguing that fat oppression is real and that, in our current historical moment, it affects female bodies the most. It also affects fat male bodies, which are coded as feminine and emblematic of “failed manhood.” Based on such assumptions, male dieting is further denigrated as “an admission of that failure” (Mallyon et al. 2010). This “failure” is due in part to shifts in the cultural construction of ideal body types for men and women, which are linked to similarly idealized notions of productive citizenship. Women have long been oppressed by the Western ideal of slimness and their bodies objectified in the media. The hegemonic ideal of a chiselled, muscular form—which emerged in the late nineteenth century (Green 1986; Schwartz 1986)—remains dominant for men, particularly the muscles frequently featured in the media, such as abdominals, pectorals, and biceps (Hoyt and Kogan 2001). Men have typically been less critical of their own bodies than women. As Susan Bordo (1999) demonstrated in The Male Body and others have studied (Pope, Phillips, and Olivardia 2000; Labre 2005), men’s bodies are increasingly treated in similarly objectified ways. Scholarship on identity and embodiment argues that like the female body, the male body is “a new (identity) project in high/late/postmodernity,” a consumerist context in which the body takes on a symbolic value (in Bourdieu’s terms) for its exteriority, for what it looks like (Gill 2005). This emphasis on appearances directs an objectifying gaze that is turned upon both female and male bodies. Analyses of popular magazines from the mid- to late twentieth century indicate an increase in the number of images featuring seminaked men, putting an ideal masculine form on display for all to see, judge, and covet (Pope et al. 2000; Stibbe 2004; Hatton and Trautner 2011). Relatedly, male body image concerns appear to have begun increasing in the latter half of the twentieth century (Garner 1997). From Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo and Rocky to former Mr. Universe and Mr. Olympia Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator, the “hard body” action movie hero infiltrated popular culture in the 1980s and 1990s. These films and stars linked depictions of rugged masculinity to

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a specific, idealized male body (Jeffords 1993), themes that still reign at the box office. In the most recent wave of superhero films, the muscular male form is front, centre, and in body-centric costume. Social pressure to conform to this ideal male body type has further increased as actors like Chris Pratt and Paul Rudd have achieved them—changes characterized as “the latest bro-next-door to transform into a man of steel” (Stein 2015). Furthermore, among US college-aged study subjects, men and women have been found to experience similar rates of body dissatisfaction, as high as 95 percent of both men and women (Mishkind et al. 1986). These concerns have drawn scholarly attention, yielding new concepts, terms, and areas of study that explore men and their relationship to their bodies, such as the Adonis Complex (Pope et al. 2000), muscle dysmorphia (Baghurst 2012; Mitchell et al. 2016), and orthorexia nervosa, which is defined as “a maniacal obsession for healthy foods” (Donini et al. 2013; Brytek-Matera et al. 2015). Michael Kimmel, who is widely recognized as a leading expert on the study of men and masculinities, aptly summarizes these trends: “I don’t think there’s ever been a time when men have been more preoccupied with their bodies than today” (Newman 2008). Although women remain disproportionately oppressed by body ideals and social standards of physical beauty, these trends indicate that men’s bodies are increasingly scrutinized as well—and that men experience, to some degree, similar dissatisfaction and distress. While dieting is culturally normative for women, “a noteworthy portion of men” also diet to combat body dissatisfaction (Markey and Markey 2005, 528). Commercial weight-loss programs have sought to profit from these shifting male body ideals and increasing discontent, but it was the emergence of an online program that facilitated Weight Watchers’ attempt to garner male subscribers. Fearing men would not attend in-person meetings in significant numbers, Weight Watchers Online for Men assures subscribers that the online message boards are “men only,” seeking to masculinize the Weight Watchers experience through excluding women spatially and conceptually. Weight Watchers Online also largely frames weight loss as an individualized experience mediated by digital tools. For example, the Weight Watchers Online home page invites dieters to “Lose weight completely online,” as if the work and results of weight loss occur within a suspended, cyber reality. In the Weight Watchers Online for Men video that I analyze in this chapter, a male dieter confesses that he thought “Weight Watchers was just for the ladies,” but then he “got the trusted plan, completely online, customized just for guys.” This pivot from Weight Watchers as derisively “feminine” to acceptably “masculine” depends upon the anonymity and strict gender binary that the online program endorses.

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Armed with online tools and apps that can be downloaded to smartphones and tablets, Weight Watchers Online subscribers engage in a relatively new system of digitized weight loss that is significantly more mobile than previous iterations. When they launched, online programs were positioned to grow and overtake more traditional diet programs; traditional program sales were flat in 2012, while online programs grew by 8 percent. Notably, Weight Watchers’ 1.7 million paid subscribers led the pack, generating $504 million in revenue (PRWeb 2013). Combining aspects of its traditional in-person program and digital weight-loss tools, Weight Watchers Online exists between two worlds of commercial diet programming. Weight Watchers’ foray into the online space demonstrates how t­ echnology increasingly shapes elements of everyday life. It also mirrors broader trends in digital health care and wellness. This landscape has changed significantly with the rising popularity of biometric self-tracking devices like the Fitbit, which was released in 2008.5 Deborah Lupton (2013, 395) examines selftracking devices and practices from various theoretical perspectives, including “­concepts of t­echnological bodily enhancement and techno-utopian visions of the perfect(ible) body, healthism and personal responsibility, visualization and bodily display and the allure and power of metrics inherent in the use of these ­ieting—with Weight Watchers or otherwise—has always devices.” While d ­endorsed and e­nhanced bodily surveillance, self-tracking devices “direct the gaze directly at the body. They privilege an intense focus on and highly detailed knowledge of the body” (Lupton 2013, 396). Employing a comparative historical approach, Kate Crawford, Jessa Lingel, and Tero Karppi (2015, 480) explore similar phenomena. They investigate how the weight scale, which first emerged in the late nineteenth century, and twenty-first-century wearable, self-tracking devices both promise self-knowledge and require self-discipline. Conceptually straddling the analogue and the digital, Weight Watchers Online also demonstrates the continuity and paradox between surveillance, self-discipline, selfknowledge, and self-improvement. This expansion in voluntary self-surveillance exerts control over the shape, size, and supposed healthfulness of bodies. It also produces constructions of gender and negotiations of power.

READING THE VIDEOS: HOW DOES (GENDER) WORK? These two “How Does It Work” videos present the success stories of Bonnie and Dan, who are presented as actual Weight Watchers Online users (see Figure 6.1). Bonnie, a young woman dressed fashionably in a sleeveless, V-neck, black dress

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Figure 6.1 (Source: www.weightwatchers.com/women [2013] and www.weightwatchers.com/men [2016] videos)

and coral-coloured necklace, explains in a soft-spoken voice the Weight Watchers Online program to female consumers. With his hair shaved short on the sides in typical military style, Dan is smartly dressed in a grey sweater and dark-wash jeans as he discusses the program’s components for men with confident posturing and an assertive tone. As model Weight Watchers participants, Bonnie and Dan e­ mbody a specific subjectivity that is white, middle class, heterosexual, ­youthful, able, and attractive. They have achieved a weight status to which viewers are ­expected to aspire; they exhibit a dedication to self-improvement that viewers are expected to replicate. Bonnie and Dan enact “successful” performances of both normative gender (Butler 2006) and fitness, which are ever-increasing requirements within neoliberal contexts, where bodies are read as evidence—or not—of self-sufficient and productive citizenship (Biltekoff 2013; Guthman 2011). Both Bonnie and Dan lost significant weight on Weight Watchers; ­Bonnie lost 47 pounds and Dan 67 pounds. These videos depict the meaning of weight loss differently for each of them, however. At the beginning of the video, ­Bonnie, a self-proclaimed “Texas girl,” shares the screen with her “before” photo and attributes her weight gain to family gatherings marked by lots of fattening food (see Figure 6.1). Prompted by personal concerns for her health and weight, Bonnie signed up for Weight Watchers Online. While Bonnie engages in the self-reflective work endorsed by the Weight Watchers approach, Dan does not. Instead, he states that he was a sergeant in the military who “could have been honourably discharged [for] barely meeting the fitness requirements.” Dan joined Weight Watchers not to transform himself both inside and out, as Bonnie did, but to salvage his career by changing his body. As such, Dan’s motivation to lose weight is made to appear more legitimate than Bonnie’s, and his “masculine”

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weight loss connotes enhanced importance. While the video depicts Bonnie as a woman who ate too much and then worried about the personal health consequences, Dan’s weight loss is depicted as central to his career success and, as a military sergeant, to the health of the nation-state as well. Word choice reinforces the orientation of male weight loss outside the self. Dan talks of “losing the weight” (emphasis added), while Bonnie speaks of “my health,” “my weight,” and “my weight loss” (emphasis added). Dan does not address his role in gaining weight; he does not adopt the mantle of personal responsibility that Weight Watchers requires. Dan does not mention, for example, wanting to be there for his children, feeling guilty, or suffering low self-esteem. Engaging the distance that “the” produces, Dan does not speak of fatness, weight, or weight loss in terms that relate to his identity and sense of self. In this way, these Weight Watchers videos articulate social beliefs that fatness diminishes selfhood and obscures gender, resulting in out-of-control women and failed, effeminate men. For dieters, weight loss is constructed as a disciplined act that “will eventually demarcate them as intelligible men and women” (Bosc 2014, 69). Within these constructions of “masculine” and “feminine” fatness and ideal bodies, Dan purposefully distances himself from his previously fat body as he adheres to hegemonic masculinity. At the end of his video, Dan claims, “I’ve become an officer and a role model for my men” now that he has lost weight and is on track to run a marathon. The video again frames Dan’s weight within a professional capacity, orienting his body—and its purported fat disability and thin ability—toward the masculinized, public sphere. In this space, his weight loss connotes achievement, complete with a professional promotion, accolades, self-confidence, and leadership status. On the other hand, Bonnie’s weight loss is about how she feels about herself. After losing weight, Bonnie says, “Now I’m hiking, I’m biking, I’m dancing. But mostly, I’m more comfortable with myself than I’ve ever been.” Bonnie also acknowledges her former fat self again. At the end of the video, she appears beside another “before” photo and says, “This used to be me. I transformed my life with Weight Watchers Online and I’ve never looked back and I know that you can too” (see Figure 6.2). Dan never appears in the same frame as his formerly fat body. While Dan does say, “Weight Watchers changed my life,” the male program video concludes by focusing on his continual progress, embodied in his ongoing fitness journey. The final frames of the video show Dan in exercise clothes crossing a finish line (see Figure 6.2). While Bonnie and Dan use the same digital tools, the videos depict them gaining and losing weight differently. Bonnie and Dan appear throughout the

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Figure 6.2 (Source: www.weightwatchers.com/women [2013] and www.weightwatchers.com/men [2016] videos)

foodscape—at restaurants, in food stores, and at home—interacting with food in ways that invoke conventional definitions of gender. For example, both Bonnie and Dan use “cheat sheets,” which are designed to help dieters make “point-­ conscious” decisions when eating out. But they use the tool in stereotypically gendered settings and to select foods that align with gender norms and expectations. Conventional notions of gender create hierarchies of flavours, tastes, foods, and ways of eating. Masculinity maps onto spicy, hearty, and savoury flavours and foods, as well as large portions consumed with gusto; while femininity marks dainty, light, and sweet flavours and foods, eaten in small portions with restraint (Kiefer, Rathmanner, and Kunze 2005; Wardle et al. 2004). Weight Watchers Online for Men repeats such stereotypes with explicit references to foods that match “masculine” preferences and appetites. A section on the website is titled, “You can eat that. And that. And that.” Alongside images of hot dogs, chicken wings, mac and cheese, ice cream sandwiches, and steak kabobs, the text assures male dieters, “Seriously—no food is off-limits. You can eat anything you want. You’ll just learn to do it a whole lot smarter.” In the video, Dan also eats out at a stereotypically masculine location—a sports bar, filled with round, high-top tables, backless stools, and flat-screen TVs. Conversely, Bonnie dines at a more formal, sit-down restaurant, with large, rectangular tables and plush booths (see Figure 6.3). Dan uses cheat sheets to order “masculine” comestibles: tacos and pizza. The video does not depict Dan making what would be considered “healthy” dietary choices. Rather, he uses the program to track what he eats and “stay on plan” in order to lose weight. The plan, these foods, and these ways of eating portray Dan maintaining an uninterrupted lifestyle and a consistent masculinity while on Weight Watchers.

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Figure 6.3 (Source: www.weightwatchers.com/women [2013] and www.weightwatchers.com/men [2016] videos)

He curtails neither his social life nor the foods he likes to eat—Dan does not order a salad when watching the game with friends. Bonnie, on the other hand, uses cheat sheets to order more feminized and health-conscious fare: a pink-hued cocktail and a plate of whole-wheat spaghetti, lightly dressed with a red sauce and green vegetables. Her selections reinforce how Weight Watchers depicts ­female dieters engaged in the self-discipline of dieting, which requires altering eating habits as part of the dieting process. Following the rules of dieting and of gender normativity, Bonnie does not order a pizza. Bonnie and Dan also use the barcode scanner on their smartphones—a tool that scans food products to determine their Weight Watchers “Points Plus” value—in gendered ways and spaces. Dan uses it to purchase a snack—in this case, a bag of chips at a convenience store—so that he “can stay on plan” while “on the go.” Bonnie, however, uses the barcode scanner at the supermarket to learn the point value of a box of whole-wheat pasta (see Figure 6.4). Again, these videos construct a gendered division between “healthy” (feminine) and “unhealthy” (masculine) food choices. Furthermore, Dan uses the barcode scanner within a public environment in which he is independent, busy, and in motion. Conversely, Bonnie uses the same tool in the supermarket, a site that since its inception has been framed as a feminized space, even “a housewife’s paradise” (Deutsch 2010). Unlike Dan, who uses the tool while “on the go,” Bonnie’s video seamlessly transports her from the supermarket aisle to a kitchen, spatially reinforcing the enduring, feminized character of food shopping and preparation (Cairns and Johnston 2015). Furthermore, while Bonnie discusses cooking and recipe tools in a kitchen, Dan never mentions these tools or appears in such a space. Instead, he uses

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Figure 6.4 (Source: www.weightwatchers.com/women [2013] and www.weightwatchers.com/men [2016] videos)

Figure 6.5 (Source: www.weightwatchers.com/women [2013] and www.weightwatchers.com/men [2016] videos)

the grilling cheat sheet to prepare one of his favourite foods (porterhouse steak) outdoors (see Figure 6.5). These program videos uphold traditional gender divides between public and private spaces, as well as the feminized nature of food preparation. Cooking contains women within the kitchen, a space that men purportedly do not enter, except peripherally as Dan grills a steak outdoors. In this way, Weight Watchers reinforces the perception of cooking as “one of the most identifiable performative traits of femininity” (Parasecoli 2005, 30). Bonnie and Dan also discuss these weight-loss tools in entirely different terms. With a degree of glee, Dan says, “The tools are kind of like a video game.” For men, weight-loss tools are part of a game, creating distance between the work, effort, and self-discipline of weight loss. Bonnie, however, engages with

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Figure 6.6 (Source: www.weightwatchers.com/women [2013] and www.weightwatchers.com/men [2016] videos)

these tools intensely, a connection that the video again depicts spatially. The video depicts Bonnie seated at a desk before a computer as if at work, actively interacting with the weight-loss effort being measured, tracked, and visualized on the screen (see Figure 6.6). Conversely, Dan is completely off-screen when the video illustrates these tools; a laptop computer screen simply animates the tools to his voiceover.

DISCUSSION: DECONSTRUCTING GENDERED WEIGHTLOSS PROMISES Comparing side by side the dialogue, images, foods, and environments—as well as the ways of eating and using technology—depicted in these program videos demonstrates how Weight Watchers manipulates traditional notions of gender in order to distinguish these programs and to define the process of dieting along gender lines. These videos also reveal the different potential selves Weight Watchers promises. For women, Weight Watchers promises a transformed self and the opportunity to start life afresh in a thin body that purportedly reflects a woman’s inner hopes and desires. Feminist scholars, such as Sandra Lee Bartky (1990) and Susan Bordo (1993), have written extensively on the destructive consequences of the Foucauldian surveillance and constant self-discipline that commercial weight-loss programs require of women in the pursuit of a transformed self. Fat studies scholars deepen these critiques, demonstrating how weight-loss promises foundationally reinforce negative portrayals and assumptions regarding fat bodies, particularly for women (Braziel and LeBesco 2001; Farrell 2011; Hill 2011; Kulick and Meneley 2005; LeBesco 2004; Rothblum and Solovay 2009).

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And even if weight loss yields a transformed self, it is conscribed to a particular type of potential womanhood that is subordinate, one with a curtailed autonomy and agency that is powerful only when thin. Various scholars have argued, however, that discourses of beauty not only discipline women but also afford female subjects agency (Peiss 2011; Cahill 2003; Brand 2000; Vester 2010). Pushing these critiques in a new direction in her article, “Foucault Goes to Weight Watchers,” Cressida Heyes explores how weightloss dieting also cultivates disciplined technologies of the self that are enabling and positively productive. She argues that dieting engenders new skills and ways for mastering, knowing, and caring for the self. While Heyes (2006, 141) agrees with feminist analyses that the rhetoric of Weight Watchers cultivates female “docile bodies,” she also argues that “the process of transformation itself invents new capacities and invites reflection on a […] self that is not yet known.” Weight Watchers excludes this process of transformation, this yet-to-beimagined self, and this set of new capacities and skills from the male weight-loss promise. While men keeping the therapeutic work of dieting at arm’s length may prove psychologically protective, it also reveals how patriarchy traps and limits masculine selfhoods. It allows little space for the potentially empowering and actualizing effects of personal change. To embark on such a process requires destabilizing the masculine subject, conceding space for improvement, admitting vulnerability, and relinquishing power—all actions in conflict with hegemonic masculinity, as currently crystallized. Because of this, Bonnie glows with the exhilaration of successful weight loss and a newfound sense of self, while Dan must demonstrate how his changed body now yields productive accomplishments, such as a career promotion and new athletic abilities. The conventional boundaries of masculinity prohibit Dan from experiencing weight loss as a process in which he can work on his relationship with himself. Self-reflection, intimacy, and understanding are portrayed as off-limits. Instead, Dan must maintain his original, immutable masculinity throughout the process of losing weight and changing his body. This inflexibility reveals the ways that patriarchy not only oppresses women’s bodies by idealizing thinness and scorning fat bodies but also male selfhoods within the context of weight loss. This is due in part to socially constructed expectations for male character that devalue and discourage food and health-related knowledge and practices (Courtenay 2000; Gough 2007). In this way, the strictures of hegemonic masculinity limit the potential of gender. This study of Weight Watchers’ promises demonstrates that cultural constructions of “successfully” feminine and masculine bodies are not only relational and co-constituted but also mutually

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oppressive to men of all masculinities, to women, and to all those who resist gender normativity.

CONCLUSION: DEFINING LOSE LIKE A MAN While women have long been targeted by the weight-loss industry, Weight Watchers has now also created its online men’s program and promoted it aggressively with a multimillion-dollar campaign. As the weight-loss industry expands its reach and cultural influence, these market changes incite new questions: What is suitably masculine? How do “real men” act? What is a masculine body? What are masculine ways of shaping and caring for the body? Or for mastering and knowing it? The work of weight loss engages these questions, and their answers have the potential to influence how men shape their own selfhoods within the increasingly technological landscape of American life. Engaging both food and the body, weight loss shapes definitions of masculinity and femininity, as well as gendered arrangements of power. In their marketing, Weight Watchers Online for Men employs the tagline “Lose like a man.” The videos analyzed in this chapter define what “losing like a man” means. While reality weight-loss TV shows like The Biggest Loser depict men experiencing the emotions of weight loss, Weight Watchers’ men do not engage in the self-help process of reflecting upon weight gain. Dan never discusses how or why he gained weight nor shares the frame with a “before” photo of his previously fat body. Men are not expected to employ self-discipline to adopt “healthier” eating habits, as Dan eats burgers, beer, pizza, tacos, and steak—foods that also evoke masculinity, as well as unrestricted dietary choices. Men are not expected to cook, an activity deemed women’s work that encroaches upon masculinity. Men do not lose weight to transform themselves or become more comfortable within the bodies that they inhabit. The work of male weight loss is external to the self— oriented around public life, professional advancement, and athletic achievement. This is the script for how Weight Watchers has extended its weight-loss promise to a new “niche market.” Given the diet industry’s capitalist motivations and the near total failure rate of diets, weight-loss promises are rarely realized (Campos 2004; Fraser 1998; Gaesser 2009). Weight Watchers’ construction of “masculine” weight loss demonstrates another terrain upon which dieting fails.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS With permission to reprint, this chapter was originally published in Gastronomica: The ­Journal of Critical Food Studies.

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NOTES 1. This chapter was previously published in Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies 17 (1; Spring 2017): 33–44. 2. Each of these Weight Watchers promises comes verbatim from the following Weight Watchers media: “If Not Now, When? | Oprah & Weight Watchers,” Weight Watchers YouTube Channel, December 30, 2015, https://youtu.be/sjp57d6pL_c; Weight Watchers commercial, which ran during The Daily Rundown on MSNBC on February 12, 2013, archived at https://archive.org/details/MSNBC_20130212_140000_The_Daily_ Rundown#start/1380/end/1440; “A Whole New Life,” Weight Watchers Website, www .weightwatchers.com/success/art/index.aspx?SuccessStoryId=16491&sc=17; “Jessica Simpson for Weight Watchers,” YouTube, https://youtu.be/29yUo6uyKw0. Dan also says, “Weight Watchers Online for Men changed my life” in the video that I analyze throughout this chapter. 3. For a full analysis of the Weight Watchers campaign with Charles Barkley, see ­Parasecoli (2016). 4. I began this study and comparison in November 2013. In fall 2016, when I revised this work for publication in Gastronomica, the Weight Watchers Online for Men “How Does It Work” video still appeared on the program website (www.weightwatchers.com/ men), but the “women’s” version no longer appeared at weightwatchers.com as the program has been redesigned and revitalized, as is typical for Weight Watchers, e.g., Weight Watchers Online became Weight Watchers OnlinePlus. Interestingly, the recent changes at Weight Watchers—including Oprah Winfrey’s purchase of 10 percent of the company’s stock in 2015 and subsequent promotion linked to the Oprah brand—did not immediately alter the men’s program, which appeared in 2016 much the same as it did in 2013 when I began this study. Since then, the men’s program has been redesigned and the “How does it work?” video no longer appears on the website. 5. Fitbits have been incorporated into the Weight Watchers program. Weight Watchers members can sync their tracking device data to their Weight Watchers account.

READING QUESTIONS 1. How do Weight Watchers’ depictions of weight loss differ between its “female” and “male” programs? Can you think of other examples in which products are

marketed or advertised in gendered ways? What do these cases reveal about gender and power?

2. How does this chapter address technological change, such as the rise of online tools and biometric tracking devices like the Fitbit? Can you think of other ways that technology has transformed our relationship with food, our bodies, and our senses of health?

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3. How do the weight-loss promises that Weight Watchers makes to male and female di-

eters about “potential selves” differ? What do these differences reveal about patriarchy and power dynamics?

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Bergman, S. B. 2009. “Part-time fatso.” In The Fat Studies Reader, edited by E. Rothblum and S. Solovay, 139–42. New York: New York University Press.

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Bordo, S. 1993. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Bosc, L. 2014. “Man, You Have Moobs! A Critical Analysis of the Fat, ‘Polluted’ Body in The Biggest Loser.” Textual Overtures 2 (1): 65–83.

Brand, P. Z., ed. 2000. Beauty Matters. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Braziel, J. E., and K. LeBesco, eds. 2001. Bodies out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Nervosa and Self-Attitudinal Aspects of Body Image in Female and Male University Students.” Journal of Eating Disorders 3 (2): 1–8.

Butler, J. 2006. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Cahill, A. J. 2003. “Feminist Pleasure and Feminine Beautification.” Hypatia 18 (4): 42–64. Cairns, K., and J. Johnston. 2015. Food and Femininity. New York: Bloomsbury.

Campos, P. 2004. The Obesity Myth: Why America’s Obsession with Weight Is Hazardous to Your Health. New York: Gotham Books.

Connell, R. 2005. Masculinities. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Connell, R., and J. Messerschmidt. 2005. “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept.” Gender and Society 19 (6): 829–59.

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CHAPTER 7

Feeding the Muslim South Asian Immigrant Family: A Feminist Analysis of Culinary Consumption Farha Ternikar

LEARNING OBJECTIVES 1. To apply intersectionality as a theoretical framework for studying food, especially considering religion, gender, class, immigrant status, and ethnicity 2. To understand how food is coded with meaning and social statuses 3. To describe a diverse immigrant population that uses food to maintain collective identity 4. To identify how race, class, gender, and religion all shape foodways for Muslim South Asian immigrants

KEY TERMS biryani, Desi, halal, intersectionality, organic, transnational feminism, zabiha

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INTRODUCTION Food is an important way to pass on culture, especially for immigrants. Culinary consumption or cooking to maintain collective ethnic identity is also part of the American immigrant way (Halter 2000). The research on identity and consumption among Hispanic and African Americans in the United States has shown how consumption also helps maintain ethnic and cultural collective identities (Chin 2001; Davila 2001). Food has historically helped maintain collective ethnic identity for various immigrant groups, including Italian and Irish, and more recently South Asian and Middle Eastern in the United States. Desi (usually referring to Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and often other South Asians in the diaspora) Muslim immigrant women help maintain collective cultural and religious identities by feeding the family in the American diaspora. Collective identity maintenance for South Asian American immigrants through food is at least threefold. Foodways for Desi women help maintain their “authentic,” middle-class, and gendered identities. The preparation of Desi food creates a socially constructed “authentic” cultural marker. The consumption of organic food and luxury ingredients signals middle-class socialization. The choice to feed the family over other domestic tasks is a way of doing gender. Although the gendering of culinary consumption often results in the patriarchal practices of domestic work, there is also decision-making power and agency in these processes. Women engage in competitive culinary consumption with their professional peers by keeping up with culinary trends, but also with the women in their ethno-religious communities by renegotiating an imagined authenticity in the diaspora through ethnic foodways, recipes, and culinary displays. Often cultural policing is a way that women surveil or censor each other. The purchasing and preparation of Pakistani or Indian dishes, the sharing and passing of family recipes, and the socialization of children to appreciate their ethnic food are all ways that culinary consumption plays a role in collective identity. Along with race, class, and gender, religion is an important additional factor in intersectionality and is also marked by food consumption, especially for Muslim South Asian American immigrants in a post-9/11 society. Maintaining halal or zabiha dietary restrictions regarding meat consumption can signal religion or religiosity for Muslim immigrants, especially those who are South Asian and from a minority background in their countries of origin. Maintaining halal dietary restrictions among American Muslims refers to avoiding pork and alcohol, and this can be different than maintaining zabiha. Halal refers to eating only

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what is permissible according to the Quran and Hadith, and the maintenance of zabiha refers to eating meat that has been slaughtered according to Islamic law (shariah) and blessed. American Muslims who observe halal also refrain from eating any meats that are forbidden as well as manufactured products that include gelatin. This expanded theoretical lens helps broaden our understanding of how race, class, and gender can be expanded to include religion in the contemporary and American context to understand why food can be increasingly important as a way to study these interlocking social factors.

METHOD My data for this project are qualitative, based on in-depth interviews with South Asian Muslim immigrant women in the greater Chicago area, including the suburbs. They all identified as Pakistani or Indian American professional ­Muslim women who were raised in the United States. I interviewed all the women in English in Chicago, though I am bilingual in Urdu and English. Even though interviews were in English, there were a few names of foods and comments made in Urdu or sometimes Arabic. I collected my data between 2015 and 2018 via face-to-face, in-depth interviews. I asked follow-up questions through emails. I recognize that I have insider and outsider status on multiple levels with this project. I am South Asian American (with a Pakistani mother and Indian father), Muslim, second-generation, and bilingual. In addition, I lived in ­Chicago for five years between 1998 and2003 while I was completing my graduate degree. However, I am also an outsider since I have been outside the Chicago South Asian immigrant community for more than 10 years. My insider status allowed me to develop a certain amount of trust with the women I interviewed. It also gives me sensitivity to the nuances of the lives of Desi immigrant Muslim second-generation women in American society, and particularly the Chicago immigrant community, which I strive to portray with integrity and complexity. I used snowball convenience sampling, building on religious and ethnic social networks to which I am still loosely connected. My sample consisted of South Asian American second-generation Muslim women in the greater C ­ hicago area. The women I interviewed were born in the United States or had arrived before the age of three and had immigration stories from the 1970s and 1980s when their parents emigrated from India or Pakistan. The respondents identified as second generation, while they perceived their parents as first generation since their parents arrived as adults, often as young professionals or students. All but two of my respondents were married, and all the married respondents were

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married to South Asian Muslim immigrant men. The only intermarriage in this study was interethnic, not interracial, between Indian and Pakistanis. All of my respondents were heterosexual. I did interviews in homes, restaurants, coffee shops, schools, and mosques, wherever interviewees felt at ease and comfortable in the greater Chicago area. I took notes on socio-economic demographics (class) and religiosity as I conducted my research. The three indicators of religiosity that came up frequently were involvement in mosque or Muslim school attendance, reference or adhering to hijab and consuming halal. Hijab refers to the hair covering that some ­Muslim women wear, and halal refers to eating food that is permissible according to Islamic law. I also collected data on homeownership, profession, and self-­ identification. All the respondents for this study were Muslim women between the ages of 26 and 49.

BEYOND INTERSECTIONALITY: A THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK I developed my understanding of feminism with an emphasis on intersectionality (hooks 1981, 1992; Crenshaw 1991; Collins 1990). After I began my interviews, I realized I also needed to turn to Uma Narayan’s (1997) understanding of transnational feminism and further grappled with her analysis of ethnic appetites. Complicating Heldke’s concept of “food colonialism,” whereby some white Westerners “eat ethnic” as a way to enhance their status, Narayan (1997) welcomes the eating of other cultures over “food parochialism.” Narayan explains that she grew up in a Hindu family and community where strict dietary restrictions associated with caste, class, and religion often reinforced boundaries among groups, and that eating the food of “others” allows for more openness to diverse cultures, perhaps allowing for less xenophobia. Ultimately, Narayan emphasizes that “what mainstream Western eaters who are concerned about ‘food colonialism’ need to think about most are not the original cultural contexts of these ‘ethnic foods’, but rather the complex social and political implications of who produces and who eats such ‘ethnic foods’ within Western contexts. Much as they may, at times willingly, signify a ‘somewhere else,’ ethnic foods as well as members of ethnic communities in the West also need to be seen as integral parts of the Western contexts they inhabit” (Narayan 1997, 183). Intersectionality emphasizes the need to go beyond gender analysis to explore patriarchy and gender inequality; it describes how gender, race, class, and sexuality are interlocking modes of oppression, and is an important theoretical

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paradigm to understand women’s lives. In this project, religion and immigrant status are part of the intersectional framework in my analysis of how foodways highlight collective identities, especially in our current political climate. Contemporary intersectionality is an ever-changing theoretical paradigm that shares a genealogy with transnational feminism. Gender, race, class, religion, and immigrant status are all part of my intersectional analysis. These frameworks help us to examine the preparation of exotic or ethnic foods for others, and to understand the performance of “doing gender” in a racialized context for Muslim Desi women. I ultimately seek not only to understand how they construct these gendered and ethnic identities through ethnic foodways, but also to emphasize a particular racialized, Desi gendered performance that takes place within and outside of immigrant communities through cultural policing. South Asian immigrant women are evaluated by extended relatives and peer networks in their communities for how authentic, religious, and sometimes even how political their food choices are.

AUTHENTICITY AND NOSTALGIA Preparing authentic food is one way that immigrants signal their ethnic identity to each other. This functions both among insiders as well as outsiders. In the diaspora, the preparation of the authentic food of their parents’ or grandparents’ home is often equated with an authentic ethnic identity. The perceived authenticity of food is shaped by society’s expectations. Though Pakistani or Indian food does have a connection to tradition and ethnic heritage, this is complicated by the diaspora experience and by how Pakistani food became perceived as ­Pakistani food through colonialism, then partition. In addition, the idea that authentic food is also ethnic is problematic. Krishnendu Ray (2016) problematizes how authenticity is understood in terms of foodways in arguing that authentic food, and ethnic food in particular, is shaped by ethnic and racial hierarchies, which shape how ethnic cuisine is consumed. The consumption of ethnic food is largely shaped by how economically and politically valued their countries of origin are. In the United States, both Mexican food and Indian Asian food are examples of culinary traditions that have not been valued as much as historically European foods, specifically French and Italian. Food can be an important way to create nostalgia and signal home, although immigrants often hold onto imaginary homelands. Homi Bhabha (1994) writes about how those occupying imaginary spaces often refer to places that no longer exist and to a myth of purity and homeland. Immigrants often long for a place

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that existed when their families immigrated (Bhabha 1994). For the participants in my research, this imaginary homeland refers to a time when their parents emigrated from India or Pakistan to the United States between 1965 and 1979. Their parents immigrated as first-generation immigrant adults, but the secondgeneration women in my study were born and/or raised from a very young age in the United States.

GENERATIONAL DIFFERENCES Cultural policing through proving their Desi-ness to others in the community or passing ethnic foodways on to their children are both important reasons for South Asian second-generation Muslim women to use food as a way of preserving and passing on identity. Immigrants have diverse interpretations of authentic ethnic food, which can be contingent on regional, classed, religious, and generational differences. Many of the first-generation middle-class Indian women who immigrated in the 1960s and 1970s were either skilled professional women or the spouses of engineers and physicians who immigrated as a result of the brain drain. The brain drain in the 1960s–80s attracted scientists and many professionals in the medical and engineering fields from South Asia and particularly India. These women frequently came from families with domestic help in India and when they immigrated to the United States, they had to manage a household on their own, while raising children and often working outside the home. The first generation of South Asian, middle-class, professional immigrants quickly adapted to using convenience and prepared foods such as premixed masalas and frozen Indian dinners, caterers, or takeout to feed the family, in addition to cooking at home. Since ethnic identity was more salient for this group, creating semihomemade dishes or using catering was part of how this group maintained their household and entertained via food. These women did not worry about proving their “Desi-ness” as they were new arrivals to the United States. However, in the second and third generations, women in particular remain vital to ethnic identity maintenance of their families, and also to the South Asian immigrant Muslim community. Second- and third-generation Pakistani and ­Indian women are often bicultural: American but also Desi. Class, ethnicity, immigration, and religion often shape how women’s roles play out in feeding the family. The South Asian immigrants quickly became part of the “model minority,” a positive stereotype that refers to Asian Americans in the United States. South Asian immigrants are considered part of the model minority because they appear as academically and financially successful and have largely seemed

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politically passive in comparison to Hispanic immigrants and other minorities (Rangaswamy 2008). In the creation of an American identity for these newer immigrants, we also see a renegotiation of gendered identity through food.

GENDER AND FEEDING THE DESI FAMILY Gender has been an important theme in studying food preparation since the 1990s. DeVault’s ([1991] 1994) foundational work Feeding the Family helped outline the important invisible gendered labour women often take on in feeding the family, including making grocery lists, considering food aversions and preferences, shopping (provisioning), and preparing meals. DeVault’s ([1991] 1994) research also suggests that access to economic power often results in decisionmaking power in the family. Part of this power enabled South Asian immigrant women to hire domestic help to manage their households. In India (and Pakistan), even among lower middle-class families, servants are often the norm largely because having domestic help is a marker of status (Sharma 1986; Donner 2008). Sharma (1986) also affirms that middle- and upper-class women in India have choices in how they manage households because of their access to servants. This is possible through very low-wage domestic labour that is not regulated through the state. Even in the second generation, South Asian immigrant women often prefer hiring domestic help to clean the family home rather than outsourcing feeding the family. These women may outsource cleaning rather than cooking because they connect feeding the family with their gendered and ethnic identities. South Asian middle-class immigrant women’s choice to maintain control over the food work in the household is often empowering and includes the possibility of emotional and creative fulfillment from feeding family or friends. Beoku-Betts (1995) explains that “Even though food preparation perpetuates relations of gender inequality in the household, under given circumstances it can provide a valued identity, a source of empowerment for women, and a means to perpetuate group survival” (Beoku-Betts 1995, 536; DeVault [1991] 1994). From her study of Gullah communities in the Sea Islands of Georgia and South ­Carolina, Beoku-Betts (1995) concludes that food preparation can promote resistance toward the dominant culture and is significant in strengthening cultural ethnic identities for minority groups. Food rituals that maintain the idea of authenticity include family meals, festival foods, and feasting and fasting. In the Desi Muslim community, Eid ­dinners (Eid refers to the Muslim religious holidays, including the end of

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Ramadan and Eid al Adha), iftar meals (iftar refers to the breaking of the fast) during ­Ramadan, and mosque potlucks are all rituals that help create a sense of community among Pakistani and South Asian Muslims. Though in their countries of origin, Indian and Pakistani cuisine was often associated with regional cuisines, northern and southern, Punjabi or Hyderabad, in the new country, South Asian cuisine takes on the role of “home food.” The food cultures in multicultural societies like the United States continue to evolve with new flows of immigrants, power, politics, and resources. New waves of immigrants, xenophobia, and racism all shape food cultures. The need to maintain a traditional identity within a foreign country is so strong that food may develop a mythical status, a “more authentic” flavor, than ­actually found in the country of origin.… Traditional recipes and food h ­ abits are ­often modified through the process of negotiated incorporations. (De ­Camargo Heck 2010, 208)

Though food helps maintain cultural identity, it is often altered in the immigration process. De Camargo Heck (2010) highlights how globalization plays an important role in the “pasteurizing” of global cuisine, and in the immigration process, food often undergoes adaptation to the host cuisine. She explains how “immigrants have preserved their food repertoire and adapted their recipes to the new ingredients found in the host country” (2010, 205). The adaptation of recipes that has historically occurred continues to be shaped by the dominant culture, but with globalization, changes in populations, and accessibility, we are seeing less adaptation and more resistance to homogenizing by the increase in ethnic grocers, online ethnic markets, and diverse influences. Certain segments of immigrants want to use their food to help maintain their ethnic identities and resist cultural assimilation, including Asian, Hispanic, and, more recently, Arab American immigrants. As De Carmargo Heck (2010, 207) explains, “culinary habits mark a strong resistance to a complete acculturation, so that old and new culinary habits are mixed and modified in ways that affect the cuisines of both immigrant families and indigenous groups.”

DISCUSSION OF FINDINGS The consumption and preparation of Desi food creates an authentic cultural marker, which often includes ethnic and religious foodways. Ethnic food helps maintain group cultural identity, and adherence to dietary restrictions helps

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maintain religious group identity. The consumption of organic food signals ­middle-class norms, cultural capital, and education. The preference for organic food was a recurring theme in the interviews, which was tied to education, class, and income. Additionally, the choice to cook for the family over doing other domestic work is a gendered choice that Desi middle-class immigrant women make. As with many other middle-class women, preparation and consumption of food is also still linked to convenience, time, and money. Though maintaining South Asian cuisine was important for these South Asian American Muslim women, it also became clear that saving time and money mattered, even for upper- or upper-middle-class immigrant professionals. Saving time and money shaped consumption practices of the respondents differently. Many of the women I interviewed were physicians or married to physicians, but others were educators, lawyers, pharmacists, teachers, dentists, and interior decorators. Cultural capital, including economic capital and education, as well as time, were all important factors in culinary practices. Cultural capital is a result of class, education, and family, and culinary consumption is shaped by cultural capital (Naccarto and LeBesco 2013). Cultural capital shapes how we consume food, and this often is a product of our family’s status. Our food habits or culinary capital is influenced by how much we know about food, our economic resources, and our access to food.

RELIGION For Muslim South Asian immigrant women, food consumption and preparation are also shaped by religion. Through the maintenance of dietary restrictions, food also maintains religious identities. Maintaining halal practices shapes where you buy your groceries, where you go out to eat, and what you eat. In Chicago, there is a growing market for halal grocery stores and halal restaurants. Until the 1980s, many of the halal markets and restaurants were relegated to Devon or “little India” in Chicago; they are now widespread in the suburbs, which are highly populated with middle-class South Asian immigrants (­Rangaswamy 2008). For Muslim women, food also takes on a unique religious significance contingent on dietary restrictions and meat preparation. Though many American Muslims do not maintain zabiha meat practices, a significant portion do and even a larger population maintains the restrictions of pork and alcohol. In the second generation, we can observe how zabiha proscriptions are often discarded, but halal dietary restrictions of pork and alcohol are still maintained, at least inside the home. This was evident in the interviews I conducted. I found that even

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the Muslim Indian and Pakistani women I interviewed who were not observant indicated that they did not drink alcohol or eat pork. Through the interviews I conducted, I found three important typologies: families who maintained zabiha practices inside and outside the home (the most observant); families who ate halal/zabiha meat inside the home but practised halal (avoiding pork and eating permissible meat) only outside the home; and those who practised only halal inside and outside the home. Respondents also indicated it was increasingly easier to find halal meat at restaurants that served zabiha products. It was also interesting that one ­respondent indicated that maintaining halal was more important than maintaining modesty practices. She explained that not all women who wear hijab are maintaining halal, and that eating only halal food is more significant religiously than wearing hijab. Halal was also often discussed in relation to purchasing organic meat. Thirty-one-year-old pharmacist Khaleda explained her concern over eating halal and organic meat. For meat we usually … buy halal meat.… Me and my kids are halal only. My husband will eat anything.… But in the house, it’s only halal … We do, we go to Devon … I try places around here and I feel like … the meat’s just not as good as like what you get from Devon.… I wanna say like every like two months maybe.… I have a deep freezer, … I just stuff it, and since I don’t cook that often … So, we buy organic dairy.… So I will buy … eggs and milk, always organic. I’ve been thinking of switching to organic chicken, … just … for the kids, especially my daughter, with the hormones, and like, like all that.

Organic groceries were often connected to feeding the family and maintaining zabiha was also closely related to feeding children. A 31-year-old teacher emphasizes that everyone in her family eats only zabiha and organic foods. Although neither she nor her husband grew up with zabiha, now that they have kids, they eat only zabiha. Children were a big factor in eating zabiha. Zabiha often becomes more of the norm after these Pakistani ­A merican couples have children. Leena, a 33-year-old lawyer, also spoke of eating only zabiha because of kids. The research on religiosity has shown that young adults become more religious after they have children, and immigrants tend to be more religious than in their countries of origin (Ebaugh and Chafetz 2000). They tend to display religiosity often through outward indicators such as attendance and rituals.

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So, I grew up eating only zabiha at home.… But we would eat outside meat if we were outside.… My husband grew up, uh, he grew up in Chicago, so he grew up eating exclusively only zabiha, so he, it was a much bigger deal for him. So, when we got married, I transitioned to only eating zabiha.… So I guess we both grew up only having zabiha in the house, … but in terms of eating outside meat, now that we’re married with kids, we only eat zabiha, even outside.

Another recurring theme in the interviews was the concern over clean meat. One of the key themes that emerged in my data was how wanting halal meat was connected to wanting “clean” meat as a reference to safety or hygiene. Cleanliness seemed to be related to how the meat was packaged or cleaned. Khadija, a female Pakistani American teacher, explained: And are there many options for finding halal meat also besides Mediterranean market.… Oh yeah; yeah, yeah.… Mediterranean has it, Tandoor ­Express has it. There’s another one … it’s also nearby; there’s another one called M ­ adinah Market. And you know you kind of go to each one and you kinda feel it out, … and like some of ’em actually have the same supplier, but then depending on how they store the meat, how they cut the meat, how they package it and stuff like that. Then, that’s why I prefer Mediterranean ’cause it feels a little bit cleaner, a little bit more like professional for me.

Having clean butcher shops as well as fresh meat was an overarching theme in the interviews. Overall, the respondents seemed concerned with maintaining dietary restrictions, but these practices were often shaped by also wanting organic meat, affordable meat, and “clean” packaging. Religion intersects with class as they both clearly shaped the consumption of meat products. Lastly, none of the respondents discussed having dietary restrictions. The consumption of organic food in the context of feeding the family, and especially feeding children, is symbolic of good middle-class mothering. The consumption of organic food among middle-class mothers is linked with intensive mothering, the dominant ideology of middle-class motherhood, which sees mothers overly focus on their children’s well-being (Cairns, Johnston, and MacKendrick 2013; Hays 1996). Research on intensive mothering emphasizes that feeding the organic child is one way that middle-class mothers use ethical consumption to create distinct identities for their families (Cairns, Johnston, and MacKendrick 2013). Ethical consumption encompasses organic, local, and sometimes fair trade or animal rights.

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Saving time was often discussed in relation to purchasing prepared foods or where women bought groceries. Many women, even those who were clearly upper class, bought groceries from popular chains such as Costco and Target for convenience. Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods also were mentioned numerous times as places that sold healthy alternatives with many organic and fresh options. Roohi, a Pakistani 43-year-old journalist and mother, emphasized her desire to buy organic meat, dairy, and eggs. For her, buying organic was more important than buying halal. Um, dairy. All dairy, eggs, vegetables, fruits … yogourt. I mean anything that … pretty much anything [laughs] that I can get my hands on yeah.… As much as possible, yeah.

Nida, a 33-year-old married lawyer from Northbrook, also indicated that eating organic was important, but could also be expensive. Cost and organic shaped her food choices. She explained: Yeah, we try and buy most of our fruit organic.… Veggies we stick with regular for the most part.… We’re not too fad or big, uh, picky about that stuff. Other than that, we’re not … I mean we try to go organic, but if it’s like double the cost, we definitely won’t.… But if it’s close or it[’s] comparable, I definitely will try to.

Afshan, a 35-year-old Indian Muslim physician, explained her preference for Trader Joe’s because of cost, cleanliness, and availability of organic food. I asked her why she chose Trader Joe’s for her regular weekly groceries. She answered: Yeah, yeah. I mean ’cause it’s organic, … it’s clean, … you know, it’s inexpensive compared to Whole Foods. Like, I think … goin’ to Whole Foods, and you know, I try to be, I wouldn’t say I’m like 100 percent ­organic, but I try to do at least 50 percent … in terms like meat and dairy.… Right, no, yeah, that’s true, yeah. So, it’s pretty, like it’s relatively cheap, … so that’s why I go there. I often refer to Whole Foods as an “upscale” grocery store because it’s known for selling a large amount of organic and specialty items.

None of the women I spoke to seemed to prioritize eating local or purchasing gluten-free, vegan, or fair trade, but buying organic, especially for children,

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seemed to be a recurring theme. The other theme that was absent in my data was sustainability. The mothers I interviewed did not express any concern about eating food or purchasing food that was sustainable. But one mother did explain that her children were concerned with the environment and they had encouraged them to start recycling before it was mandated. The consumption of organic groceries was the most prominent food trend among this population. I also conclude that organic and upscale groceries are a way for the middle class to signal class, wealth, and conspicuous consumption. The type of groceries one has access to, can afford, and has the knowledge to purchase is clearly coded with class and cultural capital.

DOING GENDER, INVISIBLE LABOUR AND ETHNIC MOTHERING Gender is displayed through food preparation even among Desi immigrant families where both parents are professionals. Desi women continue to work the second shift, especially when it comes to cooking. The second shift refers to working another shift at home after working a full workday outside the home. This increased among white middle-class women in the United States by the 1980s, though many working-class women and women of colour had been working a second shift historically. My interviews with South Asian Muslim women revealed that Desi mothers have two concerns: to ensure their children have an affinity for homemade South Asian cuisine, and to provide children with what they consider healthy or “good” food. Their food work does not end with preparing authentic food but includes socializing children into eating their home cooking and preferring Desi food over “American” food. This invisible work often materializes as additional grocery shopping and provisioning as well as extra time in the kitchen and at the dinner table to ensure their children appreciate their ethnic heritage. Laila, a 32-year-old Pakistani teacher, discussed the many places she grocery shopped for halal meat and ethnic items. She says: So generally, I grocery shop once a week.… And then there’ll be meat  ­shopping  I  probably do less.… So like once every 2 weeks, yeah.… ­Grocery shopping, I usually do either from Aldi, … or Trader Joe’s. Um, and then  some of the more ethnic products like halal meats and then like ­halal chicken ­tenders, stuff like that, like I’ll get from Mediterranean m ­ arket. Yeah.… We also have a lot of halal options to choose from too, yeah.…

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So definitely Desi spices, my tea, I usually get from there. I usually get like, um … rotis, and like porattas, naans, things like that, bread products that are like more, um, I get those. They actually have like fresh porattas that are made by someone ­locally and they like deliver it.

In Chicago and the Chicago-area suburbs, it was clear that Desi women often had to go to multiple grocers to find ethnic in addition to halal markets. Shopping as well as cooking often added additional invisible labour to their weekly tasks. Some respondents emphasized their need to prepare Desi foods. Junnah, a 34-year-old married interior decorator, discussed why she shopped at Fresh Farms: For most of my produce, and … things like that, like specialty groceries, Desi groceries, I usually do Fresh Farms.… They have an awesome like Desi section. They have—just ton of ethnic stuff in general.… For my regular, like cereal, cookies, whatever, I’ll go to Target.… and then for like basics, it’s like, I don’t go to all these three at once, but I’ll go to Aldi, and stuff like that, for like okay, I just need milk, eggs, butter …

The need to purchase “Desi” or ethnic groceries from ethnic markets was a prevalent theme in many of my interviews. But with the increase in immigrant populations, many of the women explained that they could find ethnic groceries in their suburbs and no longer had to go to Devon in the city. Farah, a 35-year-old psychologist, expressed her concern about eating healthy, but also the need to purchase halal groceries and ethnic foods. She also explained her need for Western cuts of meat as well as less familiar meats like goat. So, we live in Lombard, … which has been amazing ’cause everything is nearby.… So there’s two halal grocery stores I go to in Lombard, a ­Mediterranean ­Market, Madinah Market.… Mediterranean is a lot nicer, … and it’s like, westernized, so like if I ask for like chuck roast they know what I’m talkin’ about, if I ask for filet mignon, they cut it exactly how I want it.… Madinah is Desi owned, … so I can go and get, I can get goat there, I can’t get goat at Mediterranean.… So if I want like goat meat, if I want like, if I’m making nihari and we want tongue, [laughs] we want something ethnic, we definitely find [it] at Madinah. Madinah’s cheaper also.

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Farah’s grocery shopping indicated a need for Desi food and halal meat. Her desire to cook nihari (a meat-based curry) and shop for goat were both clear examples of Desi foodways. Lastly, her mention of “filet mignon” signalled her affinity to what she termed “westernized.” This interview clearly demonstrated how many of the Muslim Indian immigrant women strived to maintain religious, ethnic, and American identities through their foodways. In addition to shopping for ethnic grocery products, women discussed ­children’s preferences, aversions, and affinity to Desi food.

HEALTHY OR “GOOD” Healthy food was sometimes discussed as low-fat or low-carb. Shazia, a 35-yearold psychologist, expressed concern about eating healthy and how this was linked to milk consumption and carbohydrates. But if we’re really craving rice, I actually got rid of all the white rice; we only have brown rice in the house.… So if we’re really craving like a salan, … especially if my parents send something, … we’ll have it with brown rice.

In these interviews, several additional themes emerged around mothering, including meeting children’s versus husbands’ preferences, maintaining or creating a diverse palette, maintaining a halal household, and creating healthy menus. A common idea even among traditional American families is that women cook to please their husbands. Roohi explained the challenges about finding organic and halal meat because her husband in particular loved beef. Yeah, that makes sense. Um, so where do you usually buy organic meat then? So, I just, um … Fresh Farms … Okay, for the chicken, but they don’t sell … beef, … or they don’t sell it at our, um, market.… So, um, and I try not to eat that much beef. I know my, my family loves beef, but [laughs] I don’t cook a lot of beef unless it’s ground beef, and that I buy at Costco.… Um, but then if there’s like beef that they want cooked … and my husband loves beef, so he wants to cook it, then he’ll go to the, um, the local zabiha place to get like chunks.

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Naureen, a 34-year-old Pakistani American woman, supported this idea: I mean … when they say [the] way to his … heart is through your stomach, like that’s my husband.… But so I mean, he’ll eat Desi but it’s definitely not his favourite. So, but, … I’m sure I would be eating more, like even now I’m used to, I’m kinda like that, like if I go to my mom’s house for a few days, and it’s like Desi food, Desi food, … but I need something different now.

Naureen explained that since her husband does not prefer South Asian cuisine, she would often end up having to prepare a larger variety of meals. She often cooked non-Asian food to please him. Culinary traditions from India and Pakistan are often recreated or even reimagined in the diaspora. For South Asian immigrant women, this creative aspect of cooking is linked to reproducing recipes from their mothers and grandmothers and reinterpreting regional Indian dishes often from cookbooks purchased in the diaspora. Heldke (2003) also emphasizes that colonized cultures maintain traditional food as a mode of resistance. Feeding the Desi family ultimately helps maintain class, gender, ethnic, and religious identity. Though hegemonic norms shape the production of ethnic food, immigrants can also resist this assimilation through the maintenance and reproduction of traditional food. In the diaspora, traditional food prepared with organic and upscale ingredients can on the one hand reinforce class inequalities but on the other hand challenge culinary assimilation.

CONCLUSION This chapter explores how the framework of intersectionality helps examine culinary preparation and consumption for Desi Muslim women in the American diaspora. Race, class, gender, religion, and immigrant status shape foodways for Pakistani and Indian American Muslim women in the greater Chicago area. An intersectional feminist framework attends to these modes of analyses about food production and consumption in ways that underscore the various ways in which the personal is political. Desi immigrant women are able to use food to help maintain their ethnic and religious collective identity, and to display their conspicuous consumption through classed understandings of foodways. Class, gender, ethnicity, and religious status often materialize in the preparation of authentic family recipes, often incorporating organic groceries and halal meat products. Food is an important way that collective identities are created and

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renegotiated in the diaspora. Food can reinforce and reproduce hegemonic understandings of gender within the family. Since 9/11 and most recently, in the wake of the Trump administration’s stance on immigration, the Muslim ban, and the racial provocations of the US political climate, American Muslims have also come under attack and halal food is often a point of contention in the marketplace (Shirazi 2016). Food is a place where we can examine how both religion and immigration shape and change society. A feminist analysis of food considers how religion and immigration intersect to shape the discourse, illuminating how the personal is political. Future research should use the lens of intersectionality to more closely examine how food is used by more marginalized populations of immigrants, including refugees, the undocumented, and Dreamers (the illegal immigrants in the United States who were brought into the country as children and who are affected by the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors [or DREAM] Act).

READING QUESTIONS 1. Explain the role of religion, immigration, or politics on food.

2. How does food help maintain collective or group identity?

3. How is food consumption shaped by ethnicity, class, gender, or religion?

4. How can intersectionality and feminist theory be useful in understanding immigrant foodways?

5. Why do South Asian Muslim immigrant women strive to create authentic cuisine?

6. Explain intersectionality as it applies to South Asian immigrant women.

REFERENCES Beoku-Betts, J. 1995. “We Got Our Way of Cooking Things: Women, Food, and Preservation of Cultural Identity among the Gullah.” Gender and Society 9 (5): 535–55.

Bhabha, H. 1994. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge.

Cairns, K., and J. Johnston. 2015. Food and Femininity. New York: Bloomsbury.

Cairns, K., J. Johnston, and N. MacKendrick. 2013. “Feeding the ‘Organic Child’: Mothering through Ethical Consumption.” Journal of Consumer Culture 13 (2): 97–118.

Chin, E. 2001. Purchasing Power: Black Kids and American Consumer Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Collins, P. H. 1990. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment. Boston: Routledge.

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Crenshaw, K. 1991. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43 (6): 1241–99.

Davila, A. 2001. Latinos Inc.: The Marketing and Making of a People. Berkeley: University of California Press.

De Camargo Heck, M. 2010. “Adapting and Adopting: The Migrating Recipe.” In The Rec-

ipe Reader: Narratives, Contexts, Traditions, edited by J. Forster and L. Floyd, 205–18. London: Ashgate.

DeVault, M. [1991] 1994. Feeding the Family: The Social Organization of Caring as Gendered Work. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Donner, H. 2008. Domestic Goddesses: Maternity, Globalization and Middle-Class Identity in Contemporary India. Hampshire, UK: Ashgate.

Ebaugh, H., and J. Chafetz. 2000. Religion and the New Immigrants: Continuities and Adaptations in Immigrant Congregations. Walnut Creek, CA: Alta Mira Press.

Halter, M. 2000. Shopping for Identity: The Marketing of Ethnicity. New York: Schocken Books.

Hays, S. 1996. The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Heldke, L. 2003. Exotic Appetites: Ruminations of a Food Adventurer. London and New York: Routledge.

hooks, b. 1981. Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. Boston: South End Press. ———. 1992. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press.

Johnston, J., and S. Baumann. 2009. Foodies: Democracy and Distinction in the Food Landscape. New York: Routledge.

Naccarato, P., and K. LeBesco. 2013. Culinary Capital. London: Berg.

Narayan, U. 1997. “Eating Cultures: Incorporation, Identity, and Indian Food.” In Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third World Feminisms, 119–88. London and New York: Routledge.

Rangaswamy, P. 2008. Namaste America: Indian Immigrants in an American Metropolis. ­University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Ray, K. 2016. The Ethnic Restaurateur. London: Bloomsbury.

Sharma, U. 1986. Women’s Work, Class, and the Urban Household: A Study of Shimla, North India. London: Tavistock Publications.

Shirazi, F. 2016. Brand Islam: The Marketing and Commodification of Piety. Austin: University of Texas Press.

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CHAPTER 8

The Struggle Plate at the Intersection Delores Phillips

LEARNING OBJECTIVES 1. To examine the fault lines in intersectional feminism that pit women against one another along lines of class and heteronormative expectations 2. To consider why laughing at food is a politically important act 3. To examine how the struggle plate navigates (or fails to navigate) the double bind 4. To understand that food does not always have to be pleasant or fulfilling (or even edible) to perform cultural work

KEY TERMS call to care, double bind, respectability, struggle plate

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INTRODUCTION On April 16, 2016, Ayesha Curry posted a picture of a meal on Instagram, captioning it “lemony buttery shallot chicken and smokey cheddar smashed potatoes w roasted corn, tomato and pancetta” and hashtagging it #theseasonedlife. Social media erupts, calling her meal a struggle plate—and then gleefully commences to mercilessly drag Ayesha Curry and her food. Clapbactivist™ writes: “Just realized that Ayesha’s potatoes were the same colour as Trump’s face” and posts a comparison (steenfox 2016). Ash R. (aroueno 2016) writes: “­Ayesha Curry whipped up something a drunk student would after a night out and posted it on Instagram,” accompanying his assessment with a .gif of supermodel Naomi Campbell dissolving into giggles. In response to Anne of Peen Gables’s posting of the image, Andrea Morgan (AndreaDMorgan 2016) writes: “those tomatoes look sad & frustrated. Like they just looked at the chicken and sighed.” The viperous humour evidently rankled: Curry (ayeshacurry 2016a) clapped back by posting in response to commentary on another picture of another, only slightly less struggling plate: “What’s most funny about this is that this a dish from one of the #1 chefs in the world and not mine. Jokes [sic] on you. #read.” Ayesha Curry is no stranger to social media heckling.1 Her YouTube channel created room for a cooking show to be hosted on the Food Network, a cookbook deal, and a food subscription service. However, after an ESPN interview in which she counselled modesty as a means of keeping her man happy, she became the subject of biting memes that conflated regimes of taste, as her modest dress translated into spiceless meals. The struggle plate she posted paired a foodie’s proud description of a sumptuous meal with a poorly photographed plate; it revealed cracks in the model of perfect domestic performance that Curry assembles to grow her brand. Curry also isn’t the only celebrity wife to get dragged on Twitter for posting a struggle plate. Kim Kardashian posted a soul food plate she had cooked and received a hearty helping of sarky snark for her trouble.2 Nicki Minaj’s struggle plate was hailed as the first of the 2016 Thanksgiving season.3 Less than two weeks after Curry’s plate received its lashings, Laura Govan of Basketball Wives LA fame posted a struggle plate to Twitter that she has since removed after receiving high-profile teasing from Gilbert Arenas.4 Why is the struggle plate such a potent point of ridicule? There is something special about its potency when appended to Curry’s food—or to the plates of c­ elebrities who (allegedly) cook. For Curry, this moniker seemed to strike a particularly tender nerve, and it seems to adhere most quickly to a specific demographic: black women celebrities or women married to black celebrity men. Why?

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The answer to this question lies in an intersectional approach that reveals how the struggle plate connects black performance, class mobility, respectability politics, and gendered expectations of culinary acumen. The material manifestation of “The struggle is real,” the struggle plate is often deployed ironically, as an analogue to the “first world problems” meme. SNAP home economics disappears as class and race recede. An intersectional analysis of Ayesha Curry’s social media woes recuperates the struggle plate as the culinary expression of the realness of the struggle. When applied to Ayesha Curry’s meal, it positions the glee with which black Twitter assailed Ayesha Curry’s struggle plate at the nexus of black celebrity and respectability politics. The heckling of her struggle plate represents an indictment of bourgeois black femininity and a failed call to solidarity along multiple axes—one reinforced by Curry’s tone-deaf responses to other controversies. After providing a history of the struggle plate that reinvests it in the struggle, this chapter unpacks these specific calls as they hail Curry’s race, gender, class, and nationality, comparing her struggle plate to others online and then situating it in the larger framework of intersectional feminist struggle. I argue that, despite a description that aligns it with the privileged performance of the foodie, the responses to the image suggest that black privilege arouses concern about authentic performances of ethnicity and, more crucially, allegiance to black struggle in the early twenty-first century.

THE STRUGGLE PLATE AS AMATEUR GASTROPORN A struggle plate is identified as a poorly assembled plate of food that hails the working-class or impoverished roots of the home cook. For the purposes of this chapter, the lived experience of actually eating it is set aside (although commentators will sometimes contrast the deliciousness of what is on the plate against how repellent it looks) as the struggle plate is purely an aesthetic category, a visual assessment of culinary execution. The architecture of the struggle plate here follows: a person—usually a heterosexual, black cis-woman—prepares a meal of dubious appeal; portions are slopped onto a plate, usually disposable; the meal is photographed, usually with a cellphone and in poor lighting; the picture is posted on social media; hilarity ensues. The original post may include breathless declarations of appreciation and affection made for the diner by the cook or by the diner for the cook. If posted by a person cooking a meal to be consumed alone, the author may declare satisfaction with the achievement. At this point, the online community chimes in, usually in derision and always with wit.

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The photo then may be reposted across multiple platforms with original captions included, then recaptioned with a mocking statement by a commentator who invites further jeering by an ever-widening audience. If the cook is famous, online news outlets may latch on to the image, the reposting, and the teasing. We can therefore view the struggle plate as a category of increasing density, sedimenting into form as its viewership expands. As presentation is part of the delectation of a well-turned meal and a mark of a skilled cook, the struggle plate represents delicious irony, particularly when the moniker falls on the plate of a celebrity chef. However innovative and au courant the struggle plate may seem, it is but the latest in an extensive digital lineage of mocking, badly plated, poorly ­photographed food, beginning with James Lileks’s Gallery of Regrettable Food, a subsection of his Institute of Official Cheer. Created in the mid- to late 1990s, the gallery features scanned pages taken from mid-twentieth-century cookbooks, highlighting their misguided creativity, vomitous textures, sickly c­ olours, odd flavour combinations, and the absence of spices. Lileks takes pains to describe the purpose of the books as infomercials and product placement, and his commentary focuses on an intersectional critique of the gendered performances of middle-class white American domesticity idealized in these books. A wildly successful website spurred the publication of two volumes compiling the ­images and captions. James Lileks assumes sole authorship of his webspace. Someone Ate This represents a collaborative version of the Gallery of Regrettable Foods. This blog subtitles hideous photographs with succinct one-liners and hilarious tags, many of which are expressions of disbelief and disgust as well as onomatopoeias of sloppy sauces, spattering vomit, or the noises made by upset stomachs and belching gullets. Readers submit photographs of unidentifiable meals, inviting (re)posting and commentary. The struggle plate represents the evolution of Lileks’s work, but performs slightly different cultural labour. Defined by Know Your Meme and Urban Dictionary (Kuahmel 2013) as simply a hideous picture of a plate of food, what drops away from these definitions is the confluence of race and class that makes the struggle plate a peculiar commentary on late twentieth-century/ early twenty-first-century blackness. Whereas Lileks’s gallery mocks mid-­ twentieth-century middle-class white gender norms and American consumerism, the struggle plate mocks underclass blackness in an equally self-referential way. Blacks laugh at blacks who can’t cook yet post celebratory photos and triumphal captions of lovingly prepared meals. The apotheosis of the struggle plate is the popular Cooking for Bae.

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In 2013, Cooking for Bae launched as a Twitter hashtag appended to images of badly prepared food. That summer, an anonymous Instagram account collected and curated the images and invited commentary. “Your woman can’t cook” is a staple of the page. Written in African American vernacular English, this site represents a struggle plate compendium. The original struggle plates on Cooking for Bae featured cheap, processed meats (often burnt) with slices of ­American cheese (shiny and plastic) on white bread (mostly the ends, never toasted) served on ­Styrofoam—a meal that epitomizes SNAP home economics. Ramen and canned vegetables make repeated appearances. More recent offerings feature attempts at creativity (green ramen; filled fruit) or vomitous sauces and feculent gravies smothering food in featureless pools of goo. The customary palette is pallid and pestiferous: dank grey, swampy greens, meaty pinks, and shocks of orange and yellow. White bread is the substitute for hot dog, hamburger, and dinner rolls. Examples are culled from Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, sent to the curators of the site as earnest culinary performances that fall short. The struggle plate is therefore a genre of amateur food porn, a gastro-aesthetic pratfall. When Ayesha Curry posts her plate, she joins the endless ranks of foodie photographs posted online, attempting to leverage the enormous power of social media platforms to extend her brand. Her optimism is not misplaced: in April 2017, Instagram celebrated the milestone of a userbase numbering­ 700 million strong (700 Million 2017). At the time of this writing, an Instagram search for #food yielded over 234 million posts, while a search for #foodporn yields 133  million. (A search for #theseasonedlife yields 5,105.) According to ­eMarketer (2017), more than half of millennials in the United States are active on Instagram and, of these, 69 percent photograph their food as they eat it. Eighty-one percent of women social media users prefer Instagram (barely edging past Facebook’s 79 percent). As teen users flee Facebook, they migrate to Instagram, where images tell their stories, hashtags categorize their content, and influencers dominate regimes of taste. The struggle plate rises in this domain as a form of satire. Reddit’s /r/food and /r/foodporn stand apposite its /r/shittyfoodporn (as /r/shittylifehacks and /r/shittylifeprotips mirror its advice boards). Where /r/food and /r/foodporn feature food at its finest, /r/shittyfoodporn features badly photographed dishes, bizarre combinations, poor execution, and cheap substitutions, many of which spoof fine dining or the stereotypical college culinary experience of the starving student. As Curry, seasoned culinary celebrity, posts her food for collective praise and vicarious delectation, she instead falls prey to a well-established framework designed to mock her food and place at the centre of the mockery a commentary

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on class, race, and gender in the United States. However, her expertise invites yet another vein of critique: another component of the humour is the failure of the professional chef, exemplified by Cake Wrecks, a site that teases the catastrophes created by commercial bakers who misinterpret instructions or misspell words, or who overreach their skills in sculpture and structural engineering. The ­hilarity—again reinforced by anonymous submissions, curated, captioned, and open to comments—lies in the failures of the expert. These sites make clear that online spaces have constructed a flourishing infrastructure to tease the hapless chef who makes a misstep, no matter how famous the chef might be.

BLACKS, CLASS, AND STRUGGLE PLATE ECONOMICS As she posts her food with the objective of entering the digital economies of taste that would further propel her brand, Curry had to suspect that presentation would trump content. Once she posted her photo and gave the image its title and hashtag, the internet community descended on her post and made their assessment: Ayesha Curry posted a struggle plate. Their verdict had less to do with what was on the plate than with how it looked. The struggle plate stands principally as an aesthetic category and Ayesha Curry’s plate met its criteria, no matter how expensive its ingredients, no matter how painstaking its execution, no matter how delicious it tasted. The appellation of the struggle plate to Ayesha Curry’s cooking is obviously ironic, as Ayesha Curry’s wealth, fame, and disconnection from African ­American feminist politics (treated in more detail below) means that no plate she posts will ever connect to the struggle. The struggle plate is about more than just the a­ esthetics of plating. It represents the range of double binds troubling the connections between race, class, and gendered expectations of culinary acumen. It is also the material manifestation of the struggle, an exercise in the home economics of the underclass. In kitchens around the United States, the struggle is real. Indeed, race and class (but not gender) drift away from the struggle plate because the struggle itself drifts away from the uneven burdens and benefits of race, class, and gender. Urban Dictionary’s most popular definition describes “The Struggle is Real” as “[a] (generally) ironic saying often used in place of the saying, ‘first world problems.’ Has slightly more urban undertones than ‘first world problems.’ Denotes a situation where the user wishes to express that they are encountering some sort of undesirable difficulty but dealing with it. With irony, it has a comical effect of dramatizing a non-critical, yet undesirable situation.” In this definition, “urban” equals black, as seen in the backlash against

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Bond creator Anthony Horowitz, who determined that Afro English actor Idris Elba—knighted by the British Empire for his achievements in television and film—was “too street” to play James Bond (Khatchatourian and Rainey 2015). Mortified apologies, sputtering clarifications on Twitter, the proffering of another, more polished black actor, and even Idris Elba’s own gracious entry into the fray could not mollify the internet’s baying for the blood of a latent racist who speaks in dog whistles. The “urbanity” of “the struggle is real” codes the struggle as black, but then deracinates it by imbrication in postracial internet meme cultures and a well-worn euphemism. The phrase’s dispersal as a meme takes root in DTMD’s 2011 song “The Struggle Is Real” on their album Makin’ Dollas. The year 2014 was big for “the struggle is real”: Masspike Mills releases “The Struggle Is Real” on Skky Miles 3, Pt. 2 Blocks and Bedrooms, a song about his years hustling; Jay Tee’s “Struggle Is Real” appears on Vellejo Mentality by 40 Ounce Records; Google Trends reveals a surge in interest in the term. Money Mike and A.G. both release separate songs titled “The Struggle Is Real” in 2015. A.G.’s song is most notable because it tropes the impossibility to achieve success using food metaphors. Indeed, in most songs about the realness of the struggle, being broke and hungry (in multiple contexts) is a pertinent theme, as are the difficulties of black prosperity in the face of systemic racism. Limiting the struggle to only the province of black people discounts the realness of the struggle for the vast body of the working poor across the United States and its increasing pan-racial relevance to millennials who, as studied by Malcolm Harris (2017), feel cheated of the promise of American prosperity enjoyed by their parents. That said, the realness of the struggle connects intimately to hip hop, allowing it to translate across racial lines and, indeed, across borders. In 2016, Struggle Jennings wrote “The Struggle Is Real” about the struggles of the ­Appalachian working poor in Tennessee. The grandson of country star Waylon Jennings, Struggle Jennings classifies himself as an outlaw rapper: a mixture of rap and outlaw country that reaches across cultural aisles. While an uncharitable critic might suggest that Jennings cynically appropriates both his grandfather’s fame and hip hop’s widening popularity, another might suggest that the struggle is a feature of class rather than race, and is differently experienced by race, gender, and region. It still maintains its pleasures and human connection is key to enduring it: the struggle is indeed real, but we shall not struggle alone. Meanwhile, Suicidal Tendencies released “The Struggle Is Real” on World Gone Mad in 2016, lamenting the travails of ordinary affective life in the early twenty-first century, a theme shared by Blacklite District’s “The Struggle,” which describes overcoming loss.

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The struggle has gone global and, although attenuated in its connection with race, it now rides the currents of hemispheric, even global formations of blackness and maintains its connections to class despite the efforts to universalize it. In 2017, Footsy released “The Struggle Is Real.” The video begins with a feminine elder in the community who delivers a brief monologue about the experience of living with no money and opportunities in St. Kitts, where incarceration lurks around the corner from every decision. The video shows people getting by, making rich, glorious meals, and the song features images of black struggle that include Black Lives Matter and violent protest. In addition to visions of hardship, it also offers visions of hope and happiness. Most critically, it embeds the struggle in the context of global blackness, as African American struggle exits the shores of the continental United States. Somewhere in the mix, this aspect of the struggle plate got lost: its complex entanglements with race, class, and gender (none of the songs in the struggle’s lineage are written by women but the generic struggle plate is prepared by feminine hands for masculine appetite), its grappling with American inequality, its insistence on pleasure and resistance. The struggle plate is the culinary expression of the realness of the struggle. It points toward underclass dietary plenitude, where dollars stretch by buying as much of the cheapest ingredients as possible. At times, it points toward a lack of polished prowess in the kitchen—stereotypes of lazy impoverishment and a disconnection from black culinary tradition, which has always used inexpensive staples. Cups of flour, a bit of salt, baking powder, milk, and dollops of Crisco can make biscuit dough. Collard, mustard, and turnip greens sell for a couple of dollars per bunch and, when boiled with cheap salted and smoked joints and hocks, can make a large kettle that freezes well. The same smoked meats flavour large pots of beans, dumped in after an overnight soaking. Stretching beans with a cup or two of rice makes a hearty, starchy meal, and over-peppering them makes for good food on cold days, particularly when paired with a pan of fresh, hot cornbread. If the cook knows where to shop, Jiffy© sells dry mix for as low as 25 cents per box. Yet turning out biscuit dough and cooking greens and hoppin’ john requires a modicum of culinary skill. The struggle plate often features these staples of African American culinary life, yet the meme also incorporates rushed, botched food, the output of the working poor at mid-month, a home cook whose freezer dwindles precariously low and who lacks the time, energy, or inclination to cook well. The struggle plate offers a vision of despair and finds humour in it. It is for this reason that the moniker of the struggle plate applies only ironically to Ayesha Curry’s meal:

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despite a description that aligns it with the privileged performance of the foodie, her food looks just as bad as the struggle plates of poorer black women who can’t cook or have only the lowest-quality ingredients in their kitchens. She is therefore not exempt from the double bind of black privilege—which is concern about authentic performances of blackness and attenuated connection with black political life and the lived experiences of the working poor. It is worth examining the struggle plate by considering another black woman food vlogger who reinvests the struggle into the struggle plate: YouTube celebrity home cook Auntie Fee. The contrast between the women could not be starker: in complexion, dress, professionalism, and production values, the two food celebrities stand as polarities. In fact, Felicia O’Dell builds her brand on the back of the struggle plate. Better known as Auntie Fee, O’Dell ascended from complete anonymity to viral fame in 2014 with a YouTube video titled “Sweet Treats for the Kids.” Instructing her audience in the preparation of a fried pastry snack composed of biscuit dough, butter, sugar, cinnamon, and raisins, Auntie Fee zips nimbly around her kitchen, narrating steps and subjecting Tavis Hunter, her son and cameraman, to repeated, brutal tongue-lashings. The video contravenes every feature of a professional cooking show. A single hand-held camera follows the action. Cellphone notifications ping in the background, loud enough to prompt viewers to check their own devices. The cooking surface is messy, as it appears that the idea to film spontaneously occurred to Auntie Fee and her son. Hunter’s unscripted interjections derail the dialogue and ignite brief, intense tirades. For example, when Hunter describes her creation as “prison food” (possibly referencing O’Dell’s prior conviction and incarceration for drug trafficking), Auntie Fee shoots back, “This is not no prison—motherfucker, this is not prison food, okay?” When Hunter plaintively replies, “You makin’ everything from scratch!” Auntie Fee fumes, “I gotta get me a fuckin’ camera—cameraman because you trippin’.” The spontaneity of the film’s creation seems to extend beyond the conditions of its composition: when the camera begins rolling, the dish has no name, a subject of a short, expletive-laden exchange. Hunter attempts to help Auntie Fee figure this out as the sweet treats are frying, asking, “What do you call that?” Auntie Fee replies, “I don’t know. It’s somethin’ for them kids, you know.” The exchange briefly heats up: Hunter: You keep sayin’, “somethin’ for them kids”— Auntie Fee: So, well, it’s a dessert … Hunter: So when they come ask for it— Auntie Fee: Goddamn, I ain’t got no motherfuckin’ name for it yet, motherfucker! Shit!

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Hunter: So when they come ask for it, what they gonna say, “Can we have some of those ‘somethin’ for the kids’?” Auntie Fee: Well, oh, uh … okay, you’re right about that then. While the sweet treats for the kids continue to fry, further negotiations include “Aunt Fee’s Sweet Stuff,” “Sweet Treats” (the name in the video’s title), and raisin turnovers (despite one of the turnovers lacking raisins). Auntie Fee’s face lights up as she settles on “Raisin Turnovers” as the name for the dish, but Hunter does not use it when he posts the video. When asking about when Auntie Fee’s viewers should tune in to the next demonstration on how to make baked chicken, she replies, “I don’t even know. I don’t let ’em know too much about me because then they be ready to, you know, come an’ do somethin’ an’ some shit.” Drawn to Auntie Fee’s vitriolic expostulations, the video has almost 5 million views as comments below it transcribe her fiercest moments in the film. In fact, Auntie Fee’s later videos on her channel never commanded the same degree of approbation as “Auntie Fee’s Sweet Treats for the Kids” because the draw was her colourful swearing and tempestuous temperament. However popular her “Sweet Treats for the Kids” video might be, Auntie Fee’s most instructional videos are the two subsequent demonstrations that show her preparing a ramen, steak, and cheese concoction that can feed seven people for $3.35, and the fried eggroll wraps containing diced porkchops, cheese, and potatoes. Both offer lessons in kitchen thrift and are struggle plates in the most conventional sense: when a family cannot afford to throw away even a scrap of food, when the food desert has entered widespread understanding of how underserved communities must feed people as both federal and state safety nets corrode, Auntie Fee’s videos illustrate how far leftovers can stretch. She demonstrates what an ingenious home cook can do when presented with a disparate scattering of ingredients that by themselves might not be enough for a full meal for even one person. Most critically, a user can view the videos on an inexpensive smartphone. Auntie Fee’s tutorials bridge the digital divide. Auntie Fee built her brand around her struggle plates, seasoning their preparation with ample helpings of foul language. With televised appearances on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, The Steve Harvey Show, and TMZ, promotional videos for Dumb and Dumber To (a film that she wasn’t even interested in seeing, according to the video), and a minor role in the film Barbershop 3, O’Dell’s YouTube popularity moved her across media platforms. Her website parlayed her popularity into a catchphrase, “Cookin’ and Cussin’,” and a line of merchandise that includes seasoning mixes, T-shirts (which she can be seen wearing in later videos),

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pot holders, baseball caps, aprons, and window decals. Her videos adhere to the struggle plate’s structure: dubious food colourfully captioned by O’Dell’s foul language and breathless narration, then assessed and commented upon by the platform’s broader public. The difference is that O’Dell embraces the struggle plate in its entirety. The product is not always neat or visually appealing (or even fully cooked, as the inside of one of the Sweet Treats seems doughy still when Auntie Fee pulls it apart), but the dishes conserve costs and ingredients, ensuring that the harried home cook can satisfy friends and family and express her creativity while conserving food. Ayesha Curry’s struggle plate, conversely, upends her brand, in part through its association with ways of life from which she must maintain a crucial distance. The difference between Curry and Auntie Fee cannot be starker, but not only for the obvious reasons. Auntie Fee’s work in her videos acknowledges the lived realities of cooking women who lack access to the resources that Curry assumes her audience to have. Auntie Fee is therefore necessarily engaging the entanglements of political life that directly impact what her audience can cook and how they must work in the kitchen to surmount challenges that Curry sets aside in her own cookery. Although intersectionality was born in the embrace of legal studies, Auntie Fee’s videos welcome an intersectional approach because, as Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall (2013, 791) observe about the progressive history of intersectional activism, she indirectly “address[es] the larger ideological structures in which subjects, problems, and solutions [are] framed.” While it would perhaps be an overstatement to apply as a template Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall’s arguments about the evolution of intersectionality studies in the fields of the law, activism, and the university systems that house its scholars, Auntie Fee’s videos confront the problem of what people can and cannot afford, prompting a radical critique of systems of privilege even as the audience is invited to laugh about how fat people and kids love cheese.

THE STRUGGLE PLATE AND RESPECTABILITY POLITICS: CURRY VERSUS OMAROSA Ayesha Curry’s Food Network cooking show represents one of the pressure points in the ridicule. How can someone who has been crowned by the Food Network as worthy of airtime produce such a cringeworthy meal? The struggle plate that Curry posted sheds light on secret incompetence, exposing her as a Food Network fraud. The audience mocks her in a burst of schadenfreude. Curry’s struggle plate reveals chinks in her carefully cultivated image as a household maven, an

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upper-class black woman able to turn out flawless meals and reserve her sexuality for her hard-working, talented man. If Steph Curry represents the apex of black masculinity in his performances on the basketball court, then Ayesha Curry represents his perfect, feminine analogue: the ideal wife, a domestic fembot. Curry is an avatar of black feminine respectability. The first page of ­ayeshacurry.com displays a photo of her, smiling at the camera, wearing an apron over a striped, button-down blouse that could be the top of a shirtwaist, a ­crucifix, and a “MOMMY” pendant hanging from her throat. Her photo— particularly her jewellery—reinforce the quote that appears below the picture: “With motherhood as my muse and faith by my side, those moments of family together time in the kitchen is [sic] where my balance begins, where we can all just be.” The page forces the platitude to the centre of the visitor’s attention, as it overtakes the page as viewers scroll past. It packs Curry’s message into phrases strung together in Goopy style: Motherhood is the muse, arousing artful impulses and joining the company of Calliope and Erato; Curry is devout; cooking allows her to experience family togetherness; New Age zen is the payoff. There is something here for everyone: the harried mom, the church-going woman, the hipster yogi. The bottom image of the home page imitates the middle-class fashion of small, identically framed photos that form a hodgepodge depiction of family life: shots of Curry in her kitchen, goofing with her family, photos of her children in loving moments, a photo of Steph Curry wearing a suit in a locker room at the apex of the pyramidal collage. Even the photo of a messy kitchen features clean pots arranged into artful chaos, Ayesha Curry’s curls and her head leaning on her hand refracting the overworked mother now confronting a dirty pile of dishes after turning out a meal. Ayesha Curry is pure, and she is premiyum—follow her message, buy her books and her food subscription service, and you can be pure and premiyum too. Curry is nothing new—we have seen her before in the 1950s advertisements for new consumer technology, in the Victorian era’s commercialization of new home products. Curry’s innovation is, perhaps, to have used YouTube to launch her self-stylizations as an icon of respectable, black middle-class femininity. Like Julia Child and Martha Stewart before her, Curry capitalizes on “the cultural value and ideological function of food and food practices insofar as they help to sustain class hierarchies by promoting the illusion of class mobility” ­(LeBesco and Naccarato 2008, 223). Her videos, website, cooking show, subscription service, and merchandise purport to provide “access to a world normally out of reach from their economic position; however, because such access is limited and temporary, it ultimately does not challenge dominant ideologies of class.

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To the contrary, it protects them by providing consumers with an illusion of access that contradicts the reality of their economic and social position” (224). Curry’s working-class black feminine viewers can fantasize about a raceless world ­ pper-middle-class privilege replete with culinary plenitude. of u Cooking is not just women’s work; cooking is black women’s work. In her analysis of Freda DeKnight’s A Date with a Dish, Janet Theophano (2003) ­identifies cookbooks and kitchens as alternate spaces for creativity and literacy, particularly important for black women who are customarily shut out of the c­ ultures of print publication that validate their expression. Alice E. Deck’s (2001, 89) examination of the fetishization of black women’s expertise in the kitchen in the first half of the twentieth century reveals their desirability as a model for white women who use them as “a circuitous route to satisfy the white male desire for attention and aesthetic sensations by learning to cook tempting foods” and to maintain white women’s higher social status. Moreover, Deck reveals the representations of black women as perfectly content in their roles (89), a contentment that Curry projects throughout her work. Psyche Williams-Forson’s (2007) seminal study in black women and food argues that the kitchen represents a space of power and self-expression for women otherwise denied. The glee with which black Twitter assailed Ayesha Curry’s struggle plate represents the nexus of black celebrity and respectability politics. Her struggle plate gave her haters an opening to attack her because of her posture as the prissy, prudish wife of the best player the NBA has ever seen. The digital brickbats flung at her food were met with SJW counterheckling as Curry’s defenders reassured her that the teasing amounted to so much haterade dousing her success. The heckling therefore represented a failure of black feminine solidarity and a rejection of respectability politics. It represents what I name here as a call to care, a demand for allegiance to the multiplicity of political interests that structure black experiences in the United States. It is not necessarily a call for activism. It is, however, a call to include in the affective work Curry’s brand performs the task of signalling meaningful engagement with the inescapable politics of black life, inextricable from the flows of our money. Black people who dogpiled Curry’s feed presented her with their demand: If we are to build your brand, you will care about us. The spectacle of failed black feminine solidarity features prominently in reality television and is a staple of the Housewives, Love and Hip Hop, and Basketball Wives franchises. Viewers flock to these shows to watch marathon after marathon of failed black feminine solidarity—and the promise of this failure translates into astronomical ratings, just as the heckling of Ayesha Curry’s struggle

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plate translated into clicks, comments, retweets, subtweets, shares, and news and blog posts. While it is tempting to compare Curry’s struggle plate with the problem of Barack and Michelle Obama’s fraught relationship with respectability politics, it is much more productive to read Curry’s heckling in the company of ­Omarosa Manigault Newman, ejected from President Trump’s cabinet and vivisected by the press on November 12, 2017.5 Omarosa exited the White House in dramatic fashion that recalled her ascension in Donald Trump’s circuit as a reality star. Reports given by a subdued but gleeful April Ryan6 highlighted not the loss of diversity in the White House and the disappearance and continued irrelevance of black women in the inner circles of power in the United States but the style of Omarosa’s firing, recounting Omarosa’s high dudgeon, foul-mouthed tirades, and thwarted attempts to physically enter the residence to confront Trump directly. In other words, the coverage of Omarosa’s exit from the White House focused on the surreality of reality television dramatics in the White House: the spectacle of the well-dressed, wealthy black woman hurling epithets, physically imposing herself on others and committing assault in response to insults, fuming as she is guided from the scene by security. Black feminine news hosts and commentators jeered Omarosa viciously while the media and late-night comedians feasted on the story. On CNN, ­Angela Rye said that her fellow panelists were “too good” to descend into the pettiness in which she revelled, her teasing, gleeful screech and loud farewells feeding the nighttime talk show circuit as her copanelists and her host succumb to giggling.7 Attempting to restore gravitas to the panel, April Ryan gently chides her; Rye responds by doubling down on the mockery. Meanwhile, the viewer knows that Ryan isn’t sincere: in a different interview on another CNN segment, April ­Ryan’s posture and facial expressions signal her own enjoyment of the spectacle, as do her repeated allusions to Omarosa’s two other firings on The Apprentice. She punctuates her wicked reading of the scenario by raising her coffee cup to her lips with such clear, disdainful delectation. Most critically, Robin Roberts signs off the air on ABC’s Good Morning America with a casually tossed “Bye, Felicia,” a dismissive meme taken from the film Friday. Seth Meyers (2017) annotates these exchanges with clear glee on Late Night with Seth Meyers. Again, the structure of the struggle plate maps neatly onto an instance of black women teasing another black woman’s failed bid for respectability and privilege, exposing her as a fraud, while a titillated audience laughs at the spectacle. Omarosa offered no solidarity. In return, she received none. Yet TVOne host Roland Martin adeptly identifies the true casualty of the obsessive, relentless

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coverage of Omarosa’s ignoble exit: the black women who turned out the vote in Alabama’s 2017 special election. As reported by Krissah Thompson (2017), Martin says, “I simply was not going to debase myself by having a back and forth over what happened to Omarosa … I was choosing to bask in the glory of what black folks did in Alabama.” Indeed, Doreen St. Félix (2017) argues in The New Yorker that the election’s outcome sanctifies black women’s political power even as she laments the elision of both the hard work that black women canvassers did on the ground and, by extension, their political selfhood. It is this failure of imagination past respectability, complicity, and invisibility that tinges the disdain that follows both Omarosa and Ayesha Curry when they make missteps. That the response to both is sustained high-profile ridicule signals frustration with the irrelevance of black women’s interests in the weft of social and civic life in the United States and impatience with the faltering pace of social advancement promised by the civil rights movement and intersectional feminism. It is for this reason that I offer that celebrity struggle plates are the ultimate exercise in irony: no matter how ugly the food, no matter how simple the dish or how ineptly plated it is, no celebrity ever posts a struggle plate because the elements of struggle that the struggle plate represents no longer signify in celebrity life. The reinsertion of the struggle into the celebrity struggle plate deconstructs the political distance between those who struggle and those who no longer have to—or never have. It is a way to express exasperation with black Martha Stewarts who appear to disavow their humble roots even as they offer only down-market product lines because their success does not translate into sustained change for black women of any class.

AYESHA CURRY: THE COSMOPOLITE COOK AT THE INTERSECTION OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY Curry often seems hapless in the face of the censure she receives in the wake of her missteps. A rather pat response to Curry’s failure to answer the sublimated call to solidarity that runs as an undercurrent beneath the ridiculing of her struggle plate would be to point out that Curry is multiracial and Canadian. Her experience of her blackness does not connect her to the legacy of slavery that anchors the experience of blackness in the United States—and that underwrites the concerns about mass incarceration of black bodies and the precarity of black lives. The tension between multiracial Canadian Curry and the black audiences who mock her replicates the tension between scholars who think about

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intersectionality as intellectual property belonging to black women in the United States and those who see it moving across global currents. Even as she comments on black women’s bodies (repeating Bill Cosby’s chiding of black men’s bodies in his infamous Pound Cake speech in 20048), Curry signals disconnection from black struggle by foregrounding her cultural identity. In other words, she seems to claim, “This struggle is not mine; it does not belong to me.” Brittany ­Cooper (2017, 108) diagnoses this “desire to be unhyphenated” by examining Pauli Murray, an early figure in the black feminine intellectual landscape. Like ­Murray, Curry uses “her multiracial heritage … to neutralize polarizing discourses of race” (although Curry is, unlike Murray, clearly committed to a cisfeminine heterosexual conservatism). The struggle, however, is sticky, as intersectional analyses reveal. It adheres to bodies, clings to them, and rides affective circuits to emerge in belatedly anticipated ways. Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall (2013, 788) observe, “The historical centrality of American Black women and Black feminism as subjects of intersectionality theory grounds reservations about intersectionality’s usefulness as an analytic tool in addressing other marginalized communities and other manifestations of social power.” This suggests that the failure of imagination that pits Curry against her detractors troubles the field of intersectional studies at large: how rather than whether a multiracial African Canadian married to a black sports celebrity can or should engage with the political terrain of her audience in the United States. It would be an oversimplification to claim that Curry has no proverbial dog in the fight, but the eagerness to target the cultural conservatism of her brand, to lampoon her failures, and to drag the brand back into the set of significations connecting to African American economic struggle represent a failed call to care. The call to care would entail, at a minimum, what Brittany Cooper (2017, 52) calls racial sociality “born out of love for one’s fellow wo/man and radical empathy for members of one’s race.” Curry should indeed connect to the daily lives of African American women in the United States because that is precisely what her brand claims that it does—it claims to connect to the daily lives of all women everywhere in their particularity. Intersectionality moves across borders. More critically, intersectionality moves—it demands acknowledgement of hermeneutic mobility. In mapping intersectionality’s movements, Carbado, Crenshaw, Mays, and Tomlinson (2013, 305) observe in a special issue of Du Bois Review: “the movement of intersectionality has not been limited to interdisciplinary travel within the United States but has encompassed international travel as well. Various academics, advocates, and policy makers have taken up, redeployed, and debated intersectionality within

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institutional settings and discourses that attend to the global dimensions of history and power.” This means that intersectionality itself exerts its inexorable gravity upon Ayesha Curry’s kitchen work, and the lambasting of her struggle plate is a call to care that crosses the very borders that appear to protect her from it. In “Intersectionality and Food Studies,” Psyche Williams-Forson and Abby Wilkerson (2011) invite intersectionality into the kitchen, yet they insist on inscribing this invitation in the lexicon of social justice. Carbado et al. (2013, 304) write: “Paying attention to the movement of intersectionality helps to make clear that the theory is never done, nor exhausted by its prior articulations or movements; it is always already an analysis-in-progress. Put another way, there is potentially always another set of concerns to which the theory can be directed, other places to which the theory might be moved, and other structures of power it can be deployed to examine.” The humble struggle plate is such a space that articulates power, arouses a set of concerns, and then innocuously spoofs them. It is in its very innocuousness that the struggle plate’s cultural force fully emerges—to poor Ayesha Curry’s detriment.

NOTES 1. Ayesha Curry is Steph Curry’s wife, YouTube culinary celebrity, cookbook author, host of Homemade on Food Network. Steph Curry is point guard for the National Basketball Association’s Golden State Warriors, commonly viewed as the greatest basketball shooter in history. His records in sinking three-point shots helped the team win its first NBA championship since 1975 in 2015 and then two additional championships in 2017 and 2018. He may or may not be a lunar-landing skeptic. 2. Kim Kardashian is an influencer and celebrity married to Kanye West, star of E!’s reality television show Keeping Up with the Kardashians and a series of spinoffs featuring her sisters. Famous for being famous, she rose to celebrity status with a leaked sex tape made with singer, songwriter, and R&B producer Ray J. 3. Nicki Minaj is a Grammy-nominated rapper and songwriter. 4. Laura Govan is a cast member of reality television show Basketball Wives LA and mother of four children with Gilbert Arenas, against whom she has been waging a public battle for custody and child support. Gilbert Arenas is a retired professional basketball player. His career comprised of playing for the NBA’s Golden State Warriors (2001–3), the Washington Wizards (2003–10), the Orlando Magic (2010–11), the Memphis Grizzlies (2012), and the Chinese Basketball Association’s Shanghai Sharks (2012–13). He hosts a sports show on YouTube and a podcast. His relationship with Laura Govan is famously tempestuous and publicly messy.

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5. Omarosa Manigault Newman is an American reality television personality and former political aide to President Trump. After her termination as director of communications for the Office of Public Liaison, she published a tell-all book titled Unhinged, which revealed unflattering details of the White House’s inner workings. She released tapes that she secretly recorded to substantiate her allegations, breaching White House security in an embarrassing way. 6. April Ryan is an African American journalist and White House correspondent. She has dedicated her career to giving voice to American minorities. 7. Angela Rye is an American political advocate and commentator who appears frequently on CNN. She works closely with the Congressional Black Caucus. 8. Bill Cosby’s speech at the fiftieth anniversary commemoration of the Brown vs Topeka Board of Education Supreme Court decision is better known as “The Pound Cake Speech” because he referenced this dessert to comedically illustrate the banality of black deaths at the hands of the police. The joke alleges that cops kill black people for stealing pound cake because black pound cake thieves don’t have the money and lack the moral grounding provided by good parenting. Cosby then goes on to blame poor parenting for academic failure and mass incarceration that have disproportionately affected black communities in the United States. Further, he excoriates blacks who blame whites for continued black oppression. Reception of his speech was mixed, with some audiences applauding his candour in shedding the narrative of black victimhood and calling for personal responsibility among black people, while others viewed his speech as a failure of solidarity as he blames black people for problems stemming from systemic racism in the United States.

READING QUESTIONS 1. Who is left out of this analysis? What is the effect of these omissions?

2. To whom does the struggle plate properly belong? What does it mean to think about it as properly belonging to anyone?

3. How does this chapter position food cultures as divisive instead of unifying? How productive are these divisions? Can you think of other divisive food cultures?

REFERENCES AndreaDMorgan. 2016. “@BougieLa those tomatoes look sad & frustrated. Like they just looked at the chicken and sighed.” [Twitter post, April 16.] twitter.com/ AndreaDMorgan/status/721432057155440641.

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aroueno. 2016. “Ayesha Curry whipped up something a drunk student would after a night out and posted it on Instagram pic.twitter.com/yWoXxIqmK6.” [Twitter post, April 16.] twitter.com/aroueno/status/721447183258632192.

ayeshacurry. 2016a. “@SportsTalkSal What’s most funny about this is that this a dish from

one of the #1 chefs in the world and not mine. Jokes on you. #read.” [Twitter post, April 16.] twitter.com/ayeshacurry/status/721453036200038400.

———. 2016b. “Last nights lemony buttery shallot chicken and smokey cheddar smashed

potatoes w roasted corn, tomato and pancetta. #theseasonedlife.” [Instagram post, April 16.] www.instagram.com/p/BERUo93OTGc/.

Cake Wrecks. n.d. www.cakewrecks.com.

Carbado, D. W., K. W. Crenshaw, and V. M. Mays, and B. Tomlinson. 2013. “Intersection-

ality: Mapping the Movements of a Theory.” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 10 (2): 303–12.

Cho, S., K. Crenshaw, and L. McCall. 2013. “Toward a Field of Intersectionality Studies: Theory, Applications, and Praxis.” Signs 38 (4): 785–810.

Cooking for Bae. n.d. www.instagram.com/cookingforbae/?hl=en.

Cooper, B. C. 2017. Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women. ­Champaign: University of Illinois Press.

Cosby, B. 2004. “Dr. Bill Cosby Speaks at the 50th Anniversary Commemoration of the Brown vs Topeka Board of Education Supreme Court Decision.” The Black Scholar 34: 2–5. www.researchgate.net/publication/289926952_Dr_Bill_Cosby_Speaks_at_the_50th_ Anniversary_Commemoration_of_the_Brown_v_Topeka_Board_of_Education_ Supreme_Court_Decision_May_22_2004.

Curry, A. n.d. www.ayeshacurry.com/.

Deck, A. A. 2001. “Now Then—Who Said Biscuits? The Black Woman Cook as Fetish in American Advertising, 1905–1953.” In Kitchen Culture in America: Popular Representations of Food, Gender, and Race, edited by S. Inness, 69–93. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

DTMD. 2011. “The Struggle Is Real.” Makin’ dollas, Mellow Music Group.

eMarketer. 2017. “Key Digital Trends 2017.” www.emarketer.com/Webinar/Key-DigitalTrends-2017/4000152.

Footsy. 2017. “The Struggle Is Real.” MVP Records. www.youtube.com/watch?v= vN_ZYORMyK4.

Harris, M. 2017. Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials. New York: Little, Brown and Company.

Khatchatourian, M., and J. Rainey. 2015. “Idris Elba ‘Too Street’ to Play James Bond, 007

Author Says.” Variety. variety.com/2015/film/news/idris-elba-james-bond-too-streetauthor-anthony-horowitz-1201582692/.

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Kuahmel. 2013. “Struggle Plate.” Urban Dictionary. www.urbandictionary.com/define.php? term=struggle%20plate&utm_source=search-action.

LeBesco, K., and P. Naccarato. 2008. “Julia Child, Martha Stewart, and the Rise of Culi-

nary Capital.” In Edible Ideologies: Representing Food and Meaning, edited by K. LeBesco and P. Naccarato, 223–­38. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Lileks, J. 2019. The Gallery of Regrettable Food. www.lileks.com/institute/gallery.

Meyers, S. 2017. “FCC Votes to Repeal Net Neutrality: Omarosa Drama Continues: A

Closer Look.” [YouTube video, December 14.] Uploaded by Late Night with Seth ­Meyers. youtu.be/noUH5aYUBx4.

Nicki Minaj Just Unleashed the First Celebrity Thanksgiving Struggle Plate of the Year. 2016. Bossip, November 23. bossip.com/1380474/nicki-minaj-just-unleashed-the-firstcelebrity-thanksgiving-struggle-plate-of-the-year/#.

Nobranknerms. 2013. “The Struggle Is Real.” Urban Dictionary. www.urbandictionary.com/ define.php?term=The%20struggle%20is%20real.

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———. 2016. Cooking with Auntie Fee. [Video file.] www.auntiefee.com/

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St. Félix, D. 2017. “How the Alabama Senate Election Sanctified Black Women Vot-

ers.” The New Yorker, December 14. www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/ how-the-alabama-senate-election-sanctified-black-women-voters.

steenfox. 2016. “Just realized that Ayesha’s potatoes were the same color as Trump’s face.” [Twitter post, April 18.] twitter.com/steenfox/status/722118318899920896.

Struggle Jennings. 2016. “The Struggle Is Real.” Return of the Outlaw, Slumamerican.

Theophano, J. 2003. Eat My Words: Reading Women’s Lives through the Cookbooks They Wrote. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Thompson, K. 2017. “Dumbest Story Ever: How Omarosa’s Reality-Star Exit from the White House Hijacked the News.” Washington Post. www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/ the-meta-soap-opera-of-omarosa-manigaults-white-house-exit/2017/12/14/31ff281ae0fe-11e7-bbd0-9dfb2e37492a_story.html?utm_term=.a41142d6c2ee.

Williams-Forson, P. A. 2007. Building Houses out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Williams-Forson, P., and A. Wilkerson. 2011. “Intersectionality and Food Studies.” Food, Culture & Society 14 (1): 7–28.

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Low-Income Mothers and the Alternative Food Movement: An Intersectional Approach Blake Martin, Mari Kate Mycek, Sinikka Elliott, and Sarah Bowen

LEARNING OBJECTIVES 1. To identify the challenges low-income women face in participating in the alternative food movement 2. To explain the similarities and differences in the ways that low-income women engage in the alternative food movement 3. To analyze the gendered, racialized, and classed ways in which lowincome mothers talk about alternative food practices and labels, particularly organic

KEY TERMS alternative food movement, foodwork, intensive mothering, organic

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INTRODUCTION While organic, local, and fair-trade products account for a small proportion of the food market overall (Onyango, Hallman, and Bellows 2007), their consumption has grown substantially in the last decade. The organic industry experienced a 10.8 percent growth rate in 2015, reaching $4.2 billion in sales (Organic Trade Association 2016). Organic food is one of the most visible aspects of the alternative food movement (AFM), a movement based around the consumption of specific types of food (e.g., local, organic, and/or sustainable) as a means of caring for the environment and espousing ideals of personal and moral responsibility (Andersen 2011; Johnston, Szabo, and Rodney 2011). The AFM focuses on food politics, or “where, how, and by whom [food] was grown or raised, harvested, packaged, transported, and sold” (Cairns and Johnston 2015, 111). In the most general sense, the AFM’s supporters aim to use their food provisioning practices to counter the industrial US food system (Biltekoff 2013; Tregear 2011). Although the AFM denounces structural problems in conventional agriculture, proponents focus primarily on the individual behaviours and choices of consumers. Exhortations to “vote with your fork” or “vote with your dollar” abound in AFM spaces (Guthman 2011). Critics argue that by concentrating on consumption rather than production, “vote with your fork” maxims distract from advocating for better working conditions and more environmentally sound production practices (Guthman 2011). Moreover, the emphasis on individual consumer choice alienates potential adherents who are low income as they often cannot afford the higher prices of AFM products (Alkon 2012). Studies suggest that many white middle-class families have embraced the consumption of organic foods and other aspects of the AFM (Cairns and Johnston 2015, 2018; Cairns, Johnston, and MacKendrick 2013; MacKendrick 2018). Less is known about how low-income families and families of colour perceive and engage with the AFM ethos. More generally, most studies concerning food, family, and care work have tended to focus on white middle-class women’s experiences. Feminist food scholars argue that women are disproportionately responsible for enacting the physical and emotional labour associated with participating in the AFM (Cairns and Johnston 2015; DeLind and Ferguson 1999; Som Castellano 2016). However, there is a need for a deeper understanding of how low-income mothers’ views on food, health, and nutrition shape the physical, emotional, and symbolic elements of family foodwork (Chen 2016; MacKendrick 2018).1 This chapter addresses this gap in the literature by using an intersectional framework to analyze the gendered, racialized, and classed ways in which

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low-income mothers engage with alternative food practices and labels, particularly organic. We focus on the experiences of English-speaking mothers in the state of North Carolina, drawing from women in three counties (two rural and one urban). Participants were recruited from a variety of community organizations; we used purposive sampling to ensure a diverse group. Our participants, as a racially diverse group of low-income women in North Carolina, are a particularly relevant group to study because much of the previous research surrounding the alternative food movement and organic consumption has focused on the experiences of those who are white and middle-class (Slocum 2007). Our focus on urban and rural counties in North Carolina is also important because many previous studies of the AFM are based in large, urban cities (e.g., New York City, San Francisco) with a long history of engaging in the AFM. We suggest that there are important differences within the experiences and preferences of low-income women, not solely between low-income and middle-class women.

RELEVANT LITERATURE Since DeVault’s (1991) foundational study on family foodwork, many scholars have examined the relationships between food, care work, and femininity (e.g., Cairns et al. 2013; Cairns and Johnston 2015; Carney 2015; Copelton 2007; Wills et al. 2011). Foodwork and care are intimately tied up with women’s ­identities (Cairns and Johnston 2015; Carney 2015). Recent studies of women’s ­foodwork have increasingly paid attention to the role of the AFM in shaping food practices (Cairns and Johnston 2015, 2018), but these studies have focused primarily on the experiences of middle-class women. Part of understanding food and care work involves examining how individuals assign moral judgments to food. Binaries of “good” and “bad” foods are based on a range of attributes, including the perceived nutritional and caloric values of foods, ethical and environmental considerations, and their potential to demonstrate class status. Moreover, food consumption practices are closely tied to the construction of “good” and “bad” mothers (Copelton 2007), especially given that mothers are understood to be primarily responsible for children’s eating habits and weights (Bowen, Brenton, and Elliott 2019; Cairns and Johnston 2015, 2018; DeVault 1991; Elliott and Bowen 2018). The United States is characterized by a widespread cultural understanding that people who do not eat good food (e.g., fresh, local, and home-cooked) lack the knowledge to make informed food choices (Minkoff-Zern and Carney 2015). Public health interventions similarly

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tend to approach dietary deficiencies as a lack of knowledge rather than structural inequality. Ultimately, mothers are expected to teach their children to enjoy good food, not only because of its nutritional value but also because it confers class status (Cairns and Johnston 2018; Fielding-Singh 2017). Assigning good/bad food values is further complicated by the addition of AFM labels to food choices (Cairns et al. 2013; Cairns and Johnston 2018). The AFM is based on the idea that consumers can use their food purchases to challenge or bypass what they see as the dangers and problems inherent in the industrial food system (DeLind 2011; Hinrichs 2000; MacKendrick 2018). Organic, local, fair-trade, and sustainable foods are all included under the umbrella of the alternative food movement. Choices about food are connected to ideas of personal and moral responsibility. For example, organic products are often marketed in a way that evokes morality, with brands such as Honest Tea, Purity Life, and Smart Balance all suggesting that consumers are purchasing a morally superior, “honest,” “pure,” or “smart” product (Eskine 2012). Consumers espouse a variety of reasons for purchasing organic. ­MacKendrick (2014) argues that in the face of inadequate regulatory oversight of food production practices, people increasingly engage in “precautionary consumption” in order to mitigate their exposure to potentially harmful chemicals. Johnston and Szabo (2011) argue that in some cases, AFM participation has more to do with status than with actual health, environmental, or worker benefits. When good mothering is linked with buying certain products, such as organic, this reproduces inequality, as not all families are able to purchase these items (Cairns et al. 2013). Although much of the literature on alternative food practices has focused primarily on middle-class families, researchers have also considered the experiences of nonwhite and non–middle-class families as they engage in foodwork (Bowen, Elliott, and Brenton 2014; Bowen et al. 2019; Chen 2016; Daniel 2016; Elliott and Bowen 2018; Fielding-Singh 2017). Popular food discourse often accuses low-income mothers of failing to transmit the right food values to their children. Fielding-Singh (2017) and Daniel (2016) show how food values and feeding practices are shaped by social and economic positionality. For example, low-income parents may bend their own rules by providing treats in order to demonstrate that they are good parents who do not deprive children of “normal” childhood experiences (see also Chen 2016). Previous research suggests that many low-income families are aware of organic and other AFM products, but lack the money to buy them (Dettman and Dimitri 2009; Dimitri and Dettman 2012; Rifkin 2014). The belief that organic

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foods are inherently expensive is widespread across social classes (Chen 2016; Reish et al. 2013). Organic is still a niche market, and even affluent families do not often purchase organic foods exclusively (Cairns and Johnston 2015). Lowincome families also face a double bind, as they may be criticized for purchasing “unhealthy” conventional food products, but may also face criticism for “lavishly” and “irresponsibly” spending their money on expensive products like organic foods (Bowen et al. 2019; Elliott and Bowen 2018; Johnston and Szabo 2011). Moreover, as Slocum (2007) argues, alternative foods are often sold and marketed in ways that are comfortable and pleasing to white middle-class shoppers, but can be exclusionary to others. Finally, as Mares and Peña (2010, 2011) and White (2011) argue, low-income people and people of colour often engage in alternative food practices (for example, by saving seeds or growing their own food) in ways that are not recognized by others within the alternative food movement or by the researchers who study it. Our study contributes to the literature on alternative foods and family foodwork by examining the diverse ways that lowincome, English-speaking mothers in North Carolina talk about and participate in the AFM, particularly regarding the consumption of organic products and participation in alternative markets and subsistence activities, including gardening, hunting, and bartering.

METHODS Sampling The data analyzed for this chapter were collected as part of a larger five-year US Department of Agriculture–funded study on families, food, and health (2012–17). Participants were interviewed multiple times over the course of the study. During the third year of data collection, spanning 2014 and 2015, researchers conducted semistructured interviews with 112 mothers and grandmothers of young children in one urban and two rural North Carolina counties; each participant completed two interviews during the third year. The 83 participants analyzed in this chapter represent the group of English-­ speaking women who completed at least one interview during Year 3 (2014 and 2015), and whose transcripts were coded by the research team at the time of analysis. The interview transcripts for the remaining 29 participants were unavailable for analysis at the time this chapter was written, primarily because their interviews were conducted in Spanish and had to be translated before being coded, which took longer.

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For the initial recruitment process in Year 1, the research team recruited participants from a variety of locations, such as daycares and schools, community events, churches, and personal contacts. At these sites, team members would explain that we wanted to talk with women who were caregivers of small children about what it means to feed their family. In order to guarantee that participants came from diverse networks, we recruited a maximum of five people from any institution and accepted no more than two referrals from an individual. Screenings with participants were conducted over the phone prior to scheduling the interview. To be included in the study, the participant had to be the primary caretaker of at least one child between the ages of two and nine. Screening questions were also used to exclude participants with household incomes in the previous year over 200 percent of the poverty line ($22,350 for a family of four in 2011). Due to discrepancies in how participants answered the screening questions, six households had incomes between 200 percent and 252 percent of the poverty line. As stated above, 83 participants are included for analysis in this chapter: 36 are white, 45 are black, one is Latina, and one is biracial. At the time the Year 3 interviews were conducted, 57 of these participants were receiving ­Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, also commonly referred to as food stamps, a federal food benefits program in the United States. Fourteen were receiving WIC benefits. (WIC, or the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, is a federal program in the United States that serves low-income pregnant, postpartum, and breastfeeding women, as well as infants and children up to age five.) Nineteen participants had completed some high school, 22 were high school graduates or had earned a GED (General Education Development certificate, equivalent to a high school diploma in the United States), five had attended trade or vocational school, 30 had completed some college or an associate’s degree, and five had completed a bachelor’s degree. Sixty-seven participants had at least one household member employed at the time of the interview. Semistructured Interviews A research team of black, white, Latina, and Asian American women from diverse class backgrounds conducted two interviews with each participant in Year 3. Interviews generally lasted between one-and-a-half and two hours, and almost all took place in participants’ homes. The first interview focused on topics such as neighbourhood, life changes, emotions and mental health, physical

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health, domestic violence, parenting, work experiences, material hardship and food insecurity, disposable ties and help from others, and religion and spirituality, with a series of final wrap-up questions about what would help families be healthier. The second interview focused on topics such as food shopping, food assistance, food insecurity, nutrition beliefs, and health efforts. Additionally, we asked specific questions regarding participants’ participation in AFMs, including questions about organic foods, farmers’ markets, and gardens. A team of researchers analyzed the data using NVivo software to develop broad codes that would encompass the themes in each interview. To develop these codes, the research team read multiple transcripts and hand coded individually. These codes were then discussed as a group and the team continued with an iterative process of coding, memoing, and discussing until a codebook was established, which we used to code all transcripts. During coding, we reviewed 10 percent of the transcripts, recoding or adjusting coding categories as necessary. This chapter is based primarily on focused coding of a particular code from the interviews: food system. Food system references the purchase or consumption of alternative or nonconventional foods, including organic, local, and foods grown or hunted by the participant or someone in her network; this code also includes references to beliefs or critiques of how food is produced, distributed, or sold. All of the data that were coded as food system were downloaded from NVivo. The authors then engaged in an open coding process of the food system code. We individually coded a portion of this specific code and met to develop more focused codes, which we then used to code all transcripts. Our findings represent some of the dominant themes, similarities, and contradictions that emerged from the focused coding process.

FINDINGS Participants in the study discussed organic food and alternative food practices in a variety of ways. An intersectional approach acknowledges how individuals and groups differentially placed within interlocking systems of oppression and privilege have distinct points of view of their own experiences with social inequality (Collins 2015; hooks 1984; Crenshaw 1991). We focused on the experiences of low-income women and women of colour, whose experiences within the AFM have frequently been ignored. Importantly, their stories articulated that even within the category of “low-income,” there is a wide range of attitudes and practices, illustrating that no single perspective can adequately capture all lowincome women’s experiences.

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Amid the variety of ways participants thought and talked about organic food and the AFM, we focus in this chapter on three main findings. Overall, the participants had varying understandings of and opinions about organic products and the AFM, and these were informed by intersecting gendered, racialized, and classed meanings and experiences. First, participants expressed a range of emotions and attitudes about organic food, from distance and disgust to comfort and desire. Our analysis focuses on how these perceptions are formed at the nexus of practical concerns and symbolic meanings. For example, some participants emphasized that they thought organic food was for people with identities (e.g., vegan, rich) that were different from their own. Second, participants discussed alternative means of procuring foods, such as farmers’ markets or communitysupported agriculture (CSA), in ways that revealed how these spaces and services can be experienced as foreign or unsatisfying and how racialized and classed understandings infused these perceptions. These themes were not mutually exclusive, and some understandings and explanations overlapped. Third, although participants often had romantic ideas about a simpler time when people grew and raised their own food, participants who engaged in these alternative practices described using them as a means of survival and out of necessity. Organic Food: “They Just Put a Label on Them to Make Them More Expensive, That’s It” When asked how they understood the term organic food, many women focused on the high cost and unaffordability of organic products. Jenny, a white mother of four, explained how unrealistic the idea of buying organic was for her family: My family, you know, it might be healthier because it doesn’t have all the additives and stuff. But if you can’t afford it, then, in order for our family to be able to eat organic, we would eat for probably [one] week [out of] a month and that would be it. We wouldn’t eat the rest of the month.

Making sure her family had enough to eat was an important component of Jenny’s provisioning, as it was for all participants (Elliott and Bowen 2018). Low-income mothers often prioritize ensuring their children have enough to eat (Chen 2016; Daniel 2016). According to Jenny, buying organic food would mean that her family might eat more healthily one week out of the month, but they would go hungry the other three weeks. Kyla, a black mother of three, similarly viewed organic food favourably but said it was out of reach. Kyla believed that

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“smart people” bought organic food, but then added, “I mean the only problem with organic is that it’s so much more expensive.… So to be honest, I feel like people that can afford it is who buys it. Everybody can’t afford it.” Kyla backtracked from her initial assessment that “smart people” purchased organic food, perhaps as a way to avoid stigmatizing herself and others in her economic circumstances who may view these foods as preferable but lack the means to purchase them. Research finds that poor women feel they have to say no to their kids more often than they can say yes, and that food offers a way to provide for their children and also to treat them (Chen 2016). Some participants said that buying organic products would not only cost more but that it would also reduce the products available to them, making it harder to accommodate their children’s wishes. For example, along with perceiving organic products as something that “people that can afford it” buy, Tricia, a white mother of two, added, “And, there’s less of it as well. So, your choices aren’t—they’re more limited too.” Poor families already face deeply constrained choices. Some were concerned that choosing organic would further restrict their options, even if they viewed these products favourably. However, some women rejected the notion that organic food was healthier and suggested that the label was a gimmick or a fad to trick people into spending more money. Melanie, a white mother of two, had told us in previous interviews that she would definitely prefer to eat more organic food. However, during her Year 3 interview, she expressed a strong suspicion of the health benefits of organic foods.2 “I think that people are probably blowing the whole organic thing out of proportion,” she said. Melanie believed that people were duped into buying organic products “Because they’re led to believe that it’s better for you and people are very vulnerable to advertisement and they don’t think for themselves.” In contrast, Melanie constructed herself as an informed consumer who could see through advertising and think for herself. Notably, Melanie’s husband had a chronic illness and her family experienced declining economic circumstances during the course of the project. Her increasingly constrained choices may have informed her changing perception of the value of organic food. Leanne, a biracial mother of three, believed that “everybody except for my family” buys and uses organic products, suggesting she saw her food practices as  falling outside the norm. However, rather than characterize this in terms of her family’s deviance, Leanne explained her purposeful avoidance of ­organic products as an informed and sensible decision. Leanne loved cooking and ­savouring food. For her, the most important consideration was that the food

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tasted good. She had tried organic food in the past, and found it tasted the same as conventional food, leading her to conclude that “they just put a label on them to make them more expensive, that’s it.” Like Melanie, Leanne also believed that people were duped into buying organic because “they think it’s healthier.” Even though Leanne considered buying organic to be very common, she framed her decision to avoid it in a way that cast her as a rational, smart consumer who was doing right by her family (Bowen et al. 2014, 2019). Whether they described organic products favourably or negatively, most women relied on first-hand experiences or those of friends or family members to form their impressions, as Leanne did. For example, Arielle, a black mother of one, said she had tried an organic kasha bar after seeing people at her workplace eating them, but decided they were “nasty” and consequently rejected all organic products: “I don’t like that stuff. Uh uh, it’s nasty. It’s healthy but that ain’t the type of healthy I be eating. It just don’t taste good and I just can’t eat it, I’m sorry.” Although she apologized to the interviewer for her distaste of organic products, Arielle also emphasized that she could still eat healthily, even if she didn’t consume organics. In a similar vein, Kimberly, a black mother of one, said that her best friend buys and eats only organic food, but she does not. She explained, “My best friend, that’s what she buys and eats and it’s expensive. I can say, I mean, if you can afford to do it, I think it’s important, but if you can’t, then I think it’s other ways in doing things, the same thing.” The women in our study generally described being barred from the regular consumption of organic food, yet emphasized that they were still concerned about food quality and cared about their own and their families’ well-being. They demonstrated pride in their thoughtfulness and resourcefulness in doing so, defending their mothering practices in the face of potential criticism (Elliott and Bowen 2018). A number of participants used the term regular to describe the conventionally grown foods they ate and described themselves as “normal” consumers, thereby situating themselves and their food choices as sensible and practical. By contrast, some participants used terms that suggested people who ate organic foods were an anomaly, distancing themselves from these individuals and their practices. For example, Ruth, a black mother of two, cut off an interviewer’s question about organic food mid-sentence, stating, “I don’t even touch organic foods.” The interviewer continued the line of questioning: Interviewer: Okay, why is that? Ruth: Just don’t. Expensive. Interviewer: What does the term organic make you think of?

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Ruth: Nothing really. I just don’t buy them. Interviewer: Right. Why do you think that some people buy organic food? Ruth: Couldn’t even tell you. Interviewer: Who do you think buys or eats organic foods? Ruth: Maybe vegans. Here Ruth vehemently differentiated her practices from those individuals who buy organic, making it clear that organic meant “nothing” to her and that she viewed it as expensive and potentially only the terrain of vegans. “Vegan” in this instance may be a stand-in for white people, given that the public face of veganism is often white (Harper 2010). Although there are African Americans (and other people of colour) who identify as vegans, they are underrepresented in vegan and black communities, as captured by the title of a 2017 documentary by black vegan activist Jasmine Leyva, The Invisible Vegan. Additionally, the interviewer was white, which may have meant that the participant did not feel comfortable speaking explicitly about race, opting instead to use a code word, reflecting the hegemony of colour-blind discourses of race (Bonilla-Silva 2009). Other women also distanced themselves from what they viewed as the typi­ cal consumers of organic foods, characterizing these individuals as comprising a very narrow segment of society. When we asked Lisa, a white mother of two, who she thought ate organic food, she explained, “Probably someone that’s vegan or someone that is all about extremely healthy healthy, never splurges, very tiny women. Probably these women that are on the ‘Housewives of Whatever’; they seem like they’re organic people to me.” According to Lisa, organic consumers have very strict and restricted diets and are “tiny women.” By referring to the Housewives franchise of TV shows, which feature the exploits of extremely affluent women, Lisa also linked organic food to an elite consumer who does not have to worry about price. Market analyses support Lisa’s suggestion that there is something related to identity formation involved in the purchase of organic food. Despite its substantial growth over the last decade, the organic market remains a relatively small portion of the US food market (Dimitri and Dettmann 2012). Many shoppers purchase at least some organic products, but a small portion of customers accounts for the majority of organic sales (Pearson, Henryks, and Jones 2011), and most organic buyers regularly switch between organic and conventional products (Pearson et al. 2011). Organic consumers are more concerned about issues related to health, food, and environmental concerns than other consumers, regardless of income (Onyango et al. 2007). In addition, however, Currid-Halkett (2017) argues that eating organic is one way that the new,

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dominant cultural elite in the United States assert their class status and connect with each other.

ALTERNATIVE FOOD SPACES I don’t like anybody picking my products for me. —Patricia, black grandmother of two

As the previous section shows, many women associated organic food with the people who are most closely aligned with the AFM: white, affluent people ­(Onyango et al. 2007). The AFM, which includes organic food, has been criticized for its embodiment of white middle-class norms and values, while systematically ignoring the barriers others may face in engaging in the same food practices (Guthman 2011). Additionally, alternative food practices are often associated with whiteness and engage in colour-blind ideology that discounts the ongoing significance of race in the United States (Bonilla-Silva 2009; Slocum 2007). Previous research has found that spaces associated with the AFM, like farmers’ markets, are symbolically linked with whiteness (Alkon 2012). Our research further demonstrates the racialized and classed ways these spaces and services can be experienced by low-income black and white women. In addition to asking about organic food, we also asked whether the women in our study engaged in alternative food practices such as shopping at farmers’ markets or participating in CSAs. Forty percent of participants (n = 34) reported having shopped at a farmers’ market at least once, but only five participants said they regularly shopped at a farmers’ market. Ramira, a black mother of three, said she goes to a farmers’ market “right around the corner, five minutes [from here]” ever since “someone let me in on that little bit of secret.” The secret, Ramira explained, is that the food at the farmers’ market is both affordable and organic: “It’s cheap believe it or not, and it has some really good stuff, and it’s organic, in my opinion.” Although it wasn’t clear whether the food was in fact organic, Ramira unambiguously embraced shopping at the farmers’ market. By describing the farmers’ market as a “secret,” she revealed that knowledge about alternative markets is not widely shared in her community. Notably, throughout her interviews, Ramira spoke of her desire for upward mobility. She went back to school in the first year of the study and planned to become a registered nurse. Thus, while she described the secret of the farmers’ market in largely pragmatic terms (e.g., convenience, affordability), shopping there also reflected and symbolized her mobility aspirations (Lareau 2011).3

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As they did with organic food, participants often emphasized how practical considerations, such as a lack of transportation, restricted their ability to shop at farmers’ markets. Some participants spoke enthusiastically about the possibility of buying produce from a farmers’ market, even if they had not yet done so, but they also typically ended discussions with cautionary statements such as “Only if they take EBT” 4 (Bethany, black mother of one) or “If they accept food stamps” ­(Leanne). Their caution speaks to their constrained economic resources, but also potentially indicates that women may have viewed these spaces as not necessarily designed for them, or at least not with their needs in mind. Indeed, other scholars have noted that these are classed spaces, designed to feel comfortable to a middle-class aesthetic (Alkon 2012; Slocum 2007). Research also suggests that these spaces are racialized, for example, through marketing strategies designed to tap into a white middle-class habitus and through their predominantly white clientele (Kato 2013). Some participants who had previously shopped at farmers’ markets expressed confusion about how to differentiate between vendors in order to decide from whom to buy. Edna, a black mother of one, said she “would like to shop there [at a farmers’ market]” in her neighbourhood because “they have a lot of fresh fruits and vegetables in there.” But despite her enthusiasm about the produce at the farmers’ market, Edna felt it was hard to know how to choose: “And then it’s—that’s kind of hard because it’s like different people with different—so I don’t know which one might be the freshest or you know.” Her response suggested some hesitation about approaching and chatting with vendors to learn more about their farming practices, try their produce, and essentially “vet” them. Studies show that affluent white shoppers have a stronger sense of entitlement to demand a high level of attention and service in their retail encounters compared to poor and racialized shoppers (Williams 2006). Farmers’ market advocates tend to emphasize the value of “getting to know your farmer” and supporting local businesses. These kinds of face-to-face interactions characterized the typical shopping experience before the advent of chain stores ushered in a more depersonalized form of shopping. However, although people tend to romanticize these face-to-face transactions, Deutsch (2010, 13–15) observes that food shopping during this era was “difficult [and] timeconsuming” and “an intensely, indeed uncomfortably, social encounter.” For poor and working-class women, especially women of colour, these encounters were often marked by intense scrutiny, mutual skepticism, and cross-cultural tensions with the shopkeepers (Deutsch 2010). These women lacked the social credibility and money needed to resist when shopkeepers peddled inferior items to them. Not surprisingly, many poor women

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and women of colour happily embraced chain stores, hoping for fair prices on decent goods and a reprieve from the unwanted advances of shopkeepers (Deutsch 2010). Contemporary research also suggests that poor consumers often prefer chain stores over farmers’ markets in their neighbourhoods (Guthman 2011). A few participants in our study stated that because chain grocery stores carried local products, there was no need to go to a farmers’ market to access fresh food from a farmer. As Ivette, a Latina mother caring for two children, explained, “[There’s a] farmers’ market in the produce aisle of Food Lion.… I’m not going to go there [to a farmers’ market]. Why would I have to if … Food Lion and Walmart has them there?” None of the participants were members of a CSA at the time of the interview. Only 11 were familiar with CSAs, and while many reported being interested in joining a CSA when it was described to them (n = 39), they also expressed that they thought it was unlikely they would be able to join a CSA due to the cost of membership. Some also discussed how they would not want to join a CSA if it meant they could not choose what foods they received. Having choice was important for participants for many reasons, as discussed earlier, and their circumstances often reduced the choices available to them. For example, many went to food pantries (also known as food banks) to supplement their food supplies and had very little, if any, control over the amount or type of food they received from the food pantry (Bowen et al. 2014, 2019). Suggesting the importance of choice, Patricia, a black grandmother of two, stressed that joining a CSA would not suit her because “I’m the type of person that I really have to see what I’m getting. I don’t like anybody picking my products for me. I like to pick my own.” Research has shown that low-income mothers have a keen sense of what their children will and will not eat and prioritize buying foods they know their children will eat to avoid food waste (Daniel 2016). Participants reflected that joining a CSA might restrict their ability to carefully monitor and control the foods they are spending their money on.

ENGAGING WITH ALT FOOD We grow our food and we make our food. —Robin, white grandmother of two

Although most participants did not buy organic or regularly shop at farmers’ markets or use CSAs, some performed other alternative food practices that are outside conventional food procurement, such as gardening, hunting, and

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bartering. These practices generally fall outside the marketplace, which is not surprising given that most of the participants in the study, and many other lowincome women and families (Chen 2016), cite price as the main determinant in how they make food choices. Twenty-eight percent of participants, primarily concentrated in rural areas, had their own garden or access to produce from someone else’s garden (n = 23). Gardening and other means of raising food could be helpful when the garden was successful, but could also be an added burden when gardens failed to produce. Melanie, introduced earlier, told us that when her garden was successful, her family was able to eat more fresh vegetables, but that the first years of gardening for her family had been “just expensive, extensive feeding grounds for deer and squirrels.” Nichelle, a black mother of one, lived in a rural community and said that a neighbour provided her with fresh produce such as tomatoes, watermelon, collards, and cabbage from his garden. The same neighbour would also bring her pigs he raised and slaughtered, which she was able to keep in bulk and use for family meals. Some participants, particularly those who had grown up in rural areas but now lived in a more urban or suburban environment, lamented their lack of access to land or space to have a garden or raise animals. Being able to own a large tract of land in order to grow some of their own food was a dream expressed by several participants. Patricia, introduced earlier, had fond memories of growing up eating fresh produce from the garden. She believed garden produce was healthier, stating that “back then, people did a lot of gardening compared to now: fresh out of the garden tomatoes and cucumbers and you know. It was so filling and healthy.” But Patricia also said that the rules of her housing complex prevented her from being able to plant a garden. She explained, “I wish, just wish, like properties like this that’s low-income based, instead of trying to be so strict they should say, ‘Well, oh, you know … everybody … you could take and plant fruits and vegetables and stuff like that.’ … The government, they help you in some ways but they hurt you in some ways, you know. So that’s the way that is.” After being homeless for several months, Patricia and her family had managed to receive subsidized housing, and the property they moved to had outdoor green spaces for her grandchildren to play in, which she was happy about. Yet being restricted in her housing choices meant facing rules that limited Patricia’s ability to plant and cultivate a garden. Patricia offered a powerful analysis of the role of the government in shaping her access to foods she considered healthier while also expressing a sense of stoic resignation about her situation: “So that’s the way that is.” Her experiences with homelessness and

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chronic health issues may have informed her sense that there was little she could do to change this situation. But she may have also been reluctant to challenge the rule about gardening, given evidence that African Americans face more punitive treatment when they come under the radar of government officials (Roberts 2002; Soss, Fording, and Schram 2011). Overall, low-income women may be wary of governmental agencies’ involvement in their lives (Elliott and Bowen 2018; Levine 2013). Some of the older participants expressed concerns about generational shifts in gardening. Winifred, a black grandmother who shared caring for her two grandsons with her daughter, regretted that her husband’s ill health meant he was no longer able to cultivate their extensive garden as he had before. She also expressed her concern over how her life and that of younger generations have changed in relation to gardening and homesteading: Now it’s getting harder and harder to find people that garden … I don’t think people have the time that they really want [to] have to go out there. Really, my nephew, he learned a lot from my dad, but his schedule is so tight that he can’t get out there to really tend to it.… Yeah, we helped my daddy. He raised most of his food on the farm. He raised a garden, he had raised his own hogs, he didn’t have to buy no meat, he raised his own chickens, didn’t have to buy no chicken. My mama did a lot of canning in the winter time. [We] had plenty of food besides flour but he had flour because he would stock up on that and meal. It weren’t very much that we need to go to the store for.

Despite Winifred’s desire to have a garden, her nephew’s demanding work schedule and her husband’s health concerns inhibited her family from practising the same food practices she remembers from growing up. Gardens have a rich history in African American communities as a space of resistance despite various challenges throughout time to maintain these spaces (Twitty 2017). Only about 15 percent of participants (n = 12) said that they raised animals or hunted or had friends or relatives who provided them with raised or hunted meat. Ten of the 12 women who raised animals or hunted were white and, with one exception, all of these participants were in rural counties. This is consistent with the literature that shows hunting is an activity that is frequently coded as white (Floyd and Lee 2002) and more common in rural communities ­(Stedman and Heberlein 2001). Participants who hunted talked about the importance of raising or hunting meat in distinct ways. Some used their animals or their by-products to trade and barter for other essential goods. Others talked about

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resorting to hunting or fishing in times of scarcity. Some explained that they were able to get by without hunting and fishing, but that receiving these types of meats as a gift from friends and family provided a “cushion” in their food budget. Robin, a white grandmother caring for her two grandsons in a rural county, described how she managed to get a turkey for Thanksgiving by bartering eggs laid by her chickens: We’re going to get turkey. I have a friend that raises turkeys, so … Yeah, we’ve been giving them eggs. Two dozen eggs a week and then we’ll have probably a 25–30 pound [turkey] when we’re done … I have to do it that way. My daughter has celiac’s disease, so she can’t have glutens. And I can’t trust the injections or anything going into a turkey. So, we barter out the turkey.

Robin did not trust the conventional food system, so she raised her own chickens in order to have access to food unadulterated with chemicals, which is also a motivating factor for many middle-class people who engage in alternative food markets and purchase organic foods (Chiffoleau 2009; MacKendrick 2018).

CONCLUSION The diverse group of low-income women in this study had varying, multifaceted thoughts and experiences regarding organic food and alternative food practices. Participants overwhelmingly identified organic food as expensive, which gives credence to research that finds price constrains low-income consumers from participating in alternative food markets. Participants’ decision-making processes can be situated within larger discussions of food and care work. They judiciously decided which products were worth spending money on. In doing so, these mothers were engaging in intensive mothering and foodwork with the same goal expressed broadly by mothers across social classes: providing for their families in the best way possible. However, participation in the AFM is not simply about economic access but also a reflection of social identity (e.g., vegan). Not all middle- and upper-class women buy organic food or shop at farmers’ markets; similarly, low-­ income women described a range of attitudes and interests around alternative food practices, from viewing them as superior to describing them as a hoax to trick gullible consumers into spending more money. Their beliefs are formed through first-hand experience, but also likely reflect wider discourses and debates, such as those surrounding the health benefits of organic food (Onyango

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et al. 2007). Moreover, careful analysis of the women’s reasons for embracing or rejecting alternative food practices demonstrate how their perceptions are formed by racialized, classed, and gendered meanings and experiences that are dynamic and evolving. Most women in the study did not regularly participate in the practices most commonly associated with the alternative food movement (buying organic, shopping at farmers’ markets, or participating in CSAs). However, as other scholars have found (Mares and Peña 2010, 2011; White 2011), some did participate in alternatives to the conventional food system that were not market-based. Raising animals or gardening was not a hobby for these families but essential to their survival. This chapter provides an important, in-depth look at low-income mothers’ perceptions and experiences of participating in the alternative food movement. Their decision-making processes surrounding food, particularly organic food, are not uniform and may shift with changing circumstances. While price is at the forefront for all of these women, many other factors inform their food experiences and practices. Future research should further investigate the within-group similarities and differences in alternative food practices to better understand the social and cultural meanings behind these practices. Additionally, future research should also begin to more thoroughly investigate the ways low-income households may participate in alternative food practices in ways that bypass markets altogether.

NOTES 1. The larger research project explored mothers’ understandings of health. An analysis of this topic, while relevant, is beyond the scope of this chapter. For a detailed examination of this topic, please see Elliott and Bowen (2018). 2. While the analysis for this chapter focuses on interviews conducted in Year 3 of the larger longitudinal study, we spent a significant amount of time with Melanie during in-home observations and include some contextual information for her quote based on the first two years of data collection. 3. Lareau (2011) argues that class is not only about income and education but also symbolic meanings and practices. 4. EBT refers to electronic benefit transfer, which state governments use to issue benefits, such as SNAP, electronically on a payment card.

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READING QUESTIONS 1. Many proponents of the alternative food movement argue that educating low-income people about organic foods and other alternative food practices is important in order to increase participation rates. Do you agree or disagree? Why or why not?

2. What can the alternative food movement do in order to meet the needs of low-income people?

3. What can the alternative food movement do in order to become more inclusive of people of colour?

4. What are other food movements, contemporary or historical, that have ignored the experiences and needs of marginalized communities?

REFERENCES Alkon, A. H. 2012. Black, White, and Green: Farmers Markets, Race, and the Green Economy. Athens: University of Georgia Press.

Andersen, A. H. 2011. “Organic Food and the Plural Moralities of Food Provisioning.” Journal of Rural Studies 27 (4): 440–50.

Biltekoff, C. 2013. Eating Right in America: The Cultural Politics of Food and Health. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Bonilla-Silva, E. 2009. Racism without Racists: Color-blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America. 3rd ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

Bowen, S., J. Brenton, and S. Elliott. 2019. Pressure Cooker: Why Home Cooking Won’t Solve Our Problems and What We Can Do about It. New York: Oxford University Press.

Bowen, S., S. Elliott, and J. Brenton. 2014. “The Joy of Cooking?” Contexts 13 (3): 20–25.

Cairns, K., and J. Johnston. 2015. Food and Femininity. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing.

———. 2018. “On (Not) Knowing Where Your Food Comes from: Meat, Mothering and Ethical Eating.” Agriculture and Human Values 35 (3): 569–80. https://link.springer .com/article/10.1007/s10460-018-9849-5.

Cairns, K., J. Johnston, and N. MacKendrick. 2013. “Feeding the ‘Organic Child’: Mothering through Ethical Consumption.” Journal of Consumer Culture 13 (2): 97–118.

Carney, M. A. 2015. The Unending Hunger: Tracing Women and Food Insecurity across Borders. Oakland: University of California Press.

Chen, W. 2016. “From ‘Junk Food’ to ‘Treats’: How Poverty Shapes Family Food Practices.” Food, Culture, & Society 19 (1): 151–70.

Chiffoleau, Y. 2009. “From Politics to Co-operation: The Dynamics of Embeddedness in Alternative Food Supply Chains.” Sociologia Ruralis 49 (3): 218–35.

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Collins, P. H. 2015. “Intersectionality’s Definitional Dilemmas.” Annual Review of Sociology 41: 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-073014-112142.

Copelton, D. A. 2007. “‘You Are What You Eat’: Nutritional Norms, Maternal Deviance, and Neutralization of Women’s Prenatal Diets.” Deviant Behavior 28 (5): 467–94.

Crenshaw, K. 1991. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43 (6): 1241–99.

Currid-Halkett, E. 2017. The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class. ­Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Daniel, C. 2016. “Economic Constraints on Taste Formation and the True Cost of Healthy Eating.” Social Science & Medicine 148 (January): 34–41.

DeLind, L. 2011. “Are Local Food and the Local Food Movement Taking Us Where We Want to Go? Or Are We Hitching Our Wagons to the Wrong Star?” Agriculture and Human Values 28 (2): 273–83.

DeLind, L., and A. Ferguson. 1999. “Is This a Women’s Movement? The Relationship of

Gender to Community-Supported Agriculture in Michigan.” Human Organization 58

(2): 190–200.

Dettmann, R. L., and C. Dimitri. 2009. “Who’s Buying Organic Vegetables? Demographic Characteristics of U.S. Consumers.” Journal of Food Products Marketing 16 (1): 79–91.

Deutsch, T. 2010. Building a Housewife’s Paradise: Gender, Politics, and American Grocery Stores in the Twentieth Century. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

DeVault, M. 1991. Feeding the Family: The Social Organization of Caring as Gendered Work. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Dimitri, C., and R. L. Dettman. 2012. “Organic Food Consumers: What Do We Really Know about Them?” British Food Journal 114 (8): 1157–83.

Elliott, S., and S. Bowen. 2018. “Defending Motherhood: Morality, Responsibility, and Double Binds in Feeding Children.” Journal of Marriage and Family 80 (11): 499–520.

Eskine, K. 2012. “Wholesome Foods and Wholesome Morals? Organic Foods Reduce Pro-

social Behavior and Harshen Moral Judgements.” Social Psychological and Personality Science 4 (2): 251–54.

Fielding-Singh, P. 2017. “A Taste of Inequality: Food’s Symbolic Value across the Socioeconomic Spectrum.” Sociological Science 4: 424–48.

Floyd, M. F., and I. Lee. 2002. “Who Buys Fishing and Hunting Licenses in Texas? Results from a Statewide Household Survey.” Human Dimensions of Wildlife 7 (2): 91–106.

Guthman, J. 2011. Weighing in: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Harper, A. B. 2010. Sistah Vegan: Black Female Vegans Speak on Food, Identity, Health, and Society. New York: Lantern Books.

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Hinrichs, C. 2000. “Embeddedness and Local Food Systems: Notes on Two Types of Direct Agricultural Markets.” Journal of Rural Studies 16 (3): 295–303.

hooks, b. 1984. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Boston: South End Press.

Johnston, J., and M. Szabo. 2011. “Reflexivity and the Whole Foods Market Consumer: The Lived Experience of Shopping for Change.” Agriculture and Human Values 28 (3): 303–19.

Johnston, J., M. Szabo, and A. Rodney. 2011. “Good Food, Good People: Understand-

ing the Cultural Repertoire of Ethical Eating.” Journal of Consumer Culture 11 (3): 293–318.

Kato, Y. 2013. “Not Just the Price of Food: Challenges of an Urban Agriculture Organization in Engaging Local Residents.” Sociological Inquiry 83 (3): 369–91.

Lareau, A. 2011. Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Levine, J. 2013. Ain’t No Trust: How Bosses, Boyfriends, and Bureaucrats Fail Low-Income Mothers and Why It Matters. Berkeley: University of California Press.

MacKendrick, N. 2014. “More Work for Mother: Chemical Body Burdens as a Maternal Responsibility.” Gender & Society 28 (5): 705–28.

———. 2018. Better Safe Than Sorry: How Consumers Navigate Exposure to Everyday Toxics. Oakland: University of California Press.

Mares, T. M., and D. G. Peña. 2010. “Urban Agriculture in the Making of Insurgent Spaces in Los Angeles and Seattle.” In Insurgent Public Space: Guerilla Urbanism and the Remaking of Contemporary Cities, edited by J. Hou, 241–54. New York: Routledge.

———. 2011. “Environmental and Food Justice: Toward Local, Slow, and Deep Food Systems.” In Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class, and Sustainability, edited by A. H. Alkon and J. Agyeman, 197–219. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Minkoff-Zern, L. A., and M. A. Carney. 2015. “Latino Immigrants, ‘Dietary Health’ and Social Exclusion.” Food, Culture & Society 18 (3): 463–80.

Onyango, B., K. Hallman, and C. Bellows. 2007. “Purchasing Organic in US Food Systems.” British Food Journal 109 (5): 399–411.

Organic Trade Association. 2016. U.S. Organic: State of the Industry. www.ota.com.

Pearson, D., J. Henryks, and H. Jones. 2011. “Organic Food: What We Know (and Do Not Know) about Consumers.” Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems 26 (2): 171–77.

Reish, L., U. Eberle, and S. Lorek. 2013. “Sustainable Food Consumption: An Overview of

Contemporary Issues and Policies.” Sustainability: Science, Practice, & Policy 9 (2): 7–25.

Rifkin, Rebecca. 2014. “Forty-Five Percent of Americans Seek out Organic Foods.” ­August 7. www.gallup.com.

Roberts, D. E. 2002. Shattered Bonds: The Color of Welfare. New York: Basic Civitas Books.

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Slocum, R. 2007. “Whiteness, Space, and Alternative Food Practice.” Geoforum 38 (3): 520–33.

Som Castellano, R. L. 2016. “Alternative Food Networks and the Labor of Food Provisioning: A Third Shift?” Rural Sociology 81 (3): 445–69.

Soss, J., R. C. Fording, and S. F. Schram. 2011. Disciplining the Poor: Neoliberal Paternalism and the Persistent Power of Race. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Stedman, R. C., and T. A. Heberlein. 2001. “Hunting and Rural Socialization: Contingent Effects of the Rural Setting on Hunting Participation.” Rural Sociology 66 (4): 599–617.

Tregear, A. 2011. “Progressing Knowledge in Alternative and Local Food Networks: Critical Reflections and a Research Agenda.” Journal of Rural Studies 27 (4): 419–30.

Twitty, M. 2017. The Cooking Gene: A Journey through African-American Culinary History in the Old South. New York: Amistad, an imprint of Harper Collins Publishers.

White, M. M. 2011. “Sisters of the Soil: Urban Gardening as Resistance in Detroit.” Race/ Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary Global Contexts 5 (1): 13–28.

Williams, C. 2006. Inside Toyland: Working, Shopping, and Social Inequality. Berkeley: ­University of California Press.

Wills, W., K. Backett-Milburn, M. L. Roberts, and J. Lawton. 2011. “The Framing of So-

cial Class Distinctions through Family Food and Eating Practices.” Sociological Review 59 (4): 725–40.

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CHAPTER 10

“Waiting to Be Fed”: Reading Memories of Hunger in the Tsilhqot’in Land Claim Trial Transcripts and Tracey Lindberg’s Birdie Lauren McGuire-Wood

LEARNING OBJECTIVES 1. To gain an understanding of settler impositions to Indigenous food systems in Canada 2. To develop knowledge of Canadian settler and Indigenous relations as they pertain to food 3. To consider how food plays into the cultural and political landscape in what is currently Canada 4. To identify both the intersections and divergences of feminist and Indigenous theory in this context

KEY TERMS collective memory, colonialism, food security, food sovereignty, Indigenous epistemologies

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INTRODUCTION Looking at food develops a rich, textured picture of a culture and the practices and traditions within that build and sustain communities. That food holds this much meaning suggests that it has a role in memory, both personally and collectively: moments to create, share, and recall memory across time can revolve around food. However, colonialism generates a devastating rift in this process as settler foodways are prioritized over Indigenous practices, given rights and access to land. There exists an absence within collective memory when more than one culture or nation derives meaning from food on the same land. This chapter will focus on these instances as a form of hunger, a term that can encompass the totality of an embodied emptiness. In no way is the use of this term meant to minimize the experiences of those who lack food in a very material way. Instead, it outlines the consequences of being made to go without food through generations. I begin to unpack this by employing two texts that contend with and rely on memory between an Indigenous nation and what is currently Canada: the Tsilhqot’in land claim trial transcripts, wherein elders’ storytelling is mediated through a number of instruments of the government of British Columbia such as interpreters, lawyers, court reporters, and judges; and Birdie, a work of fictional literature by Cree legal scholar Tracey Lindberg, of the Kelly Lake Cree community located near the border of British Columbia and Alberta. Mentions of food in these texts operate as a medium through which one can read the construction and maintenance of collective memory when multiple nations exist on the same land. These texts depict memory through different means: the trial transcripts in a settler legal setting, which privileges a colonial world view and history, and Birdie in an oral storytelling tradition through multiple voices. These works are analyzed together here because they are both narratives that are told and remembered through relationships with food, and demonstrate how food fares in both settler and Indigenous legal practices. The inclusion of a literary narrative alongside government documents puts the two on equal footing, as I suggest that stories passed down among generations are no less legitimate than transcripts, also a form of storytelling with its own limitations. Each text details a return, a homecoming through the successful claim to possession of ancestral Tsilhqot’in land, and by finding space within one’s own body to call home, respectively. While the stories are ones of triumph and persistence, these victories have not been come by easily. In order to discuss hunger within these stories, I engage with theoretical work around the entanglement of food and memory, of memory

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with history, and history with nationhood, with regard to two specific Indigenous nations and Canada. In an examination of the Tsilhqot’in land claim trial transcripts, I explore the way settler legal structures preside over Indigenous ways of being, using food as a tool to exert control over communities. In particular, the format of the trial and the ongoing depletion of collective memory due to colonialism lead to a gap in one of the elders’ stories about Hunger (Dt’an). In Birdie, Lindberg focuses on food as a device for addressing memory. Taking note of her different uses of the terms feed and hunger, I will analyze how these words take shape through the physical body and relationships with the land. This chapter will show the complications of food in use as markers of memory: on one hand, it can be a helpful, tangible reference point and a way to invoke language to speak about what is unspeakable; on the other, it can reinforce the values of one culture or nation as superior to another, especially if each has (at times, opposing) knowledge of the same land. Just as tracing the appearances of food across these texts yields clues into how food forms memory, this chapter will show how the absence of food—the hunger—exists in silences and stories lost in translation. This suggests that the appearances and lack of appearances of food are political at their very core.

A BRIEF BACKGROUND ON RELATIONSHIPS OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES, LAND, AND FOOD At the forefront of the struggle of Indigenous peoples for sovereignty and selfdetermination since contact has always been land. Colonialism has systematically dispossessed Indigenous peoples in Canada, doing irreparable damage to ties with their territories. These ties are important, as relationships of Indigenous peoples and nonhuman beings are constructed through connections with space and place, not linear time (McLeod 2007). Instead of participating in practices rooted in the past, as colonial history would have one believe, Indigenous nations in Canada continually renew and regenerate ancestral teachings through ongoing relationships with land. This opposes settlers’ conventional notions of Indigeneity as based on the “simple and brute criterion of temporal precedence” (Grey and Patel 2015, 434). Legal disputes over land possession often come down to the question of who was there first, and who was using the land properly (as in those who extract the most value from its finite resources). Though food is linked in irrefutable ways to space and place, it can be co-opted for the purposes of questioning long-term occupancy through temporality. Part of my work here

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is to show how Canadian settlers have used food to continue this precedence of time, and the ways Indigenous individuals and communities are refusing this. It should be noted that the categories of settler and Indigenous person are not absolute, and not necessarily entirely in opposition. In Indigenous Writes: A Guide to First Nations, Métis & Inuit Issues in Canada, Métis lawyer Chelsea Vowel (2016) acknowledges the differences between white settlers, black people, and non-black people of colour, given the way each group of people has had relations with the land; this considers transatlantic slavery and the movement of refugees. Settlers, then, refers to those from varying backgrounds who came to Canada for the economic prosperity of what was thought to be untouched wilderness (Vowel 2016), the idea of which completely erases the intricate structures of civilization already in place across Indigenous territories. Recognizing the complexities of these identities, the term settler will be used generally in this chapter to name those who benefit from settler colonial systems, particularly, in these examples, the British Columbian and Canadian courts, other governmental institutions, and land owners. As a Canadian settler of Irish and French descent myself, I am working within the limitations of my own knowledge here. I have been privileged in my past work, at the helm of a community food security organization on Coast Salish territories (Vancouver, Canada), to learn from and alongside Indigenous peoples. My position is to further expose the political decisions that can lead to hunger, in terms of colonial imposition on Indigenous food systems and foodways. Relationships on and to the land have played out over food for hundreds of years. McLeod (2007) writes that during the negotiations over Treaty 6 in the 1870s, part of the foundation of Canada as a country, Cree people considered themselves able to survive without having to take rations and living on reserves so long as they had buffalo. Though settlers told Cree people that they would not lose their fishing and hunting rights in signing the treaty, testimony of Cree elders recalls the settlers’ systematic killing of buffalo on Cree territory in 1885, starving Cree people “into near-submission” (McLeod 2007, 50). Further, McLeod (2007) states that with Christianity came agriculture, parcelling land into careful sections, organizing arable land in ways that undermine the food practices of Indigenous nations, which aligned with the way land occurs natu­ rally. Grey and Patel (2015, 437) agree: “state technologies of order were designed to smash Indigenous systems of food production, consumption, celebration, and identity, and to replace them with the civilizing forces of modernity.” They add that the introduction and continued use of agriculture fails to acknowledge that hunting, trapping, and gathering practices are part of a complex ecosystem of

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food production. It is in the best interest of those who wish to uphold settler colonialism, then, to maintain that Indigenous foodways are outdated and better replaced by modern systems; this is another function of this focus on linearity and progression. The effects of colonialism are most certainly not relegated to the past, however. In their research into the experiences of residential school survivors, Ian Mosby and Tracey Galloway (2017) state that hunger has always been central to survivors’ accounts and that the malnutrition accompanying it has not been limited to the life course of survivors alone, but continues into future generations. Without access to land and food practices, the ongoing physical and spiritual hunger lingers, while the ability to make and continue memories through food diminishes. Competing ideologies and their relation to food make the physical body a site of contention. Since food shapes the very bodies we live in and how we move in the world, more attention must be paid to the way food has been deliberately mobilized as a way of enacting power relations through bodies, and the effects of this on collective memory.

FOOD AND/AS MEMORY According to rhetoricians Greg Dickinson, Carole Blair, and Brian L. Ott (2010, 9), the different spaces, objects, and “texts” that make engagement with the past possible become the infrastructure of collective memory. Food becomes one of these texts as it carries with it the political, economic, and cultural implications of its production and consumption, intertwined in systems of settler colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy in the Canadian context. Food mirrors the value systems of a culture and thus becomes a way of reading the culture from which it cannot be apart. Instances of hunger especially are tied to disparities in terms of race, class, gender, and ability, and are an outcome of deliberate social constructions designed to dictate who has the most basic human rights and who does not. Food does not exist in isolation, and neither do the stories of a community, ones that revolve around food or otherwise. Comparisons can be drawn between food and stories: McLeod (2007, 8) cites Cree poet Louise Halfe’s work, stating that “she depicts the collective memory of Cree people as food, essential for the soul.” The similarities go beyond this metaphor. Anthropologist David E. Sutton (2001) writes that meals have their own implicit structure. This structure is reliant on repetition of certain food items over time, the ordering of the day around meals, and the values implied within acts of generosity around food (Sutton 2001). These contextual details mark the difference between the morning and the evening, the mundane and the sacred, a good host or not. Each meal will

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have its own significance, so the structure extends to the entirety of all meals over a lifetime as well (Sutton 2001). These particulars are dynamic but they are also memorable; this is part of what makes food so special. Similarly, the structure in narratives is evident when McLeod (2007, 15) recalls that his grandmother’s “life was not merely a series of scratches on paper; her stories were like an organism, a living thing that linked stories and experience together.” The purpose of this structure, in part, is to link one generation to the next as “vehicles of cultural transmission” (McLeod 2007, 68). The rituals around eating, then, can be considered a mode of this transmission of culture across time. As Margaret Kovach (2009) states in her work on Indigenous research methodologies, the very notion that a story is an apolitical or a cultural method, which can be applied without consideration of the knowledge system that sustains it, is contestable. Both food and stories can be considered structured, repeated events that are bound in social and political relations. To look at them distinct from their origins, and especially specific places from which they spring, is to invalidate and devalue their history, and blur the memories that came from and were about to be made from them. Sutton (2008, 157–58) suggests that even though food is ingested into individual bodies, it “[feeds] social memory,” which has a crucial normative role in creating social orders and identities. He posits that what makes food such a powerful site for exploring memory is that “unlike public monuments, in producing, exchanging, and consuming food we are continuously criss-crossing between ‘public’ and the ‘intimate’, individual bodies and collective institutions” (160). Since Sutton’s study of food and culture is based mostly in Greece, his work does not consider the effects on food and memory when this criss-crossing takes place through colonial institutions actively enacting systems to control Indigenous bodies. Grey and Patel (2015) are more familiar with this context, stating that ongoing colonial occupation has damaging effects on one’s ability to produce and reproduce memory through food: Colonial interference manifests itself not only in the production of food, but also in its preparation and consumption, and represents a concerted effort at de-­ skilling in both realms. Because knowledge of food is taught, just as relationships with food are socialized, the decline of conduits for the transmission of tradi­ tional knowledge (augmented by the brutal instruction of residential schools) helped to secure a place for the colonial at the Indigenous dinner table. (438)

This passage illustrates how the colonial project of assimilation operates through the relationship between food and memory. By ending the repetition

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of food skills, the opportunity to remember and teach these skills disappears. Grey and Patel’s framing of colonial power as having a place at the table helps illuminate the imposition of unwanted guests. The ways in which this i­ mposition appears—in food and through eating—make visible the mechanisms by which larger colonial operating principles continue. Studying those m ­ echanisms, which appear in the Tsilhqot’in transcripts, Lindberg’s novel, and other texts, is key to ­understanding and beginning to dismantle these principles.

NATIONHOOD AND FOOD IN THE TSILHQOT’IN LAND CLAIM TRIALS Food, as it is linked to the land from which it comes, can often be built into the construct of nationhood. Memory is important to this nationhood: for colonizers, in upholding the nation’s power and, for the colonized, the potential for resistance to that power. Legal scholar Austin Sarat (1999) argues that the focal point for collective memory of whole nations is often the assertion of legal rights. In trials, this collective memory is put into action in order to gain certain ground, and to establish and maintain nationhood in a legal sense. In fact, the naturalization of the progress upon which settler colonialism relies is “accomplished through the application of European legal doctrines” (Calderon 2014, 328). Food can become a space through which this application happens. The fact that food is of significant importance across cultures and settings makes it a point of commonality, a dialectic starting point, but its mention can reproduce the power structures inherent in whichever nations are discussing it. This problem arises when one nation values their comprehension of food over another, replicating asymmetrical colonizer-colonized relationships. This is evident in the transcripts of the Tsilhqot’in nation’s trials, especially since the courtroom is a place in which settler legal systems are at a complete advantage. These transcripts come from a historic and precedent-setting land title case, where, in June 2014, the Tsilhqot’in nation won against the province of British Columbia. According to the judgment documents, the Supreme Court of Canada declared “occupation was established for the purpose of proving title by showing regular and exclusive use of sites or territory within the claim area, as well as to a small area outside that” (para 4). As such, the Tsilhqot’in people reclaimed land in their ancestral territory for their exclusive community use and are able to receive economic benefits from that use. The court case took years, moving back and forth between different levels of the court system, from the ­Supreme Court of British Columbia to the Court of Appeal, tying up the

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resources of the Tsilhqot’in nation. In the Court of Appeal, it was argued that title referred to smaller spaces with a specific purpose and not larger areas of land; according to the Tsilhqot’in people, this made “a mockery of Aboriginal title” (Tsilhqot’in National Government 2014, para 7), as it woefully misunderstands Indigenous foodways. An examination of the testimonies of several elders shows that mentions of food become sites where colonial power enacts itself and positions settler history as superior to Indigenous memory. When, as McLeod (2007, 9) puts it, “the stories found in memory help people find their way out of colonialism,” it is no wonder that settlers make a concerted effort to stifle the importance of these stories. Analyzing the narratives within trial transcripts is an important method for understanding legal relationships between nations. As Sarat (1999) argues, trials themselves tell stories and the essential narrative elements of trials are recorded and encoded in transcripts. He continues: “By attending to both rhetoric and remembrance, to what is present and what is absent in transcripts, we can see in trial transcripts a form of communication in and about law that is enormously revealing of law’s anxieties and aspirations as well as its constitution in and against language” (1999, 357). In the Tsilhqot’in transcripts, the anxieties of settler law are shown through Counsel’s attempts to make Indigenous collective memory fit into the settler-colonial formula for history in the court case. Whereas the narrative of a courtroom is recorded and memorialized in transcripts as memory of a specific event, Indigenous stories are anchored in places, the names of which become coded with knowledge and experiences of that place (McLeod 2007). There is a disconnect in the way events are remembered. Rather than mobilizing food as a common element between cultures, its reference is used rhetorically throughout the transcripts to uphold the value system that privileges the socalled logic of time. Throughout the transcripts, the counsellor for the province of BC attempts to render the stories of Tsilhqot’in elders inadmissible as evidence by questioning the elders’ memory, and attempts to prove that it does not match settler history. French historian Pierre Nora problematically contends that “memory, being a phenomenon of emotion and magic, accommodates only the facts that suit it,” whereas history “calls for analysis and critical discourse” (Dickinson et al. 2010, 8). This binary between memory and history is in place here, and one must question whose analysis and critical discourse is privileged in this history, as Counsel in cases such as the Tsilhqot’in trials accommodates only the facts that suit the provincial government’s case. Here, memory is required to align with history and is passed off as myth if it does not. When Counsel ignores the

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way Indigenous storytelling frameworks are connected to the land and other beings, stories are put “in the realm of mythology,” which removes the life from the narratives (McLeod 2007, 32). Given the genre conventions of a trial in Canada, the lawyers constantly interrupt testimonies to ask questions, changing the story from what the storyteller intended it to be. Witnesses in the case are subject to the whims of the lawyer forwarding their own argument. Since governments see Indigenous self-determination as “a threat to national unity, territorial integrity, economic prosperity, and legitimate jurisdiction” (Grey and Patel 2015, 440), the memory within the elders’ stories is subject to settler fear of this threat, which manifests itself in the form and order of the questions asked by Counsel. The transcript reader can see this fear materializing in this particular trial. By attempting instead to secure these stories along a settler timeline of events rather than to a physical location, Counsel disengages the very point of the narrative, which is to identify that the stories of one of the witnesses, Tsilhqot’in elder Minnie Charleyboy, are distinctly tied to the places from which they are told and can establish the memory of the long-term occupancy of the Tsilhqot’in people. The first such instance of this is in the transcripts for day 83 of the trial. Counsel tries repeatedly to pair an English month with an appropriate Tsilhqot’in word during Charleyboy’s testimony, usually in reference to parts of the salmon spawning season. Pages and pages of the transcripts detail this transaction; forcing Indigenous food practices to coincide with English months distracts from the land title claim at question. Counsel discredits Charleyboy’s memory, stating that “she’s mixed up with her years … her months in English” (sections 0054–55). By suggesting that the witness is confused, Counsel acts rhetorically to call into question the truthfulness of Charleyboy’s claims by pointing out her inability to match her memory with colonial history. The implication that she is somehow less credible for not having learned enough English, a language forced upon Indigenous peoples in Canada after contact, is especially troubling. This legal tactic silences Charleyboy, not allowing her to tell the narratives that may actually be associated with the fish and the places they were caught. The settler conception of fish spawning as a way of distinguishing temporality is then confused by the fact that different fish spawn in different months (0056), which further points to the inefficacy of this method. Counsel repeatedly undermines Tsilhqot’in memory and knowledge structures through attempts to connect it to settler history in a linear fashion. Rather than asking about food practices on the land or associations of these food items with community stories, food quantity is continuously at issue during this trial. This demonstrates the insidious ways in which settlers have controlled

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the production and harvest of food on Tsilhqot’in land. In the transcripts for day 93, Charleyboy mentions that white people have been coming out to count the number of fish caught (section 0040) and dictating where and when the Tsilhqot’in people can collect mountain potatoes (0044). The constant reinforcement in these transcripts that food is to be commodified and measured shows the magnitude of the way colonial power is enacted through food systems, and that settlers’ determination of food intake amounts affects the everyday practices of the Tsilhqot’in people. On day 98, Counsel asks, “Mrs. Charleyboy, have you ever hunted, fished, trapped, or harvested outside the Chilcotin?” She responds, “No, I do not go anywhere else” (00050, lines 27–29). Though the Tsilhqot’in people have always maintained the right to harvest and fish, their practices are limited by quotas established by settlers, and by the constitution of restrictions on where and when food gathering happens. When food is appropriated as another instrument of colonial control, its potential as a text of memory is contained within boundaries set for the Tsilhqot’in, not by them. Despite the fact that these rights are not at issue during these land claim trials, settler concepts of land ownership and entitlement continuously insist that measures of food take precedence over stories around food. While testimony from the Tsilhqot’in elders details their relationship to the land, how they tend to and steward it, the elders also speak of what has been missing due to contact. On day 246 of the trial, elder Elizabeth Jeff takes the stand and begins to tell the story of Dt’an, or Hunger. In Jeff’s oration, Hunger appears to the community to bestow the Tsilhqot’in people with fish and warn against trading with the Bella Coola people. There is some confusion over the ending, when it is unclear why Hunger would kill two women who did not trade with the Bella Coola. This story of Hunger is a source of difficulty for Counsel to comprehend: it does not translate exactly into English as the story is told in old Tsilhqot’in phrasing, making it hard for Counsel to “understand what the story can teach me, or [Jeff]” (00033, lines 30–32). The ending of the story and its lesson remains only with the older Tsilhqot’in speakers. Stories can no longer function as a reflection of values and community memory—in this case, histori­ cal relations between the Tsilhqot’in and Bella Coola peoples—when the origi­ nal language they are told in has been all but lost. If the stories are not passed down, it becomes more difficult to prove long-term occupation in a settler court. For the lawyers on behalf of the provincial government, the stark absence of a translatable conclusion in this story of food marks the frustration of the lack of a narrative that appeals to the settler sensibility of logic. Hunger as a being in this story demonstrates a point of irony: the loss of stories depicts a hunger

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in itself that arises from a lack of collective memory. Deliberately limiting food has been a tactic of power for centuries; here, systematically withholding the elements necessary to perpetuate these stories keeps hunger alive, and the colonial role in this is made visible. In these trial transcripts, food is weaponized by settlers to establish what they believe is rightful ownership over the traditional and ancestral lands of the Tsilhqot’in nation. Sutton (2008, 176) states that there is an implied shared community through groups of people eating similar food “with sufficient frequency to consider themselves experts on it. They all believe, and care that they believe, that they know what it consists of, how it is made, and how it should taste.” In this case, both settlers, represented by the Canadian court system, and the Tsilhqot’in people have knowledge of the same land and consider themselves experts in the food derived from it. However, Counsel placing Indigenous practices and expertise in question invalidates Tsilhqot’in knowledge cultivated over millennia, and perpetuates the idea that their collective memory is just mythology, negating any chance of coming to a shared understanding of food and land. In spite of this rhetoric, through trials at three different levels of the court system, the Tsilhqot’in were able to establish the occupation of their land that satisfied the Supreme Court of Canada such that part of their territory was returned to them. Rarely has this been the case for other nations. Reading the absences within these transcripts showcases settler anxieties around the perceived risk to Canada’s nationhood, which uncovers a blatant disregard for Indigenous legal systems and epistemologies.

COMING HOME TO THE BODY IN TRACEY LINDBERG’S BIRDIE As a legal scholar herself, Lindberg (2015) demonstrates through her fictional story the way settler legal systems have and continue to infiltrate Indigenous ways of being, including but not limited to food systems. Food weaves together her novel, Birdie, which tells the tale of Bernice, a young Cree woman, who faces layers of violence stemming from systemic colonial oppression and must create a home for herself both away from her family’s territory and within her own body. Food, and her faithful viewings of a television cooking program, The ­Frugal Gourmet, may be the only link that stretches across the multiple iterations of temporary homes for Bernice as she travels across Alberta and British ­Columbia. The pervasive mention of food in this novel becomes a response to violence and violation of Bernice’s own body through family members, institutions, and the

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ongoing legacy of colonialism. Lindberg’s invocation of food gives shape and weight to the kind of pain that can be indescribable, that moves silently from one generation to the next. However, she also uses food to demonstrate the ways that protecting one’s own body and nourishing oneself can overlap, through both eating and hunger. Demonstrating at once the hypervisibility and invisibility of Indigenous women’s bodies, Lindberg depicts Bernice caught up in a number of government institutions, including a mental health facility, the reserve system, schools that continue to teach the master narratives that benefit Canada as a nation, and social services. As Bernice navigates and resists these physical iterations of settler legal structures, she links memories to places, and the food she eats there, rather than moving chronologically through experiences. Lindberg complicates depictions of food as both holding colonial history and being the key to refusing that history. While colonial interference can be seen systemically in the Tsilhqot’in case transcripts, such as Counsel using food to measure time in a linear fashion, ­Lindberg demonstrates how this interference also appears in everyday interactions with food. This is shown in Birdie through two examples: the first comes early in the novel, when Bernice convinces her new boss Lola to change the name of her bakery’s “Happy Squaw Squares” (9). This pejorative term for an ­Indigenous woman, appropriated from the Algonquin languages (­Merriam-Webster 2016), frames the production and consumption of the squares. Another instance is when Lola thinks of the term brownie (9, 185), which functions again as both a slur and the name of a baked good. These encounters reveal that the relationships between colonized and colonizer have been socialized to the point where customers buy bakery items without knowing the etymology of the words with which they place these orders. Not only do these instances demonstrate the troubling normalization of racism, they reiterate Grey and Patel’s point that the dinner table is overwhelmingly colonial, when these are the types of options available. This might be one case where Bernice finds that it is possible to be “both hungry and full at the same time” (77). Here, Lindberg negotiates between history and memory through the body; the troubling names of these treats are at odds with their sweet taste. Food in its present form can render visible the conflictions upon the land on which the food is made. It is not only the ingredients—such as sugar, a colonial introduction—but the names of the baked goods that carry a legacy of racism against Indigenous peoples in Canada. Lindberg shows how ingrained this language is in everyday life, particularly the ways it can infiltrate every space, every morsel of food, and every cell of the body.

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Though she makes many references to specific foods, Lindberg is concerned more broadly with exploring the embodiment of hunger. She takes up hunger as both something one has and something one does. She writes of what has been waiting to feed on the women in Birdie, from her framing of the novel around the disappearances and murders of Indigenous women and girls in Canada to the implications of gendered violence on individual women in the story. Bernice is both the subject facing hunger and the object of hunger. When Bernice visits Grand Prairie, Alberta, after some time away, she notices how the town’s appearance has changed: the town had sprawled, with chain businesses where old institutions once stood. Bernice realizes, though, that the feeling of the town is still the same, that there was still the same hunger (169), though her identification of this feeling of unease is different than her own hunger for family. Hunger in the case of the town, and especially the men within it, stems from a feeling of right to ownership over women’s bodies, conditioned into men from the harmful patriarchal binaries brought along and tightly entwined with colonialism. The town, as an extension of colonial ownership, chews you up and spits you out. Lindberg also delves into how that hunger manifests in the individual body, and using hunger as a way to exercise autonomy over one’s own body. Bernice, who, as a child, lives in a small room under the stairs at her mother’s house, eats and eats to make her body fill up the entire tiny space. Bernice eats to make her body inhospitable and unappetizing to others, to her uncle, to the other men who hunger to take advantage of women’s bodies as if they own them. She eats because of her own insatiable hunger for something that food can never provide by itself, when devoid of structural context. Her body becomes a “cage” (139) that keeps her safe from harm, but limits her movement and freedom. Throughout her novel, Lindberg uses metaphorical and literal hunger to convey connections between body and place, and food as a means of protection and safety. Specifically, Lindberg explores the way being the object of this hunger manifests itself in the body through repurposing language commonly used to describe food. At her darkest moments, Bernice associates food with pain: “the silence about what was happening around them seeped into the kitchen, first. Permeating the curtains. Eating into the linoleum. Eventually settling in the fridge. It was like some sort of bad medicine—it made Freda skinny, Bernice fat, and [her mother] Maggie disappear” (62). Pain and silence are given life in Bernice’s story; they have form and movement through an association with food. Of particular interest here are the verbs Lindberg uses to describe this infiltration: silence eats into the linoleum, a consuming force itself. Then it settles in the fridge, which not only gives the impression that silence means to stay and make

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itself comfortable but makes an inexplicable association of this silence with the invasive nature of settler colonialism. Silence has taken up residence in the food with which they are meant to fuel their bodies. Lindberg depicts the effects of a lack of cultural connection with food when Bernice and her family repeatedly ingest what harms them and, through consumption, this accumulates in their bodies. Bernice describes pain with words typically associated with taste, stating that her palate for pain is well developed: “the flavor is bitter and dull, tastes like defeat” (41). These associations suggest at once that there is an inherent lack in languages to adequately express pain and a need for an understanding of that pain to be universal. By mentioning this pain and silence as that which feed Bernice and her family, Lindberg describes how relationships with food exist relative to the body, and the destruction food can enact when connected to painful memories. Throughout the novel, Lindberg suggests that these relationships between food and memory are in constant flux, and are developed through cultural media, family, and experience. The pain Bernice feels comes not only from the disappearance of her mother, but largely from recurring sexual assaults by her uncle Larry. She remembers incidents in her life in association with episodes of the television show The Frugal Gourmet: “This morning [Frugal Gourmet] made ‘Pine Nut Pastry’. The last time she had pastry was at [Larry’s] wake. Even though Lola had plenty of pastry around, Bernice has not been able to eat it since she got to Gibsons. Or, since the wake for that matter. Food could take you back, she thinks” (26). In this instance, the existence of this memory within this pastry lets Bernice contain what must have been a very troubling event. She no longer wants to consume the same food with which she associates her uncle’s death; it would be like taking part of the funeral back into her body. This is complicated by the fact that Bernice finds Lola’s bakery to be a place where she feels comfortable, yet her memories appear in seemingly innocuous places. Rather, the pastries hold a history for Bernice, even though Lola bakes them fresh each morning. Since “The Frugal Gourmet does not do themes and is in perpetual reruns” (29), the memories are associated with the show in no particular order. The lack of linearity to any of the episodes along with the random air times interacts with the idea that connection of Cree collective memory is not to temporality but to space and place (McLeod 2007). This opposes the kind of argument that Counsel was attempting to make in the Tsilhqot’in trials. Lindberg begins here to reflect ways in which memory operates through the structure and rituals of cooking and eating; this is a trend throughout the novel and is especially true given that the episodes form part of the framework of Bernice’s story.

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With Bernice’s connection to the Frugal Gourmet, Lindberg reimagines how knowledge about food moves from body to body, from generation to generation. Sutton (2001) speaks of the changes to the medium of food knowledge transmission with new technologies, stating that this process is considered to be a type of “apprenticeship,” usually undertaken in the kitchen with a relative (134). As an apprentice, a new cook will watch, learn, and eventually perform the movements necessary to create a recipe. Bernice’s connection to the Frugal Gourmet and his teachings, and his eventual presence as she works through the memories of her uncle’s violation of her body, stands in temporarily for this familial relationship and precipitates closer bonds with her family later in the novel. Thinking of cooking knowledge moving from body to body as an apprenticeship is a way of valuing care work, traditionally performed by women, which is unpaid and taken for granted, at the same level as trades dominated by men; work done by and through the body must be valued, however one’s gender is expressed. Though the television show relies on a form of technology for its continual runs in syndication, the oral nature of The Frugal Gourmet episodes suits it to both a form of mentorship for Bernice, and a link between certain memories and where she was while watching. Cooking shows can provide a makeshift apprenticeship between family members: Bernice thinks her kokom would have approved of the Frugal Gourmet and his “food magic” (108). Lindberg reframes how food is associated with safety here and it instead becomes a way to find kinship through healing relationships rather than toxic ones. As well as thinking through the structures involved with food, Lindberg considers the ways in which food might act as medicine. She continues to use the word feed but as a metaphor to discuss spiritual healing of addressing memory. While Bernice’s physical form becomes larger, the Pimatisewin tree, of which there are only a few left in existence, becomes smaller. These trees are of the utmost significance to Bernice, and she knows the one she has found in Gibsons, British Columbia, holds strength she lacks, despite the fact that it is dwindling in size. Both are hungry for what they can find only through each other, and need to be nourished not only through food but their connection. Bernice has been looking forward to the day when she would be able to make a feast as an offering to the Pimatisewin tree. Lindberg frames this as a shift in her life as part of the process of finding fullness in her own body. In the aftermath of her uncle’s death, Bernice sleeps for days on end, foregoing food, with her worried family members, Val and Freda, and Lola at her side: “no one had actually seen Bernice eat in that time. Val got the sense that the kid was being fed” (124); she was in fact “feeding herself memories” (162). Bernice’s fasting is a deliberate type

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of hunger that allows her to evaluate and process her painful memories. Lindberg uses specific language, especially the verb feed, to explore the difficulty in acknowledging histories that are often at odds with one another, but that there is strength in doing so. Through Bernice’s relationship with the Pimatisewin tree, Lindberg mobilizes food as a tool of futurity for Bernice and her family. Throughout the novel, Bernice writes small lists of ingredients: some are spices from elsewhere in the world, some are plants native to Turtle Island (North America). Not only is this a documentation of the movement of foods across Canada, there is a connection to each ingredient compiled. Though seemingly just a list, it tells its own story of moments past and ones yet to come, written on and through the ingredients. All the ingredients, and their corresponding memories, are incorporated into the future feast in some way. Everything involved with making food, whether growing it or planning and preparing meals, is about looking into the future. Sutton (2001, 19) refers to this as “prospective memory.” Doing this work of seeing ahead involves each one of Bernice’s family members and is something they undertake together: Val, Freda, Lola, and Bernice all participate in listing and gathering ingredients, and making a feast to honour the Pimatisewin tree. These practices structure the way their stories and memories overlap. Recipes are written into the body, from the way the body remembers each movement, and are produced in physicality by the hands (Sutton 2001). Lindberg explores the way cooking forms an extension of oneself. As an example, when Bernice starts to come out of her fast, she pulls her list of ingredients from the flesh of her own body as if it was with her the whole time (240). In the act of preparing the feast and consuming each ingredient/memory, Bernice remembers what her own body is capable of doing. Lindberg uses these collections of ingredients and the act of preparing the feast to allow her characters to recognize the power of the body in enacting the future. As the women prepare the meal for the tree, Lindberg illustrates how the ritual of eating together becomes an important part of a reciprocal relationship. Their mutual hunger is what bonds Bernice to the Pimatisewin tree and the tree to her during her feast offering as they feed each other after bouts of malnourishment, spiritually and physically. After giving the feast to Pimatisewin, Bernice “feels some energy in her limbs, as if she has eaten the food herself, and stands up, the Cree on her tongue having flowed to the tree” (250). The structures within food and stories, coming together at once in this moment, link her to her culture, ancestral knowledge, and a home, though not on her nation’s territory; memory is both feeding and is fed by her. She is able to tap into collective

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memory that she was disconnected from before. Meanwhile, the tree has been “waiting to be fed, to have nations unite in one place” (247). The tree was anticipating the women’s return to the land; the ingredients in the feast begin this process. While Bernice does not find justice for what has happened to her through settler legal means, Lindberg chronicles how the relationship Bernice creates with herself, through food and with the women around her, helps her find a place to call home within her body.

CONCLUSION As shown through these two examples, food is of particular interest as memory work because of its understood importance across the boundaries of languages, cultures, and time. Mentions of food in these texts highlight day-to-day encounters with colonialism and the accumulation of memory loss due to settler occupation over time. If access to food is limited and controlled, so is memory, which plays into the settler hand in terms of upholding colonial legal structures. In the land claim trials, food is used rhetorically to privilege colonial history over Tsilhqot’in collective memory. Certain uses of land are considered to be more important than others and the question of who was there first is still shown to be a key point of contention (and anxiety) within settler legal structures. In Birdie, food allows characters to recall personal and collective memory as a way to heal from colonial history. For Bernice, in finding the bakery, fasting, and coming together with her family, she no longer needs her body to fill up an entire room to keep other people out and to mimic the feeling of being full. Rather than food taking the place of memory, Bernice comes to treat her memories as what she needs to consume to be at peace with herself. In writing this, Lindberg shows the tension around food on territories that are occupied and the power of kinship among women to address how these relationships look going forward. It is clear that food has a propensity for narrativity; the reading of these two pieces together allows one to see the complications involved in the memories around food from the land by different people, ones who have lived peacefully for centuries and others who have forcefully imposed their beliefs on the land. These differing values play out through food, through its availability (or lack thereof), production, preparation, and enjoyment. Food is a text that can be read for its engagement within cultures, highlighting ideological differences and reflecting systems of power and oppression; we may learn from and work to change these systems, especially when rendered so visible through food. When food is thought of solely as a resource, we all lose out on its abilities to act as a text of memory, of

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intercultural communication and translation, and the full extent of its nourishment. Through the Tsilhqot’in trials and Birdie, one can see that hunger not only represents the limiting of food but the deliberate withholding of the conditions necessary to maintain collective memory.

READING QUESTIONS 1. What do the different genres of text here (one is a fictional novel, the other courtroom transcripts) offer in terms of understanding national relationships to food?

2. How is hunger deployed in this chapter and what limitations are there of this as a metaphor?

3. Reflect on the ways in which gender operates within these texts, specifically in terms

of who produces and cooks food. How do the texts, especially Birdie, contend with and resist the idea of the gender binary, itself a colonial imposition?

4. Which Indigenous territory do you live on? Consider the food systems in your area and how or whether they are connected to multiple nations.

REFERENCES Calderon, D. 2014. “Uncovering Settler Grammars in Curriculum.” Educational Studies 50 (4): 313–38.

Dickinson, G., C. Blair, and B. L. Ott, eds. 2010. Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.

Grey, S., and R. Patel. 2015. “Food Sovereignty as Decolonization: Some Contributions

from Indigenous Movements to Food System and Development Politics.” Agriculture

and Human Values 32 (3): 431–44.

Kovach, M. 2009. Indigenous Methodologies: Characteristics, Conversations, and Contexts. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Lindberg, T. 2015. Birdie. Toronto: HarperCollins.

McLeod, N. 2007. Cree Narrative Memory: From Treaties to Contemporary Times. Saskatoon, SK: Purich Publishing Ltd.

Merriam-Webster. 2016. “Squaw.” In Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster.

Mosby, I., and T. Galloway. 2017. “‘Hunger Was Never Absent’: How Residential School

Diets Shaped Current Patterns of Diabetes among Indigenous Peoples in Canada.” Canadian Medical Association Journal 189 (32): 1043–45.

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Sarat, A. 1999. “Rhetoric and Remembrance: Trials, Transcription, and the Politics of ­Critical Reading.” The Legal Studies Forum 23 (4): 355–64.

Sutton, D. E. 2001. Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory. New York: Oxford University Press.

———. 2008. “A Tale of Easter Ovens: Food and Collective Memory.” Social Research 75 (1): 157–80.

Tsilhqot’in National Government. 2014. “Background to the Decision, Tsilhqot’in ­Decision, Supreme Court of Canada.” www.tsilhqotin.ca/About/Documents. Tsilhqot’in Nation

v. British Columbia. 2014. 2 SCR 257. Supreme Court of Canada. Judgments of the Supreme Court of Canada by Lexum.

Vowel, C. 2016. Indigenous Writes: A Guide to First Nations, Métis, & Inuit Issues in Canada. Winnipeg, MB: Highwater Press.

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CHAPTER 11

We’re All Intersectional Now: Representational Intersectionality in Melbourne’s Immigration Museum Elaine Swan, Deana Leahy, Emily Gray, Sian Supski, and Adele Wessell

LEARNING OBJECTIVES 1. To use intersectionality to think through multiculturalism 2. To learn how the lens of representational intersectionality can be used to examine how museums represent race, gender, and class through food 3. To undertake an intersectional analysis of a specific museum exhibition about food

KEY TERMS identity, multiculturalism, multimodality, representational intersectionality

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INTRODUCTION This chapter offers readers an opportunity to think about the representation of food in museums. Representations of food matter because they reinscribe visual racisms and sexism, reproduce stereotypes, and reinforce symbolic and material inequalities. The exhibition of food in museums is relatively underexplored but not neutral as we show in this chapter. The chapter uses the case study of a migration museum to show how the display, narration, and depiction of food is central to understanding race and identity through a food lens and offers you resources for analyzing food displays in museums you encounter. In particular, given the theme of this book, we bring a representational intersectional analysis to our study of food exhibits in the Immigration Museum, Melbourne, ­Australia. Taking in­ illiams-Forson’s call spiration from critical race food studies scholar Psyche W for more intersectional studies of food, we extend our analysis beyond food production and consumption to examine cultural constructions of identity, or what Kimberlé Crenshaw defines as “­representational i­ntersectionality” (Crenshaw 1991; Williams-Forson and Wilkerson 2011). Crenshaw (1991) distinguishes representational intersectionality—with its f­ocus on cultural constructions, stereotypes, and inequalities—from political and structural intersectionalities to stress how cultural representations reproduce systemic ­racism, oppression, ­inequality, and symbolic and material harm. Although food scholars study cultural representations of identities—from TV programs, cookbooks, food marketing, films, through to digital ­media—few attend to museums and their curation, collection, programs, and exhibitions. Museum studies scholars are now turning their attention to food p ­ rogramming, but studies on representational intersectionality remain marginalized (see ­Levent and Mihalache 2016; Mihalache 2016; Moon 2016; Tunc 2017). This matters as museums are sites of identity formation, nation-building, and knowledge ­ production—they are effectively “epistemological technolog[ies]” that reinforce long-standing racist, sexist, ableist, and heteronormative practices ­ (Robert 2016; see Witcomb 2009). The cataloguing, curating, and displaying of food in ­museums was integral to the colonial nation-building exhibitions of the ­nineteenth century (Mihalache 2014; Moon 2016; Tunc 2017). Moreover, food is a critical “part of the knowledge systems developed about the Other, ­constructed and displayed” (Mihalache 2016, 67). Our chapter is timely because food museums and food exhibitions are proliferating internationally. Museums—from bricks-and-mortar art, history, and science museums to heritage sites, historic houses, and digital sites—increasingly

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collect, exhibit, display, educate, and tell stories about food from its production, consumption, history, and culture (Levent and Mihalache 2016; Moon 2016; Tunc 2017). With museums interpreting the meaning of food across exhibitions, educational programs, and even restaurant offerings, food changes museum practices and the museological landscape (Levent and Mihalache 2016). Museums adopt educational programming on a number of counts (­Mihalache 2016; Moon 2016; Tunc 2017). First, to respond to the cultural proliferation of food media; second, to increase visitor numbers when funding is shrinking; third, to reinterpret their collections, particularly in relation to school curricula; finally, to continue their role in social justice through engagements with diverse food cultures, knowledges, and practices (Moon 2016). Food, because of its multifaceted meanings, offers vast “interpretative potential” (Mihalache 2016). Thus, museums view food as a way to educate visitors about history, to bridge ethnic and racial cultures, and to address how food consolidates inequalities, privilege, racism, heteronormativity, and sexism (Moon 2016). Given the move in museums to create new relations with diverse communities and develop exhibition practices that are more inclusive, our chapter offers a representational intersectional analysis of an exhibition entitled Identity: Yours, Mine, Ours at the Immigration Museum in Melbourne (see Mihalache 2016; Witcomb 2009). We explore this exhibition for two key reasons: first, the museum has a remit to represent migration, multiculturalism, and racial politics. Second, the exhibition specifically invites visitors to do “identity work” in relation to racial, ethnic, and faith-based identities with food seen as integral in individual and collective identity formation. To analyze the exhibition, we utilize representational intersectionality, which Crenshaw (1991, 1283) defines as the production and representation of images of women of colour drawing on sexist and racist tropes. We extend this approach to the design and content of a food display in the museum to discuss how it produces knowledge about individual and collective identities in relation to food. Importantly, intersectional studies scholars stress that an intersectional analytic goes beyond individual multilayered identities to explore “interlocking systems of oppression and multiaxial power structures” (Byrne 2015) with the explicit purpose to produce social justice, antidiscrimination, and antioppression (Bilge 2013; May 2015). It is important to note that critical race scholars contest the politics of the institutionalization of intersectionality (Bilge 2013). For instance, Jasbir Puar (2012, 212) claims that intersectionality has been turned into a “tool of diversity management, and a mantra of liberal multiculturalism.” The argument here is that institutions reproduce tokenistic and essentialist

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applications of intersectionality because they do not undertake the real labour necessary to address inequalities (Puar 2012). In this view, intersectionality, originally catalyzed by the feminists of colour as counterhegemonic knowledge production and radical politics, has been depoliticized, commodified, and colonized by diversity discourses in social institutions, NGOs, social movements, and corporations. Bilge (2013, 408) refers to superficial, sanitized, and opportunistic uses of intersectionality as “ornamental intersectionality,” which works as good PR, but ignores the need to address injustice structurally. Taking these critiques into account, our chapter contributes to intersectional food studies by developing a method of representational intersectional analysis and applying it to Melbourne’s Immigration Museum. We are most concerned about the centrality of the category of race in intersectionality analysis. Thus, feminists of colour stress that intersectionality is a foundational black feminist analytic, theory, and politics. First named and deployed as an analytic category by US legal studies academic Crenshaw (1989), intersectionality as a form of politics developed from a long line of black theorists and activists, including enslaved black woman Sojourner Truth in the nineteenth century, and the Combahee River Collective in the twentieth century. They stress the multiplicity and complexity of identity, oppression, and power for black women (Collins and Bilge 2016; Lewis 2013). This history matters because white feminists ignore the theory building of women of colour and whiten intersectional theory by “quarantining” race in its genealogy, analysis, and canon (Bilge 2013; Carbado 2013; Lewis 2013). Too often, white feminism’s intersectional analysis foregrounds gender and backgrounds race and black feminism to make them less threatening to white organizations (Bilge 2013). Indeed, feminists of colour developed intersectional theorizing as a direct result of the exclusion of race in white feminism. For intersectionality studies to engender social justice, critical race theorists insist that we cannot be colour-blind and must attend to race, which includes whiteness as a racial identity (Carbardo 2013; Bilge 2013; Lewis 2013). A second important argument of relevance to our chapter is that intersectionality is not just about individual identity but how social categories of identity are conditioned by wider social systems (Bilge 2013; Carastathis 2008; May 2015). Hence, intersectionality is not simply a theory about identity, but as Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall (2013, 797) insist, “intersectionality … emphasized political and structural inequalities.” This does not mean ignoring identity but instead refocusing attention on “how things work rather than who people are” (Chun, Lipsitz, and Shin 2013, cited in Cho et al. 2013, 797). Relating this to an Australian context, Indigenous feminists have reconfigured intersectionality by challenging white feminism’s neglect of how colonialism shapes the racialization

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of gender and gendering of race (Silverstein 2017). This means that identity categories have to be understood through the institutional, political, and economic conditions that produce them (Silverstein 2017, 20). An important step in representational intersectional thinking is recognizing the specificities of identity processes, for example, racialization, in a particular national, historical, and cultural context. Accordingly, our analysis of representational intersectionality examines how racial identity categories are produced through museum practices against a background of settler colonialism and violence toward Indigenous peoples, state racism, and shifting politics of multiculturalism in Australia.

COLONIAL NATION-BUILDING IN MUSEUMS Following Bilge’s argument that intersectional analyses need to take account of the importance of historical contextualization, we provide a brief history of race, multiculturalism, and museums, underlining the specificities of intersectionality in Australia (Silverstein 2017). Australia is a settler colony with a brutal history of murder and dispossession of Indigenous peoples, and state-sanctioned racism toward Indigenous and non-Anglo-Celtic groups. In 1901, the independent British colonies unified as a federation, and issued the Immigration Restriction Act (1901–58) and its replacement, the Migration Act (1958–66), more commonly known as the White Australia Policy, to exclude nonwhite migration and keep Australia white ethnically and culturally. Against this backdrop, Australian museums both institutionalize and ­challenge colonial nation-building and racist knowledge production. ­Museums operated as colonial institutions, and their activities during the nineteenth ­ ­century were an important resource for generating nationalism and white identities. Settler cultures founded on deeply racist assumptions deployed history and heritage collections to legitimize conquest and deny Indigenous sovereignty. Indigenous objects were valued, classified, and displayed as relics of a vanishing world, or an ahistorical present. In contrast, Australian settler history presented itself in terms of narratives of progress. Evidence of Indigenous agricultural production was largely ignored, protecting the white colonial claim to national ­sovereignty and the notions of cultivation on which it rested. This history erases food ­production as the “motivation for the expansion of the European empire and the ­justification for the seizure of land from Indigenous people, which they defined as ‘­unoccupied’ by virtue of erasing the history of cultivation” (Wessell 2017, n.p.; Woodcock 2016). As Indigenous scholar Bruce Pascoe (2014) insists, Indigenous food production systems and land management have been grossly undervalued to justify dispossession.

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MIGRATION MUSEUMS Migration museums in Australia have their own history of museology and political interests, framed by government immigration and race policies, media racism and popular opinion. Their focus on migration and multiculturalism throws up complex politics in relation to Aboriginal sovereignty and the deleterious effects of migration on Indigenous peoples (Witcomb 2009). Established to implement multicultural cultural policy, they have responded to debates about immigration politics, cultural and social changes, and provided spaces for cultural, r­acial, religious, and ethnic representations, histories, and stories (Witcomb 2009; ­Hutchison and Witcomb 2014; Message 2014; Heinrich 2013). The emergence of formal Australian multiculturalism in the late 1970s after growing public and political opposition to assimilationism saw the establishment of migration museums in Adelaide in 1986 and in Melbourne in 1998. Museums were seen to offer the means to re-educate the Anglo-Celtic majority on the values of cultural diversity, work with migrant communities, and “foster acceptance of cultural diversity as central to Australian identity” (Witcomb 2009, 52). Since then, migration museums have changed their curatorial and interpretative strategies in response to shifting views of multiculturalism. In plotting the shifts, Andrea Witcomb notes that to begin with, exhibitions were “celebratory,” stressing the economic and social contributions of migrants through an “enrichment narrative” (McShane 2001, cited in Witcomb 2009, 52). For instance, migrants were depicted as “revolutionising Australian food cultures, introducing the cappuccino, improving our sense of style and adding a sense of cosmopolitanism to an otherwise bland Anglo culture” (Witcomb 2009, 52). Curators have tried to challenge the “enrichment” narrative to offer a critical history in dialogue with big questions about colonization and Indigenous sovereignty (Witcomb 2009). In the 2000s, after the terrorist attacks in the United States, Indonesia, and ­Europe, and intensifying state and popular racism, Australia is a­ rguably in a postmulticulturalism phase. This is further evidenced by the severe cuts to investment in multiculturalism and the strengthening of xenophobia, I­ slamophobia, and racism (Witcomb 2009).

OUR RESEARCH SITE: IMMIGRATION MUSEUM, MELBOURNE Founded by the state government of Victoria, the Immigration Museum opened in 1998 with an aim to explore the history of immigrants in the state of Victoria.

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The Victorian premier was keen to establish a “non-ethnic” museum to “unite all Victorians through their shared migration experiences and family histories, part of the democratisation of the ‘nation of immigrants’” (Heinrich 2013, 213). Hence, the museum attempts to relativize and ethnicize Anglo-Celtic migration as another part of multiculturalism rather than the dominant group, representing a shift in British self-ethnicization and the status of Anglo-Celtic privilege (Heinrich 2013). Moreover, the museum was keen to respect the Aboriginal community as the First Victorians, and to show the impact of immigration on their lives and family histories (Witcomb 2009). The museum produces and incites identity work.

METHODOLOGY Intersectional methods tend to focus on the structural and political, and use documentary and textual analyses and/or interviews and focus groups to e­ xplore lived experiences of social categories, oppression, and inequalities. Scholars ­recognize that methods fail to capture the complexities and dynamics of power and intersectional identities, and the “multiple dimensions of social life and categories of analysis” (McCall 2005, 1773). There is general acceptance that nevertheless intersectionality is a way of thinking that “enables an immediate recognition of the impossible yet necessary task of thinking a number of differences at once, which mark social groupings of identity” (Silverstein 2017, 17). Of significance for this chapter is that few studies examine representational intersectionality, and those that do focus on media and advertising. A representational methodology for museums needs to take into account that they are distinct cultural institutions and exhibitions that produce knowledge and make meaning through a range of design features—space, images, verbal text, curriculum, lighting, layout, and colour—and visitors’ interactions with these. These factors make it difficult to apply intersectional methods designed for other kinds of intersectional domains. Accordingly, one of the authors, Elaine Swan, developed a representational intersectional methodological approach for our analysis that brings together techniques from meaning making in exhibitions (Moser 2010; Ravelli 2006); multimodal semiotics of difference (Flowers and Swan 2018; van Leeuwen 2008); and extant museum studies on intersectionality (Grahn 2011; Robert 2014, 2016). Swan’s approach is influenced by Louise Ravelli’s (2006) and Stephanie Moser’s (2010) argument that visitors make meaning from the knowledge-making practices of exhibition design as much as the content. Thus, museums actively

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construct knowledge through space, design, colour, light, visual and verbal text, layout, activities, and display. In turn, visitors make meanings through their in­ teractions with the exhibition content and design, which “visitors subconsciously ‘read’ when they move through an exhibition” (Moser 2010, 27). The museum presentation modes and curatorial decisions influence how the visitor interprets the exhibition and messages about what is and is not valued, what is included and what is not. Accordingly, exhibitions are “communicative texts” that create a “representation system” through “an articulation of objects, texts, visual representations, reconstructions and sounds” (Lidchi 1997, quoted in Gazi 2014, 5). While Moser and Ravelli offer methods for “reading exhibitions,” they do not attend to intersectionality. However, their political questions are consistent with an intersectional understanding of how institutional processes construct inequality and oppression. Specific museum intersectional methodologies are rare, although Nicole Robert (2014, 2016) has developed an explicitly intersectional approach, building on the work of Moser and Ravelli, for examining “the organizing structures of museum practice,” by which she means the ways in which racialized, gendered, and sexualized people are othered or excluded in museums (Robert 2014, 26). Robert (2016, 290) insists that museum citational practices on explanatory, informational, and pedagogic labels should reproduce “authorial transparency” by being clear about who curated an exhibition and the knowledge systems they reproduce. The approaches defined by Moser, Ravelli, and Robert enable us to think through asymmetrical knowledge-making practices in museum exhibitions, but their work lacks attention to the visual semiotics of othering, central to visual representations of race and racism. Hence, Swan added Theo van Leeuwen’s (2008) multimodal approach for analyzing the semiotics of othering, stereotyping, and exclusion. Advocating a close reading of how groups and individuals are depicted in text and visuals, he asks if people are homogenized, depicted as generic types or concrete individuals, active or passive, negatively or positively evaluated. How are they depicted through techniques such as their gaze direction and body display, representations of social distance, the viewer’s point of view, and the image modality (van Leeuwen 2008, 136–48)? His emphasis is on meaning potential, i.e., how displays set up a “preferred” reading and an “implied” visitor. Images “do not speak to us all universally” but construct the possibilities for a particular kind of audience through the nature of the image’s style, content, layout, etc. (Sturken and Cartwright 2001, 45). Following this, our analysis explores how a range of identities—­individual, collective, group, racial, culture, etc.—are constructed through curatorial and

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exhibitionary practices. In particular, we examine how food practices are invoked in relation to identity and the degrees to which intersectionality is explored across three facets: “multilayered identity,” “interlocking systems of oppression,” and “multiaxial power relations” (Byrne 2015).

METHOD In line with museum scholars studying race and museums in settler colonies, our research design entailed participant observation of the exhibition, supplemented with digital and documentary analysis (Chew 2015; Witcomb 2013). Four of us toured the exhibition for half a day, and two of us returned for two focused visits after our preliminary analysis. We tried out the interactive media displays, digital/audio displays, and read the verbal texts and museum labelling. Two of us photographed the museum, gallery spaces, and displays and wrote comprehensive individual field notes, which included descriptive and preliminary analytical and interpretive commentaries drawing on categories from literature on food studies and intersectionality. The research team members are all white, although intersected by other social axes of difference, including age, sexuality, disability, nationality, and class. Insisting that intersectionality needs to focus on race and racialization, Bilge (2013) does not mean that white people cannot write about intersectionality. We come from different disciplinary backgrounds—history, education, sociology, food studies—and have a track record in feminist and critical race theory, all of which helped our “intersectional reflexivity” (Rodriguez 2017).

IDENTITY: YOURS, MINE, OURS Our chapter focuses on the permanent exhibition, Identity: Yours, Mine, Ours, which opened on May 9, 2011, supplementing previous permanent exhibitions. The exhibition begins with the question, “What does it mean to belong and not belong in Australia?,” and then gives a brief precis about the exhibition: Identity: Yours, Mine, Ours. The exhibition is divided into three broad themes that address identities and identity formation: “First Impressions,” “People Like Us,” and “People Like Them,” which organize the layout of the gallery spaces and displays. “First Impressions” focuses on how perceptions of visible identity can lead to stereotyping and how hidden aspects of individual identity challenge or surprise us (Museums Victoria, Immigration Museum 2019). “People Like Us” explores collective identity formation and the final theme, “People Like Them,”

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explicitly explores racism and its effects on identity, from policy racism to bystander racism and commodity racism in historical and contemporary domestic food marketing and packaging. For museum scholars and the curators, the exhibition with its focus on identity and racism constitutes a shift in the curatorial strategies of migration museums. Hence, lead curator Moya McFadzean (2011) argues that the exhibition is about the museum being “an agent for change” using “popular culture, racist and anti-racist ephemera, religious and sporting items, Aboriginal historical and contemporary cultural material … [to] challenge visi­ tors beyond the more conventional narratives of migration” (­ Museums Victoria, Immigration Museum 2019). The exhibition has been the subject of scholarly interest, particularly in relation to its representations of identity and racism. Heinrich (2013, 11) argues the exhibition broaches “hot topics,” including “racism, difference and cultural relativism.” Witcomb (2013, 265) writes that the museum wanted the exhibition to participate in debates about immigration policy, and focus on “living with cultural diversity,” the lived experience of migrant and settler groups once in Australia, and not the usual trope of migrant journeys. Hence, the aim is to explore national identity and the “legacy of the past in the present, how Australian identity is shaped by cultural diversity” (Hutchison and Witcomb 2014, 240). In their view, the exhibition does this by moving attention away from cultural and ethnic groups to individuals and their intersectional identities. Moreover, everyone—Anglo-Celtics too—are seen as having cultural identities. In a similar vein, Indigenous Victorians are depicted as part of contemporary Australian society, not on the periphery of an immigrant nation “through the inclusion of a range of Indigenous identities: personal, professional, familial and group identities” (Heinrich 2013, 11). Although the exhibition does not use the category of intersectionality, Mary Hutchison and Andrea Witcomb (2014, 240) insist that the exhibition is about “what it means to live in a culturally diverse society where identity is multiple and hybrid. Difference is back on the agenda—not as a spectacle or a colourful addition, but … embedded in a conversation about what kind of people we want to be as Australians.”

FOOD, IDENTITY, AND INTERSECTIONALITY How then do these ambitions around the representation of race and identity connect with food exhibits? There are four food-related displays in the exhibition, at least one in each main display space. Each display space focuses on a different theme to do with identity formation practices, moving from personal

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and collective identity formation to policy, media and marketing, and bystander racisms. The themes are reflected in layout, display, and design, including wall display and floor colour; lighting; verbal texts; and use of objects. For instance, the design in the gallery about racisms is dark, claustrophobic, informationally dense, and emotionally unsettling. Across the exhibition, verbal texts vary in length, tone, and aim and include explanatory, informal, and authoritative labels and panels, reinforcing the exhibition’s strategy of polyvocality and underlined by its use of personal individual stories of identity, experience, and memories alongside curatorial conversational and specialist expert voices. Methods of display encompass traditional object cases, video installations, contemporary artworks, visual material, and multimedia. The pathway through the exhibition varies through these displays, from directed paths and pauses to more semiopen movement, meaning there can be different experiences of the exhibition and its narrative. Overall, however, the flow moves from personal to structural identity practices, and from individual prejudice to collective racism. Through these design features, in particular, the use of interrogatives in text, mirrored images, and interactive video installations, visitors are invited to perform identity work by sharing their experiences, reflecting on their identities and feelings, and challenging their prejudices and racisms. In particular, the exhibition has explicit aims to address racism and its effects on identity formation to unsettle visitors and show how cultures create identifications, connections, and misunderstandings (Hutchison and Witcomb 2014; Message 2014; Witcomb 2009). The exhibition is not dedicated to food, but draws on personal memories, photographic scenarios, videos about food, and food-packaging ephemera to bring out identity making, identifications, and intersectionalities. The food displays are shown in the following order: •

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The first two exhibits, “My Food” and “What We Eat,” are in the first display space entitled “First Impressions.” We discuss “My Food” in more detail in this chapter because it is the first food display in the exhibition, the largest display, the most complex interactively and multimodally, and explores different forms of personal, racial, gendered, and cultural identity, all of which mean it sets the tone for the rest of the exhibits. Many people we observed were drawn to the display table compared with smaller exhibits. The second display, “What We Eat,” on a smaller horizontal display close by, shows black and digitalized photographs from the 1990s and early 2000s of people in family and

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•

•

community groups eating. Its main focus is collective shared eating rather than personal preferences. The third exhibit is in the second display space entitled “People Like Me.” It constitutes a short digital video featuring well-known ­Australian TV chef and personality Poh Ling Yeow, in which she ­discusses her cooking and art and their relationship to her identity as a Chinese Malaysian Australian. In the final themed space, “People Like Them,” the third exhibit, a glass display of Australian “commodity racism” shows racist historic and contemporary food packaging and associated informational and pedagogic text. This is the only one that includes material objects; the other three are based on digital images and film.

“My Food” is part of a larger exhibit called “Ever Surprised by Your Assumptions?” on a long, black, glossy digital multimedia flat interactive touchtable (see Figure 11.1). Dominating the centre of the gallery space are six screens with

Figure 11.1: Photo of “My Food” digital touchtable (Source: Sian Supski and Elaine Swan)

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large digital images and short digital films of 10 selected real-life individuals of different cultural, racial, classed, gendered, and faith backgrounds alongside brief informational texts. The museum verbal texts classify the speakers by social categories of collective identity and difference, and the speakers self-identify in their spoken interviews in the videos. Caroline—classified as disabled with spina bifida. She is a white Australian but not categorized as such by the exhibit. Brendan—of Indigenous and Greek heritage, his grandmother and mother are of the Warlpiri people; he is a barrister and football supporter. Vera—grew up in South Africa; of Chinese parents, she moved to ­Australia in 1988. Carlos—of Chilean heritage, has been in Australia for 25 years and is a builder. He arrived when he was 15 and wasn’t able to speak English. Nyadol—arrived in Australia five years ago; she grew up in Ethiopia and Kenya in refugee camps. Jacob (“Jaap”)—has lived in Australia for 18 months; migrated to New Zealand from Netherlands when he was two years old; moved to ­Australia because his children live here. His family is Jewish. Shanton Chang Lik Wen—a Chinese Malaysian from Sarawak, Malaysia, he is an academic who has lived in Australia for 14 years; he is gay. Diana—older white Australian woman, although classified only verbally by her age, profession of acting, and as a mother and vegetarian. Ben—classified as a 17-year-old student but is a white Australian male. Moustafa Kamal Dabab—a Muslim young man and a father, born in Australia. The group has been chosen to represent intersectional identities such as gender and disability; Indigeneity and class; race, faith, and sexuality. The categories of class and gender are not in the museum texts or the spoken interviews, although visually there are clearly classed and gendered markers. None of the white people are described as white or Anglo-Celtic. The display is framed by a very large, two-metre-diameter reflective mosaic of stylized line drawing graphics of faces linked by swirling lines. This artwork is repeated on walls and displays throughout the exhibition, and mirrored by twisting lighting on the floor, creating a sense of coherence through the very different galleries and suggesting movement and interconnections between people and the complexities of identities. Like many of the displays, which have reflective

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Figure 11.2: Photo of mosaic and reflective surfaces (Source: Sian Supski and Elaine Swan)

surfaces, visitors are able to see themselves in the mosaic as they stand in front of it, encouraging the idea of visitor reflexivity in relation to the exhibits and their own assumptions and feelings. Visitors look down and tap the screens to interact with the visual and verbal texts and hear directly from the sample of people interviewed (see Figure 11.3). They select from a menu of identitarian topics to find out more about the person they have chosen to “meet”: “My Food,” “My Language,” “My Religion,” “My Name,” “My Clothes,” “My Look,” and “Who I Really Am.” Visitors touch the face of the person they want to hear from and then view a very short video of the person responding to a set of prerecorded questions, which are in verbal texts across the images. Each contact with the display reveals more layers of personal and collective identity. In essence, the displays call visitors to make meaning about stereotyping through the senses of touching, hearing, and seeing. The prerecorded films depict the speakers as active, speaking to the visitor in the first person, with direct eye contact and at a close-up social distance as if the person is addressing the visitor in friendly, if somewhat stilted, conversation. According to social semiotics, these modes of representation simulate “real life” social interactions and create a sense of an individual person rather than a

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Figure 11.3: Photo of a close-up of video of Jaap (Source: Sian Supski and Elaine Swan)

homogenized member of a collective group or ethnic identity, the usual sources of diversity in representations of multiculturalism (van Leeuwen 2008). The identifications of the 10 people are designed to surprise us and prise open the assumptions we may have about how cultural, racial, and ethnic markers define people. For instance, Brendan, an Indigenous football fan dressed in a football scarf, reveals his barrister’s wig, challenging racist and classist stereotypes about Indigenous employment and achievement. Shanton, an ­Australian Malaysian middle-aged academic, is gay, a football supporter who likes choirs and comics, and in one swoop fells a number of popular ­stereotypes about Asian Australians. Of interest to this chapter is that food is defined as one of eight identity formation characteristics. This is in line with popular and academic belief that what we eat marks personal and collective identities (James 1997; Joassart-Marcelli, Salim, and Vu 2017). Our food choices are meant to “say something” about us (Willetts 1997, 111). Cooking and eating practices are seen as identity practices, communicating who we are, what values we uphold, and what groups we belong

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to, or, as Wenying Xu (2008, 4) writes, they “have ontological significance.” Indeed, the exhibition both reinforces and challenges the view that food expresses and produces lifestyle, individual, racial, gendered, classed, cultural, and national differences between groups of people. In particular, the display “My Food” suggests that eating food is performative of identity, i.e., a self-conscious act rather than an unconscious habit (Joassart-Marcelli, Salim, and Vu 2017). In line with the exhibition’s goal of showing how identities are dynamic, multiple, and complex, which is a first step in intersectional thinking, the display provokes us to rethink how we classify and differentiate others through their food practices. The main way the display “My Food” does this is to individualize rather than collectivize eating practices. Thus, many of the eating preferences of the people of colour displayed do not line up with obvious cultural or racial traditions. Indeed, the focus is on their eating as a personal choice. This overarching narrative is augmented by curatorial strategies and display techniques. First, the visitor is encouraged to see the represented people who are classified by social categories of difference—Indigenous, Brazilian, disabled—as concrete, specific, named individuals rather than as generic “types” (van Leeuwen 2008). Second, the verbal text personalizes food consumption by using the personal possessive my, and first-person, personal narratives, reinforcing the individualizing visual modes of direct eye contact and close-up facial expressions in the video (van Leeuwen 2008). Individuality is implied too by how the videos show food practices as personal choices, transgressing assumptions about food’s role in structuring collective racial and cultural identities. For instance, one of the prescribed questions is: “What do you think my favourite food is?” The answers are designed to challenge ­ hilean essentialist ideas about what racialized groups eat. Thus, Carlos, the C builder, informs us with a glint in his eye that his favourite food is a sausage roll, a food very much associated with working-class white Anglo-Celtic culture in Australia. An accompanying photograph provides us with visual evidence of Carlos relishing a sausage roll. Carlos says that if you looked in his fridge, you would not know he is Chilean—although he does eat Chilean cakes, often in the middle of the night and bought from shops in Melbourne! In a similar vein, Nyadol, a black Ethiopian woman, says her favourite food is nasi goreng (a popular Malaysian/Indonesian rice dish found in many restaurants and cafés in Melbourne), a big change from the beans and white flour she ate in the refugee camps where she grew up. Hence, the video challenges dominant assumptions that racialized migrants hold on to their food cultures and eat foods that sustain tradition and connect to the homeland. At the same time, the video reinforces

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stereotyped views of working-class masculinity in its stress on Carlos’s lack of interest in cooking. While the videos present these choices as individual identity choices, it can be read that the display constructs Carlos’s and Nyadol’s eating practices as aligned with Australian notions of culinary citizenship. In the white imaginary, Australian cuisine is hybrid, multicultural, open-minded, and non-traditional: “we all eat different things now” (Gallegos 2005; Duruz 2009). Thus, Carlos and Nyadol are depicted as transcending their race and ethnicity, with Carlos loving Anglo-Celtic food, and Nyadol “eating Asian” (Duruz 2009, 16). They are shown reproducing food omnivorousness, a mode of eating that can be understood as an Australian culinary “citizenship device,” through which individuals or groups stake a claim to a collective plural identity (Gallegos 2005, 108). In performing a rejection of “tastes of home,” Carlos and Nyadol are depicted as “true” Australians (Beagan et al. 2014, 204). This is not to say that racialized migrants do not experiment with eating different foods but to underline how the museum has chosen to highlight this mode of food consumption with its connotations of Australian openness and tolerance as a form of “multicultural nationalism” (Gordon-Walker 2016, xiv). The display “My Food” does not just focus on food and individual identity as discussed in relation to personalized food preferences. It depicts connections between food practices and collective faith identities. Thus, a verbal text on the display table asks a question, “Do you think my religion influences what I eat?” and is replied by Jaap, a white New Zealand Jewish man of Dutch heritage. Referencing popular associations of Islam with food and drink prohibitions—even though many religions have food proscriptions—the display asks, “Do you think I avoid certain foods?” and Moustafa, a young Muslim man, answers by talking not about food but how he avoids “alcohol contexts.” Juxtaposed against these conversational answers are two didactic text bubbles, which authoritatively explain in an expert curatorial voice what kosher means, and what Islam says about intoxicating substances. Some of the questions asked are deeply racializing. For instance, ­Shanton, a Chinese Malaysian man, is asked, “What food do you think takes me back home?” He explains that Sarawak food takes him home because while M ­ elbourne restaurants are diverse, they do not yet serve foods from Sarawak. His verbal text is supplemented again by a museum didactic written text explaining the origins of the Malaysian dish, Laksa soup. The question, “How do you think I like my ­kangaroo cooked?” is posed only to Brendan, the Indigenous barrister. ­Kangaroo is sold widely in urban supermarkets and restaurants and eaten by

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different classes and ethnicities in Australia, although it has its roots in Indigenous cultures. Brendan replies that he likes to buy a fillet from the supermarket and make it into a curry or eat it in his local pub, unsettling potential assumptions that an Indigenous person would eat it in a “traditional” style in the bush. Then he adds that sometimes he eats it with his family in central Australia, where they cook it in the ground. Although the display does not mention intersectionality, the aim of the display is to reinforce how people use objects and cultural practices to negotiate their cultural identities, and that these are complex and not reducible to a single category (Heinrich 2013; Witcomb 2009). The “My Food” display challenges a number of potential visitor assumptions about racialized and ethnicized eating in its visual and verbal texts, and foregrounds that people classified by social categories do not always reproduce eating practices associated with these categories. Indeed, this suggestion echoes a popular Australian narrative that it is a country of freedom, food bounty, culinary omnivorousness, and individual choice. Hence, the display underlines that “food is actually a fluid symbolic medium for making statements about our identities” (James 1997, 81). At the same time, the display seems to want to consolidate certain food identity essentialisms. One of the problems is that the speakers do not have the opportunity to recount stories but just provide very brief answers to prescribed questions. Moreover, there is very little curatorial transparency about how the interviews were generated and whether the answers were said in response to the textual questions suggested on the display. Secondly, white Australians are not ethnicized nor are their ethnic food traditions or practices explained. Thus, the white Australians are not asked about what takes them “back home,” how their food is influenced by religion, nor how they like to eat kangaroo. While didactic texts explain authoritatively what Malaysian Laksa, and Islamic and Jewish food practices are, the curators do not explain what vegetarianism is. In proclaiming the truth of racialized food traditions and not racializing nor ethnicizing others, the labels appear to be speaking to an imagined Anglo-Celtic visitor. Furthermore, in representing these food practices so concisely and authoritatively, they undercut the complexities and heterogeneities of cultural food traditions. While race and faith are presented as differentiated and complex, intersections of gender and class are not made explicit as significant individual or collective identity categories. There are clear visual markers of gendered and classed identities through clothes, accents, status, and food preferences, as well as depictions of food practices that are culturally gendered and classed. As Jennifer Brady and colleagues write, “food is doing gender” (2018, 3). The display depicts

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the two white middle-class women through white food femininity, although the curatorial voice is silent on this. Thus, C ­ aroline, a white middle-class Australian woman with a disability, is asked what might be special about her evening meal. In response, she challenges disablist stereotypes to say how she likes cooking and “entertaining at home,” both culturally feminized practices. Diana, a visibly older white Australian woman, who is asked a question about “what her dietary requirements might be,” explains she is a vegetarian, a white feminized food identity. White food masculinity is also depicted. Thus, the two white men—the ­middle-aged Jewish man from New Zealand and the young Anglo-Celtic man— are constructed as “food omnivores.” Jaap, the Jewish man, is depicted as saying that unlike his wife and children who eat kosher food, he can eat anything, and in so doing, the museum reaffirms his masculinity through invoking his agency and personal choice, alluding to cultural associations of men in families using power to determine their own food preferences. This does not mean his wife and children don’t exercise agentic choice by eating kosher but rather that the museum focuses on Jaap’s narration of his eating. The younger man explains that his favourite food would be “a different food from different parts of the world each night,” echoing Ghassan Hage’s (1997) concept of cosmo-multicultural eating, a white middle-class Australian self-enrichment project of consuming a variety of ethnic foods. This is about the cultivation of cultural capital rather than being concerned about the lives of racialized food labourers, or what Hage (1997) calls “multiculturalism without ethnics.” Cosmo-multicultural eating is motivated by the desire to consume different multiple ethnic foods, rather than the specific material properties of the foods themselves or understanding the working conditions of the producers. In summary, “My Food” offers a glimpse into some of the layers of intersectional food identities. The official overall narrative is that reading off identification from these practices can be problematic. In addition, racialized migrants are shown experimenting with and adapting to food cultures in Australia. The display avoids generalizations and assumptions, and recognizes individuality, multiple identities, and personal preferences as Moon (2016) suggests food exhibitions should. The effect of focusing on personal identity and individualized food practices rather than group identity and collective food practices—while challenging essentialism and hybridizing and humanizing the figure of the racialized migrant, as Phillip Schorch (2015) suggests—ignores wider power structures. In representational intersectional studies terms, the individualization of food choices makes it more difficult to attend to interlocking systems of

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oppression and multiaxial power relations that underpin food production, food choices, and their racialized, classed, and gendered relations. While the exhibition cannot cover everything, it might be possible to raise questions about the structures that create food preferences, choices, consumption practices, and classifications and relate these to racism, sexism, and heteronormativity, for instance. As a result of a focus on individual food preferences and practices, racist structures of Indigenous peoples’ food history, food cultures, and food inequalities and the effects of labour markets and government policy on migrants’ food lives and foodwork are all ignored. Furthermore, although the museum seeks to relativize white Anglo-Celtic cultures, white Australians are not ethnicized or racialized in the curatorial labelling and verbal texts. As May Chew (2015, 97) argues in museums, “multiculturalism functions to mark bodies deemed divergent while simultaneously unmaking those of the unspoken ‘norm.’” The design of the display reinforces this lack of attention to wider structures of inequality. For instance, “My Food” is presented on a flat interactive tabletop, with equivalent sizes of images and verbal text to represent the sample of people. Like a kind of human periodic table, this design visually and spatially erases any differentiation between white Anglo-Celtic Australians and all other racialized minorities, including Indigenous Australians. It flattens difference and creates a sense that underneath we are all the same, we are all intersectional. In so doing, the display ignores the “special status” of Indigenous Australians, and their dispossession and genocide (Stratton and Ang 1994). Another significant design feature is that the tabletop displays mean that visitors look down at photographic and video images of depicted people. According to semiotic visual analysis, this creates a sense of visitor power over those represented. The display “My Food” accentuates this sense of power in that the visitor can call on individuals to speak by directly touching the faces of people they want to hear about. Not only does this give the visitor a sense of embodied mastery, it suggests that knowledge about identities can easily be summoned. Witcomb (2009, 65) argues that in museums, well-used, individualized “personal stories do … not degenerate … into a narrative that simply supports a simplistic understanding of diversity in which there is a clear distinction between those who simply add color and interest and those who are ‘normal’ and whom we should all aspire to be like.” But in the food display discussed in this chapter, the stories become soundbites and an imagined white visitor and preferred reading is created. In its lack of marking of whiteness in food practices, its promotion of people of colour as multicultural eaters, white men as true omnivores, Australian cuisine as multicultural bounty, and the levelling out of difference, we argue that white norms underpin the content and arrangement of the food displays.

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CONCLUSION In this chapter, we argued that food displays and exhibitions are important sites for identity work and knowledge production, which can reinforce inequality and discrimination. Accordingly, we suggest that one way to respond to the call for intersectional studies of food is to turn to analyses of representational intersectionality in food exhibits in museums. In so doing, the chapter makes an original contribution by designing and applying an analytic framework to a food exhibit “My Food” in the Immigration Museum, Melbourne. Our methodology shows how meaning about identities is created through a range of curatorial and exhibitionary strategies. Mundane labels or visuals contribute to cultural knowledge and symbolic inequalities about food, race, class, and gender. Too often, exhibitions are seen as neutral and “not noticed as being a point of view” (Ravelli 2006, 89). Our chapter shows how a white point of view about culinary citizenship and eating is constructed through visual and verbal texts and the design of displays. The focus on personal identity, the levelling out of differences, and the display of representational equivalence limit the discussion of the racialization of food. As a result, the opportunities to bring wider social structures of identity making, inequalities, and food practices are lost. Of course, there are other food exhibits in the exhibition, although it should be noted that these continue to reproduce narrow views about food identities. While we acknowledge the risks taken by the exhibition in “returning racism to multiculturalism” in some of the displays, and we suggest that food exhibits should be used to extend knowledge about race, collective identities, intersectionality and inequalities, and how systems of oppression and power structures shape foodways and food choices (Message 2014).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We’d like to thank Dr. Rosie Welch for her suggestion that we visit the museum and for her contributions to our discussions.

READING QUESTIONS 1. Have you ever thought about how individual and collective identity are represented in museum exhibitions?

2. How might representational intersectionality be a useful concept to think through identity? 3. What role do space, display, verbal texts, and written texts play in producing knowledge about food and identity/intersectionality in museum exhibitions?

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Witcomb, A. 2009. “Migration, Social Cohesion and Cultural Diversity: Can Museums Move beyond Pluralism?” Humanities Research 15 (2): 49–66.

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Xu, W. 2008. Eating Identities: Reading Food in Asian American Literature. Honolulu: ­University of Hawai’i Press.

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CHAPTER 12

Fermentation and the Possibility of Reimagining Relationality Maya Hey

LEARNING OBJECTIVES 1. To describe fermentation as a process that challenges anthropocentrism 2. To explain the limitations of thinking in self/other or us/them binaries 3. To analyze food through the lens of feminist epistemologies, such as embodied knowledge and fabulations

KEY TERMS anthropocentrism, embodied knowledge, fabulate/fabulations, fermentation, self/other binary

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INTRODUCTION: WHAT IS FERMENTATION? Fermentation refers to the biochemical and symbolic changes due to the work of microbes such as bacteria, moulds, and yeasts. Their frequent life-and-death cycles make up the very transformation of fermentation, and their microscopic size results in a longer processing time compared to preparations by cooking or ­baking. This slow process, like curing or canning, underlines fermentation’s history as a common food preservation method. In times of abundance, food ingredients are fermented to secure a steady supply of nutrients for times of dearth. In parts of East and Southeast Asia, which are humid and conducive to mould growth, fermented soy products—like Japanese miso and shoyu, Korean jang, and Indonesian tempeh—would ensure year-round sources of protein and umami for both health and taste. In other parts of the world, sauerkraut and kimchi guarantee fibre and vitamin C during the cold of winter. Intentionally inoculating food ingredients with an array of edible microbes would stave off opportunistic ones in the ambient environment. The life of a food would be extended by microbial life, and the resulting ferment would be consumed months (even years) after the original ingredient was harvested or prepared. Cheese, yogourts, and kefirs are some examples of extending the liveliness and consumability of milk, which would otherwise become unfit for human consumption. Thus, fermentation’s potential to improve food security has made it an important food practice that cuts across geographies and cultures. From the perspective of the current industrialized food complex, fermentation may seem like a quaint return to a nostalgic pastime or an outdated and risky method of food preparation; however, fermentation has long been a necessary processing technique at various scales of food production.1 For instance, the cassava tuber, which is a staple food in parts of Nigeria, cannot be consumed raw, so its starches become digestible only after fermentation. In tropical climates, the first steps of chocolate and coffee production involve fermenting the fruit (that is, the cacao pod and coffee cherry) so that their aromatic compounds develop into their respective smells. Other foods may have undergone processes of fermentation that we may not see or readily know about, such as the case of the mould species Aspergillus, which ferments corn to yield high-fructose corn syrup in commercial quantities (McGee 2004, 678). Fermentation traverses various food cultures, making it seem ubiquitous in a way, but fermentation also carries regional specificity that gives the resulting ferment a place-based meaning. During fermentation, both matter and meanings change. Consider the transformation of grapes into wine as simultaneously being a biochemical, ritualistic,

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and symbolic change: yeasts convert the fruit sugars of grapes into alcohol, and the resulting wine carries meanings (such as hospitality or religious signification) that were not assigned to the original grape. What is important to note is that meaning is assigned, such that a single ferment can be described as a fermented delicacy or a rotten disaster, depending on social or cultural context. For the people defining these food practices, ferments can be used to delineate in-group and out-group practices, informing thoughts such as “we are the people who eat this delicious ferment” or “they are the people who eat that disgusting ferment.” Some ferments like kimchi serve as a marker for Korean national identity in ways that are internally believed (“we eat this”) and externally enforced (“they eat that”). Other iconic or peculiar ferments—like cave-aged Roquefort (blue) cheeses from France, Icelandic fermented shark (hákarl), and mucilaginous nattō from Japan—are known for their strong flavours, acrid smells, and slimy textures; these foods signal notions of nativeness or foreignness to the eater when consumed or rejected. Or, consider how the South and Central American beverage chicha, made from masticating and spitting corn pulp, undermines European norms about hygiene and cleanliness, which are also socially constructed. The meanings associated with each of these ferments indicate that fermentation does not describe one definitive answer of what is. Instead, fermentation is an ongoing and variable process that allows for complex and multiple realities to coexist.

HOW CAN FERMENTATION HELP US TO UNDERSTAND DIFFERENCES ACROSS AND WITHIN SPECIES? At its core, fermentation counters anthropocentrism, or human-centred thinking. In particular, fermentation enables a critical reconsideration of who or what is acting, and what counts as an actionable subject. Instead of automatically assigning agency to the human maker, fermentation examines more-than-human (f)actors, both microbial and ambient, that cumulatively decentre the human. This kind of philosophical repositioning can potentially change the way we think about causality and accountability, raising the ethical questions of how we use other forms of life and how we ought to live together. The question of instrumentalizing microbial life is especially salient since increasing research shows that we cannot live without microbes when the reverse is not true (Hird 2009, 22; see also McFall-Ngai et al. 2013; Gilbert et al. 2012; Gould 1996; Margulis and Sagan 2007; Derry 2017). We are compound creatures, dependent on and comprised of microbial species that regulate our well-being.2 Humans and microbes

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are not separate entities. Our lives are entangled and, as such, our combined futures are at stake. By decentring the human, fermentation enables us to wedge ourselves into a relational food web where we are tethered to others in ecologies of eating. But who exactly makes up this “we” and how are “we” defined? Evoking the term we relies on a universal human actor on the preparing/eating side of fermentation, which problematically erases the specificity and layered nature of minoritarian oppression while enabling heteronormative discourses to relegate some humans to subhuman status (Chen and Luciano 2015; Weheliye 2014). In turn, this assumption casts microbes as a singular entity, which flattens and further objectifies nonhumans as expendable and exploitable (Plumwood 2000). An intersectional approach to fermentation would expose the powers that are taken for granted when an overdetermined sense of Self goes unchecked. We are not universalizable, neither within the human species nor between other species. This chapter makes the case that fermentation could be used as a productive model for rethinking broader scales of difference and their resulting power relations. Fermentation productively problematizes our ideas about who we are as eaters and food makers while also challenging how we imagine our tethered connections with others. In particular, the practical and theoretical considerations of fermentation can help reconceptualize agency, embodiment, and relationality. The first section challenges anthropocentrism by questioning who/what carries agency in fermentation. The second section attends to the ethical questions of how we embody (others’) knowledge without essentializing and instrumentalizing others. The final section examines scales of relationality, given that fermentation can complicate our ideas about selfhood, otherness, and interconnectedness.

WHY EMPLOY A FEMINIST PERSPECTIVE? Feminist thought takes seriously the ethics of being in a more-than-human world and aims to deconstruct the conflated nature of anthropocentric/androcentric assumptions. Feminist analyses pay particular attention to scale and interdependency, including the politics of microbial life (Hird 2009; Fishel 2017), multispecies engagement (Despret 2016; Haraway 2003; Gillespie and Collard 2015), and the complications of living and dying together in shared environments (Tsing 2017; Davis 2014). As we will see, fermentation sets up an encounter with microbes, which also make up part of our literal being. This complicates our understanding of selfhood and otherness and whether such a line is even warranted. At the same time, feminist theory considers how we

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could relate to one another through the imaginative work of worlding (­Tsing 2015) and speculation (King and Moesch 2012; H ­ araway 2013). F ­ eminist ­speculations, as articulated by Donna Haraway (2013, 9), are “patternings, risky ­co-makings, ­speculative fabulations” that hold open multiple truths and create space for ­reflexivity. U ­ sing feminist fabulations as a methodology, Rosi Braidotti (1997, 43) poses, “How do feminist fabulations of figurations help in figuring out ­alternative ­paradigms?” What follows is a series of fabulations that combine the lived e­ xperience and conceptual what-ifs in an attempt to figure out an alternative mode of food and feminist relationality. Each section begins with a personal narrative to ground some of the theoretical concepts discussed in concrete terms. Similar to case studies, the details in these stories are designed to animate the discussions and analyses that follow. These stories also follow the feminist tradition of situating oneself inside research such that inquiry and investigation are driven by an acute awareness of one’s social positioning (Harding 1986; Haraway 1991). While these stories are offered in the spirit of attuning to all of the forces that make up social location, they are meant to be illustrative, not demonstrative, so that theoretical concepts become easier to understand. They are told from my partial perspective as a cis-gendered, female-identified, mixed-race human. These stories call upon my meaning-making experiences as a graduate student in Italy and Canada while carrying backgrounds in chemistry and culinary arts, a certain economic mobility to pursue higher education, and an able body to move through ­different foodscapes. Admittedly, this kind of subjectivity cannot account for everything, as intersectionality is “difficult to get everything in the frame” (Razack 2017). However, this analysis attempts to examine Jennifer Nash’s (2008, 90) call to “­describe the ways in which privilege and oppression intersect, ­informing each subject’s experiences.” By examining the power relations within and across ­species, this chapter investigates fermentation’s potential to ­reimagine ­relationality that is more ethical and just.

QUESTIONING WHO/WHAT HAS AGENCY I’d heard a strange rumour that you can buy bread yeast only from the pharmacy. Though I’d been living in Italy for months at this point, my limited language skills necessitated help from a native ally. I asked the token bread-baker in my class. “Oh, you want to buy yeast? I can just give you some of mine.”

(Continued )

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The following day, I had a jarful of sourdough starter in my hands and, in the following week, I was madly scribbling down my friend’s sourdough recipe at her house. Remember, she warned, handing the jar to me: the dough will not rise on a humid day. Somewhat sarcastically, I made note that I’d soon be learning how to read the weather and become the yeast whisperer, to which my friend responded with an emphatic, earnest, Yes! Esatto! For good measure, I copied the starting ratios of starter-to-flour-to-water and watched my friend sift a mound of flour directly on top of her wooden table. Gently, she cratered the centre and poured the liquid ingredients, including the yeast starter. What started as a small swirling gesture with her two fingers gradually involved her whole body as more and more of the flour was incorporated into the dough. It almost looked as if the dough was moving her. Then I tried my hand at kneading, noting the visual cues and memorizing them in my hands. Like an earlobe to the touch, I thought. “Use your legs,” she reminded me. I started to knead from my hips, coordinating my arms and legs and shifting my weight with a rhythmic heave-ho. It helped to close my eyes so that I could feel the dough start to resist my hands. I felt grounded yet agile in the circular motion of gathering and pushing. I asked her how I would know when the dough is sufficiently worked. “Your hands will be clean. You will know.” Will I? “Si. You’ll know,” she repeated.

Fermentation combines multiple species, multiple senses, and multiple scales of life that challenge assumptions about control (e.g., who or what ­exactly is leavening a sourdough bread?) and knowledge (e.g., how does one know when the sourdough has finished leavening?). In the above story, the material ­practices of fermentation keep food knowledge diffuse and dispersed across the body (e.g., in the eyes, in the hands, in the legs) and decentralized across a set of external factors (e.g., the yeasts, the humidity). Most notably, fermentation relies on the ambient surroundings for transformation. One can set up favourable or hostile environments for microbes to thrive or suffer only by tinkering with parameters such as temperature, acidity, and access to oxygen. As a r­ esult, microbes live and die according to the conditions provided, not necessarily ­according to human volition.3

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Since humans have only indirect control over what microbes do, fermentation can decentre our assumptions about human power: humans must work with, not on, microbial life. Indeed, fermentation would not be possible were it not for the invisible work of microbes. By countering the anthropocentric food narrative, fermentation shifts attention away from the human and the mind, which Western philosophy has long privileged. Instead, it questions what counts as an actionable subject. The agency in leavening a bread loaf spans the yeast, gluten matrix, time, human hands, as well as the microbes living on that hand. It also matters whose hands are kneading, in what environment, in which region, because each of these parameters carry microbial factors that affect the final bread in both taste and meaning (see Albala 2011, on San Francisco sourdough).4 It is not the human baker who leavened the bread but instead many (f)actors in concert that transform the ferment from sticky paste to smooth dough. Rethinking agency suggests that humans are not “on top” of a food chain but part of a relational web. Fermentation revivalist Sandor Katz (2012, 43) asserts, “food is much more than simply nourishment. It embodies a complex web of relationships. Reclaiming our food means actively involving ourselves in this web.” Fermentation provides a way of wedging oneself back into this web because the success of a ferment (that is, its edibility) is predicated on maintaining interdependent relations with other species in a shared environment. Eating encounters are also relational. In When Species Meet (2008), Donna Haraway uses the etymology of companion (cum- with, and panis- bread) as her rally cry for considering how we interact with other, nonhuman species with whom we metaphorically break bread. These interactions become particularly clear when she discusses eating others: “trying to make a living, critters eat critters but can only partly digest one another” (31). The partial digestion of others, for still others to digest, can serve as a helpful reminder that eating is not inherently a linear process. For example, our intestinal lining cannot digest cellulose or plant fibres; bacteria do this for us, as they do for ruminants (like cows and sheep). Nutrients are recycled from one organism/environment to the next. Relations, then, are crucial for maintaining these nutrient exchanges. Understanding our relations as interdependent disrupts the vertical, hierarchical understanding of the human-microbe relationship. As Elspeth Probyn (2000) posits, “eating joins us,” and reflexively examining these encounters could provide clues for how we can come to terms with the ethics and politics of having eaten. This is particularly salient when microbes are essentialized as probiotic, or health-promoting, entities. When one eats a probiotic yogourt, for instance, the partial digestion of the live active bacterial cultures allows these microbes to

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occupy and live within one’s intestinal lining.5 The eater incorporates them into the gut, but a flipped perspective would see that microbes incorporate the eater into their ecosystem. In this ecosystem, microbes determine intestinal health, not the human eater per se. In this strange dance of eating and being eaten, both human and microbe have incorporated each other into their corps, complicating what it means to embody others.6 These interspecies entanglements become particularly clear in Lynn Margulis’s (1998, 35) literal example of incorporation on the cellular level: the energy-producing mitochondria in our cells are the results of “literal ‘incorporation’ […] in which the undigested green bacteria survived and the entire merger prevailed.” In other words, human cells are in and of themselves the results of incorporation and mergers with microbial life. Each cell carries the legacy of maintained relationships with bacterial pasts. This notion suggests that humans are no more exceptional than the microbes that make up these bodies; it also suggests that “we” can be better thought of as complex, more-than-human bodies. We may not conscientiously think of microbes even though they live inside, on, and around us at all times. Since we cannot see them with the naked eye, we tend to reduce or relegate microbes to a lesser status because they are not “big like us” (Hird 2009). We reduce these invisible actors as something unimportant (and therefore erasable) or something to control (and therefore exploitable). This kind of reductionism is “as dangerous as it is prevalent,” argues Margulis (1998, 56), cautioning against the persistent narrative that “our strong sense of difference from any other life form, our sense of species superiority, is a delusion of grandeur” (98). The myth of human exceptionalism is particularly pronounced in Vivian Plumwood’s (2008, 324) argument that we cannot deny “the most basic feature of animal existence on planet earth—that we are food and that through death we nourish others.” In insisting on the notion that “we are all food,” Plumwood works with the food/death imaginary to open up new narratives of human positionality. Encounters with food remind us that we are neither at the top nor centre of any system.7 Instead of a food web starring the human eater, eating shows multiple relations woven together in an instance of coconstructing our bodies.

QUESTIONING HOW WE EMBODY (OTHERS’) KNOWLEDGE In fermentation, one must rely on parts of the body that are less frequently called upon to figure out what is happening. One must smell, taste, and touch to assess

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the doneness of a ferment. In the above story, closing my eyes attunes me to other perceptions that the dominant sense of sight would otherwise disregard. With agency dispersed across a set of (f)actors, fermentation challenges dominant epistemologies, or the philosophical domain of how knowledge is perceived or sourced. How does one know when the dough has been sufficiently kneaded? One way of knowing is to follow instructions as indicated by a recipe; here, the source of knowing is in the text (i.e., the recipe) and in the mind. Compare this to a bodily approach where the source of knowing is in the senses, “written” into the body. Fermentation relies on embodied knowledge because of the unpredictability and variability of microbial life. Embodied knowledge acknowledges that the body comes to know in ways that that mind cannot and that this knowing varies across different bodies. Here, ­feminist accounts of the body are helpful to challenge singular ways of knowing and gendered assumptions about bodies (Grosz 1994; Shildrick 1997; Bates 2015a; see also Wilson 2015). Elizabeth Grosz (1994, 164) collapses some of the ­philosophical binaries that essentialize female bodies in order “to reconceive bodies outside the binary oppositions [of] mind/body, nature/­culture, ­subject/object, interior/exterior oppositions.” In so doing, she reasserts the body as a source for knowledge production. Applying Grosz’s ideas to fermentation practice, embodied knowledge cannot be universalized or abstracted (into words, for instance) but needs human bodies to travel from one body to another (like when my baker friend passes her knowledge to me in the story). This way of relating mind to body and body to body follows what food philosopher Lisa ­Heldke (1992a) calls “mentally-manual activities” in which parts of the body stand as proxy to the “capital I-self,” so that: The knowing involved in making a cake is “contained” not simply “in my head” but in my hands, my wrists, my eyes and nose as well […] I know things literally with my body, that I, “as” my hands, know when the dough is sufficiently kneaded, and I “as” my nose knows when the pie is done. (218)

Heldke (1992a) describes food making as an embodied practice, in which she is neither entirely separate from nor entirely exerting her power over her ingredients. Instead she “enters a kind of relation with” them (176) in order to cultivate a “relational view of self [which] suggests that your interests and mine are (often) connected” (Heldke 1992b, 212). Embodied knowledge reconnects body to mind in a way that strengthens relations across a network of interactions, including the head, the hands, the flour, the water, the humidity, the yeast, the air, the temperature, and all other (f)actors. These forces work in relation to

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one another to produce an outcome (in this case, bread and humanly relations). Embodied knowledge recognizes that knowledge is not absolute, located inside the brain; it is dispersed throughout the peripheral body and across many bodies. Measurements and calculations can help, but one must ultimately feel their way through fermentation using the body’s knowledge. Thus, fermentation is an embodied practice, situated between the backand-forth of listening-to and working-with. Furthermore, fermentation ensures that multiple understandings of embodied knowledge keep knowledge spread across people, who are inherently variable, allowing said knowledge to remain multiplicitous.

Bon Appétit, the food media conglomerate, has a web series called It’s Alive (2017), which demystifies the work of invisible microbes and fermented foods. The show stars Brad Leone and emphasizes his can-do candour with simple recipes and clear instructions on what to do and expect. In response to Brad’s kimchi episode, comedian and content-writer Jenny Yang staged a one-off video in which two sets of Korean mothers and daughters are filmed for their reactions to Brad. The language leading up to the video’s hyperlink drips with sarcasm, and the hashtags imply slight disapproval (#OhBrad). Given the prelude of mockery, one would expect the commentary to be more incisive, yet the Korean women never claim superiority over what kimchi is or should be. Whereas Brad announces a recipe, the Korean mothers and daughters explain kimchi’s variability and its connection to family/national memory. Effectively, the reaction video captures two realities of a single ferment: kimchi and “Bradchi.” I found Yang’s reaction video refreshing as it lacked the bashing so common in online spaces. When I shared the video through my own social networks, not surprisingly, my contacts responded along racial lines: marginalized voices appreciated the mild call-out on Brad’s appropriation of Korean food culture whereas visible-white perspectives saw the video as an attack against Brad. One notable response came from the culinary sector, who interpreted Brad’s original kimchi video as part of the culinary mandate for knowledge dissemination. They saw the reaction video as “hating on” the act of “just sharing knowledge.” It is worth noting that the transfer of culinary know-how is neither innocent nor neutral, and one need not look further than the histories of capitalist logic and extraction during colonial times to see the political nature of food knowledge.

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These conquests emphasize the techniques, abstracting knowledge out of the knowing (coloured, gendered) body and into the socially mobile body. Framed as “exchanges” and “substitutions,” these instances of decontextualization permit those with the most social mobility the loudest platform for expertise, all the while circumventing the social and ethical accountability that comes with encountering Others.

A more complex understanding of difference across and within species begins with examining fermentation through the lens of an us/them or self/other binary. Binaries set up power structures and help tease out assumptions and interactions. First associated with Hegel ([1807] 2016), the self/other binary is a theoretical scaffold into which one can insert experiences and attitudes to better understand one’s social positioning and identity. It has since been expanded by social and cultural theorists like W. E. B. DuBois ([1903] 2012), Simone de Beauvoir ([1949] 2011), Frantz Fanon ([1963] 2004), Edward Said ([1973] 2003), and bell hooks (1992), all of whom examine the skewed power relations and critique its inconsistent manifestations. For example, man’s theoretical other may be woman, and the opposite of white may be black, but the reverse is never true. Furthermore, the opposite of a black and woman identity holds no oppositional equivalent, which demonstrates the limits of such binaries and warrants a more nuanced approach to understanding social power as intersectional and interlocking. A binary that is tied to power relations creates dead ends, argues Susan Stanford Friedman, because privilege and oppression are not opposites but are complicated, layered, and stratified. Instead, she explains that binaries need “relational narratives” to show depth in these layered interactions, which “­requires acknowledging how privilege and oppression are often not absolute categories but, rather, shift in relation to different axes of power and powerlessness” (Friedman 1995, 7). A relational approach to studying binaries gives us tools to understand how power is deployed. In the case of selfhood and otherness, a­ symmetrical power relations justify the process of othering: We are not them. They are not us. Therefore, we are separate. And our interests may never align. Othering draws boundaries, and one of its dangers is that repeatedly pronouncing these boundaries sustains only the dominant group. Black feminist bell hooks (1992, 26) argues that marginalized groups remain oppressed because their commodified otherness “offers the promise of recognition and reconciliation,” but these encounters erase historical legacies of oppression and end up

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sustaining dominant (white) supremacy. To give a concrete example of hooks’s argument, recall the two kimchi functions between Brad/white/male and the Korean mothers/daughters. Brad’s attempt to make kimchi gestures toward reconciliation (“I am like you”), but his engagement with Korean culture and ­history remains shallow and the result is a decontextualized “Bradchi.” The Korean women speak of many different kimchis and breathe nuance into its multiplicitous preparations. In comparison, Brad emerges as an authority on fermented cabbage. The essentialized kimchi becomes the cultural commodity for which Brad and Bon Appétit gain clicks, likes, followers, and revenue; and the circulation of such messages amplifies the reductionism to which others’ perspectives are subject.8 To be clear, the power and oppression experienced by marginalized ­others is not the same as that of microbial life. Their lived experiences are incomparable. However, what these power relations reveal is a misuse of power when the rhetoric of difference is evoked to exploit or eliminate certain ways of life. How we treat others—when calling upon exotic others to verify authentic r­ecipes, when employing expendable others to do work for us, or when articulating otherness as a latent threat—sheds light on our own assumptions about our self-aggrandized, inalienable privilege. It points to our failure at reconsidering the overinflated Self. Power is not absolute; it is enacted in specific ways that privilege certain beings over others. Thinking about fermentation turns a critical lens onto our-Selves. It helps us question our own enunciations of selfhood that might go unchecked. These ideas are not just abstract, hypothetical scenarios. There are material practices that discriminate and eradicate, which echo the philosophical separation of us/them. These practices include the hygienic, eugenic, and public sanitation protocols that aim to protect our-Selves. Yet, these protections are justified through a narrow interpretation of what is dangerous and what must be controlled. In “Unruly Edges: Mushrooms as Companion Species,” Tsing (2012) blurs the lines between metaphorical and literal separation of (racialized) difference. Tsing explains that nineteenth-century discourses surrounding scientific hygiene and health practices bled into other social realms during ­Europe’s colonial expansion: “white women became responsible for maintaining the ­boundaries—of homes, families, species, and the white race” (Tsing 2012, 149). In other words, the mentality that separates races runs parallel to separating species along the self/other, us/them binaries. Additionally, this kind of anthropocentric and ethnocentric division becomes the baseline for analyzing the self-talk that animates one’s desire to categorize, simplify, and conquer others.

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Understanding fermentation in terms of the self/other binary highlights our own (ab)uses of power, which suggests that we should each operate more self-­reflexively. As a thought experiment, fermentation provides us with tools to check our power relations, which involves reflecting on our own social location and our own political affordances. This may help us to better understand how we might be complicit in contributing to dominant power structures and ideologies. It is worth repeating that exploited humans and exploited microbes do not share the same experience. One does not equal the other, but holding these analyses together exposes some of the (ab)uses of power that come with dominant assumptions about who/what is human. An intersectional lens is crucial to challenging power, especially in anthropocentric critiques. So, how do we keep our selfhood in check while also remaining accountable and responsible to one another? This is where the important work of imagination comes into play.

QUESTIONING HOW WE RELATE TO ONE ANOTHER How could the material practices of fermentation change the way we think about relating to others whom we cannot easily see or understand? Fermentation may help point to modes of intimacy that are based on living with, not living off of, others. What follows is an attempt to fabulate a different kind of relationality. To fabulate means to relate a fable or story, often used as an imaginary or speculative exercise. Feminist fabulations take seriously the ethics of being in a morethan-human world, as well as how we could better relate to one another. Donna Haraway (2013, n.p.) describes fabulations as exercises that rethink and remake what is considered “real” in order to imagine new models for being: “SF is that potent material-semiotic sign for the riches of speculative fabulation, speculative feminism, science fiction, speculative fiction […] Therefore, SF must also mean ‘so far,’ opening up what is yet-to-come in protean entangled times’ pasts, presents, and futures.” Fabulations counter some of the universalist claims (about bodies, about science, about scientific facts) that pose as objective knowledge and truth. Feminist theory operates from the baseline that “it matters which ideas we think other ideas with; thinking or making […] is not an innocent universal gesture, but a risky proposition in relentless historical relational contingency” (2013, n.p.). Thus, fabulations become crucial pivot points for the gendered, coloured, classed perspectives that have historically been discredited and relegated to a lesser status. Using the concept of “anonymous intimacy,” the following story fabulates an alternative mode of food and feminist relationality.

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I recently made “a handmade cheese,” in which I replicated the experiments of Christina Agapakis and made a cheese using milk that had been intentionally inoculated with the bacteria living on my hands. Rather than remain in the conceptual realm of how we relate to microbes, I made this cheese because its physical form raises questions about what goes into our notion of edibility, what constitutes contamination, and how we decide to eat other living beings. When I invited participants to a tasting, their reactions to the cheese varied from reserved fascination to polite rejection. To those moved by disgust, I conjured up centuries of traditional cheese making to normalize the hands-on nature of this experiment, claiming that it would fall in the same line of work as that of chefs or home cooks who also make handmade food, but are rarely met with misgivings. What’s really in that cheese? Milk. A natural coagulant called rennet. Bacterial cultures. Time. And me. There is a literal piece of me in this food and every other food I ever make. The food and I are already entangled, even when we are linguistically separate as subject and object. How can we describe this separatebut-not relationship? Once someone used the phrase “anonymous intimacy” to describe this collapsing of distance: “I don’t know you, but if I were to eat your food I would be incorporating a piece of you. And, parts of us would get to know each other.” This cheese, as well as any other ferment, enables an encounter for “parts of us” to “get to know each other” in ways that confound conventional epistemologies and how we conceptualize social relations. How can anonymous intimacy reconfigure what it means to eat, to be eaten, and to be intimately connected to microbial others?

Dominant ideologies frame the body as bound, impervious, and therefore pure; thus, the purity politics of man is made sacrosanct by the skin barriers that clearly demarcate the beginnings and ends of bodily experience. Selfhood ends where skin ends; otherness begins outside the boundary of the skin. Humanness, then, is what is within these clearly delineated boundaries. Here, anthropocentrism bleeds into androcentrism (male-centred thinking) and a gendered “impurity” is imposed upon leaky (female) bodies. Violating the boundaries of selfhood, the female body is devalued for its seepage (see also Shildrick 1997, 2001). The indeterminacy of internal/external boundaries is manifested in the work of artist-researcher Tarsh Bates (2015a) in an exploration of the medical condition candidiasis.9 In The Unsettling Eros of Contact Zones, Bates (2015b) examines the

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tensions between the gendered bodies, socially constructed disgust, and the yeast species Candida albicans. Bates presented bread that was partially leavened with C. albicans to visitors alongside bread that was leavened with regular baker’s yeast (S. cerevisiae) only to find that visitors were reluctant to eat both. Bates (2015a, 25) reports: “the disgust experienced when faced with Candida-leavened bread is tightly woven with ‘sexual’ disgust due to the metonymy of Candida and women’s genitals.” In a similar way, my “handmade cheese” complicated where, when, and how my (impure, leaky female) body ends and cheese begins. In making the cheese, I deliberately chose to use the bacteria from a “­public” area of my body—which were my hands—instead of more private ones to mess with our ideas about scales of intimacy. Feminist blogger @stavvers (2015), for example, made bread leavened with vaginal yeast, and food scientist Harold McGee (2014) wrote about leavening bread with flesh-eating bacteria. Considering the enchanting ritual of public ­handshakes, hands and their concomitant microbiota are a far cry from the privacy associated with vaginas and flesh wounds. Yet, the association of “public” with “hands” is quickly undone when the cheese invites participants to eat as an intimate form of embodiment. When asked to engage with that hand in culinary form, hands are no longer part of the public schema.10 Here, anonymous intimacy brings to the fore questions of p ­roximity: ­handshakes are permissible because they occur at a distance, yet ­embodiment crosses the barriers of selfhood and produces an uncanny result. That the ­handshake is an act from afar and cheese eating collapses that distance suggests that anonymous intimacy occupies multiple distances at once. Perhaps it is a form of perpetual openness, not necessarily beholden to binaries of close/distant or static/dynamic. How can we remain close to something, even embody it, and yet not feel the need to control or overcome it? How do we engage with differences so that “parts of us would get to know each other” in ethical and responsible ways?

CONCLUSION This chapter used fermentation as a model to pose questions about how we relate to microbes that we cannot see or understand. As a practice, fermentation reminds us that we are not in absolute control. As a theoretical tool, fermentation affirms our relationality across multiple scales of being. Humans are not exceptional; we are interdependent. We are not pure; we are messy and complex, and this “we” is neither unified (in terms of bodily composition) nor universal (in terms of social positioning). To perpetuate the myth of anthropocentrism

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reinforces the existing powers that privilege certain forms (of life, of knowledge, of cultural understanding) over others. An intersectional lens is crucial toward keeping analyses of power relations plural and ethical. Fermentation provides one way of practising and imagining how we (could) engage with others in the greater relationscape. It provides a way for calling into question our assumptions about power by thinking through difference differently: embodied knowledge challenges the privileging of the mind over body, self-reflexivity destabilizes an overinflated Self, and f­eminist fabulations offer ways of relating to others ethically. Engaging with ­fermentation is one way of grappling with a more complex and nuanced narrative between humans and microbes.

NOTES 1. See Susan Friedberg’s (2004, 43) explanation of canning’s history, botulism, and public perception about food safety standards. 2. See Sender et al. (2016) on the composition of microbial life in human bodies. See also Hutter et al. (2015) on revising the concept of human to “super-individual” to account for microbial complexity. 3. The rhetoric of encouraging certain species over others can be seen in both the material practices as well as the ingredients used: sourdough starters are aerated to ward off mould spores, the ginger in ginger beer gathers wild yeast, but fends off other fungi, and the salt in sauerkraut promotes bacterial growth instead of yeasts. In other words, the logic behind fermentation is such that conditions are deliberately made hostile for species other than the target microbes. 4. Agency also matters for attribution, expertise, and the (often gendered) expectation of who will bake the daily bread. The gendered/classed responsibility of baking bread plays out differently when baking out of obligation or out of choice. 5. The fat globules in dairy provide protection for these probiotic bacteria so that they can survive the harshly acidic conditions of the stomach and make it to the intestines (see Shori 2017). It is interesting to think that the relationship between probiotic bacteria and fat molecules guarantees species survival. 6. Prannie Rhatigan (personal communication 2018), an allopathic doctor with deep interest in the microbiome, describes probiotic bacteria as “tourists” inside the gut: they’re not here to stay and their permanent presence is never guaranteed. This is also the justification for consuming probiotic ferments on a regular basis, as if it were a micronutrient with a daily recommended intake.

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7. Humans are often depicted as being on top of a proverbial food chain, yet how quickly we fall to the bottom when we interact with other living beings (like sharks or E. coli O157:H7), the semiliving (like viruses or undercooked mussels), and the undead (like BPA plastics or radioactive isotopes). 8. While Brad’s performance of expert knowledge is problematic in its own right, that Yang (2018) created a countervideo also labels the raced and gendered voice as the guarantor of authenticity. 9. The common name for candidiasis is thrush, which occurs when an overpopulation of C. albicans leads to irritation in bodily orifices (e.g., mouth, vagina). While candidiasis can occur in all humans, the condition is highly feminized to the point where the term yeast infection has become synonymous with vaginal candidiasis. 10. See 1,000 Handshakes, a public performance/experiment in which Francois-Joseph Lapointe attempts to map out “the microbes between us” that mingle and interact during handshakes. His lab assistants swab his hands after every 50 handshakes for future analysis of how the microbial profiles on his hands change over the course of one evening.

READING QUESTIONS 1. Consult a fermentation recipe in verbal, written, or embodied forms. What are some

of the assumptions embedded in these recipes? Is one form of knowing privileged over another? What are some of the ambient factors that might affect the outcome?

2. Fermentation straddles the self/other binary, which organizes power as vertical, hierarchical relations. Why is this kind of superior thinking dangerous? How would an intersectional approach account for layers of difference?

3. Fabulations are one way of thinking and making differently. Identify a food-related problem in need of an updated narrative. As an imaginative exercise, design and con-

struct (or investigate) a hypothetical intervention that addresses the problem. A good starting point is to begin unravelling two threads at once: “Why is it that … ?” and

“What if … ?” Do not let current “realities” impede your fabulations. Part of the value in speculation is in naming and questioning such barriers.

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GLOSSARY These are definitions of terms that have been used throughout the book, which have been compiled by the editors and the contributors. They align with the Key Terms in each chapter. agrarianism: A philosophy that values rural society as superior to urban society, sees farming as a way of life that can shape the ideal social values, and elevates the individual farmer as citizen. alternative food movement: A consumer-based social movement centred around using food-purchasing decisions—for example, of local, organic, or ethically produced food—as a way of challenging the problems in the industrial food system. anthropocentrism: Human-centred thinking; the belief that humans are at the top or centre of existence; the perspective that only humans hold the moral standing in humanly existence. biryani: A meat and rice dish that is popular in northern India and Pakistan. call to care: A demand placed upon powerful figures to meaningfully acknowledge the complex social issues faced by those from whom they profit. collective memory: A memory shared by a group of people that is passed on to future generations. colonialism: The violent dispossession and economic exploitation of a land and its people by another nation. Colonization describes the dispossession and genocide of various Indigenous populations by European settlers around the globe, including in Canada, the United States, Australia, and other ­territories. Although the beginnings of colonialism in these regions stretch back hundreds of years, colonialism continues to impact Indigenous populations around the world through the long-lasting effects of the original ­violence and exploitation, as well as through the ongoing institutionalization of colonialist world views.

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critical weight science: A body of literature that calls into question the view that one’s weight is an indicator of one’s health, and that losing weight will enhance health for people of a higher weight. Unlike the fat studies literature, critical weight science is typically rooted in a positivist, quantitative paradigm. Desi: Slang for South Asian, often an insider reference to other Pakistani, ­Indian, or South Asian immigrants, especially in the diaspora. dieting: A food practice by which one restricts food intake to reduced amounts or special kinds of food in order to lose weight. discourse: In “West and the Rest: Discourse and Power,” Stuart Hall (1992, 291) describes discourse as “a group of statements which provide a language for talking about—a way of representing the knowledge about—a particular topic at a particular historical moment.” At the same time, it is important to stress that discourse does not solely encapsulate language, but it is a wider system of representation that makes the world intelligible to us. According to Michel Foucault, discourse does not simply describe things, concepts, and groups of people, but it constructs them in a certain way, normalizing certain representations as the way reality is. Finally, discourses not only produce meaning, but they also have outcomes that are material and tangible. Hence, discourses participate in producing reality and subjectivity. double bind: A term used in postcolonial studies and defined as the contradictory instructions imposed on us by our various socio-cultural affiliations. embodied knowledge: Information and know-how that is generated, sensed, learned, and stored in and through the body. Embodied knowledge ­acknowledges that the body (not necessarily the mind) can create/apprehend knowledge, while also acknowledging the variability and relative nature of such knowledge(s). fabulate/fabulations: To relate a fable or story in order to rethink, remake, or otherwise challenge what is considered “real” and imagine new models for being. fat bias: Oppression or marginalization that results from discriminatory judgments against an individual’s or group’s body weight or size. Discrimination,

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or bias, against fat people often stems from the wrongful association of fatness with other characteristics that depict fat people in a negative light and that are rooted in moral judgment, including laziness, gluttony, and stupidity. fat studies: An interdisciplinary area of research that, like food studies, has an underpinning activist movement that led to its formation. Fat studies scholars conduct research in several areas related to fat bias and oppression and fat identity and culture, and often include an intersectional perspective to understand how fat bias is gendered, racialized, sexualized, and classed. femininity: A gendered identity shaped by socio-cultural processes, not biology. Femininities are dynamic and multiple because they shift depending on historical, cultural, and contemporary contexts. fermentation: A process of transformation in both matter and meaning, with microbial life (including bacteria, moulds, and/or yeasts) changing the material and discursive properties of a food in its cultural context. For example, the transformation of grapes into wine is simultaneously a biochemical, ritualistic, and symbolic change, such that new meanings are given to the wine that were not associated with the original grape prior to fermentation. food regimes: A conceptual framework that provides a materialist analysis explaining the strategic role of agriculture in the construction and development of the world capitalist economy associated with particular configurations of geopolitical power and social arrangements. food security: As defined by the United Nations, food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life. food sovereignty: The right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and the right to define their own food and agriculture systems. food studies: An interdisciplinary area of research and practice that comprises academic study, advocacy, and activism in the areas of food, agriculture, sustainability, food security, policy, culture, art, social systems, and more.

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Although food studies is now represented among academic associations and undergraduate and graduate programs, its beginnings are also rooted in food advocacy and activism. foodwork: The physical, mental, and emotional labour associated with acquiring and preparing food and planning and coordinating meals. gender: Refers to feminine and masculine characteristics that produce gendered identities that are socially constructed based on the subjective sense of oneself as female, male, or intersex. Gender is expressed through representations of feminine and masculine characteristics and is fluid and dynamic. governmentality: Michel Foucault has described governmentality as a governance technique of biopolitics—or systems of governance that rely on ­individual self-discipline and self-surveillance of individuals, not repression or punishment from external forces, to control and regulate populations. ­Neoliberal governmentality thus produces citizens who act as entrepreneurs in pursuit of bodily health and well-being. halal: Food according to Islamic law that is considered permissible to eat; usually alcohol and pork are considered haram, which is not permissible. HBCU: Historically black colleges and universities that were established in the United States prior to 1964, and whose principle mission is to educate black Americans. hegemonic masculinity: According to a theory developed by R. W. Connell (2005) in “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept,” hegemonic masculinity is a culture’s normative and idealized form of masculinity. While hegemonic masculinity is not simply a list of traits, it is typically performed and represented in modern Western cultures as white, middle class, strong, assertive, competent, and competitive. Hierarchical and historically specific, hegemonic masculinity is also potentially flexible and can change over time through the struggle for hegemony. The theory also situates hegemonic masculinity within a system of three other patterns of masculinity—complicit, subordinated, and marginalized masculinities—which secures some men’s dominant position and the subordination of women, while also marginalizing men who are not white, middle class, or heterosexual. Even Connell

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concedes that hegemonic masculinity is “a contest concept,” but it remains an influential theory of masculinity. hegemony: A process or form of ideological, social, cultural, or economic predominance or ascendancy by a dominant group or regime that exerts undue influence within a society, and that is so ingrained or normalized that it goes unnoticed and is seemingly unchangeable. heteronormativity: The system that intends heterosexuality as the norm, and that regulates a combination of sexual and nonsexual aspects of social life. In “Decentering Heteronormativity: A Model for Family Studies,” Oswald et al. (2005, 144) define heteronormativity as “the implicit moral system or value framework that surrounds the practice of heterosexuality.” It is established by three binaries: the gender binary (real males and females versus gender deviants), the sexual binary (natural versus unnatural sexuality), and the family binary (genuine versus pseudo families) (144). All three of them are organized in polar and hierarchical opposition, implying that genuine families are based on heterosexual relationships and biological difference. identity: A term that describes how people understand and present themselves, and are categorized by others or state agencies as individuals and as members of collective groups. Usually identities are structured by social categories such as race, sexuality, nationality, gender, ethnicity, faith, and age, but identities can be more lifestyle based. Food is imagined to mark individual and group identities. Indigenous epistemologies: Ways of knowing that are based on Indigenous world views about the nature of life, predicated on the view that all living and nonliving beings, as well as the spiritual world, are interconnected. intensive mothering: According to the ideology of intensive mothering, mothers should be the main caregivers whose task is to protect and preserve children’s innocence, which takes time, energy, money, and expert advice and requires mothers to put children’s needs at the centre, above their own. intersectional feminism: A feminist approach that centres analysis on understanding how individuals and groups of people’s identities overlap through social structures (gender, race, class) both historically and contemporarily,

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which then shapes the way they move through the world and experience oppression, discrimination, and privilege. intersectionality: A term initially coined by scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991) in “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics and Violence Against Women of Colour.” As discussed in the introduction, intersectionality is taken up in multiple ways, including as theory, methodology, pedagogy, and activism. masculinity: A gender identity defined by the roles, behaviours, and meanings that society attributes to a “man.” Masculinity is a highly variable rather than ­universal construct. It also is not solely connected to biological ­maleness, so scholars often refer to and research these identities in the plural, as ­masculinities. See also hegemonic masculinity. multiculturalism: Can refer to a state’s policy in relation to racial, cultural, ethnic, and faith groups. Policymakers recognize the presence of these groups and their particular needs and disadvantages, and attempt to meet these needs with settlement programs, language education, and cultural services. Multiculturalism is also used to describe the actually existing diverse makeup of a country. multimodality: A theoretical and methodological approach that argues that representation and communication rely on a variety of modes from sound, image, colour, verbal text or layout that work in concert and independently to make meaning. In museums, for instance, light, layout, display design, pathways, videos, and verbal text are different modes used by curators to make meanings about exhibitions, objects, and history. multispecies ethnography: A methodology that uses the tools of traditional ethnography, as well as knowledge and tools from the natural sciences, to study human relationships with other living entities. multispecies pedagogies: Pedagogical approaches that explore the lives of nonhuman living beings, often with the goal of improving their quality of life or existence. neoliberalism: Neoliberalism is understood in terms of a cultural, political, and economic system that prioritizes the free market, free trade, privatization,

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deregulation, and competition. Neoliberalism conceives human well-being to be enhanced through the “liberation” of people’s entrepreneurial capabilities and their participation in the free market. In A Brief History of N ­ eoliberalism, David Harvey (2005) argues that neoliberalism has become so pervasive as to affect all facets of modern living, from economics to politics and institutions, and eventually in the way individuals make sense of the world and act accordingly. normalizing discourse: Normalizing discourse (sometimes referred to as normalization) refers to the myriad social processes in and through which dominant or powerful ideals come to be taken as universal and natural, rather than as historically contingent (the idea of heterosexuality as normal or natural is an example of normalizing discourse). See also discourse. nutritionism: Is both a paradigm and an ideology and refers to the effects of an overly reductive way of thinking about food as the sum of its nutrient value. For example, the ideology of nutritionism presumes that eating a 1,500-­calorie-a-day diet will equal weight loss without taking into consideration social, economic, or other contextual factors. Moreover, nutritionism has been taken up by private enterprise through “corporate nutritionism,” which directly impacts how individual foods are marketed by their nutrients as the way to know good, healthy food (e.g., orange juice fortified with calcium, or eggs fortified with omega 3). “obesity epidemic”: A term that was popularized through the mass media to ­describe the uptick in body weight observed at a population level over the last 30–40 years. This term has been contested by scholars writing from different epistemological positions, including those within critical weight science and others within fat studies, as inciting moral panic rather than simply describing the population level increase in average body weight. In fat studies literature, the term obesity epidemic is placed in quotes to denote that it is a politicized term that medicalizes the ­nonconforming, fat body. organic: Often understood as foods that are produced without the use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, or other artificial chemicals. However, the ­standards and practices required in the production of food that may be labelled organic are variable across varying definitions of the term. pedagogy: The art or science of teaching, as well as the theories of learning that guide teaching.

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performativity: Theories that consider how lived experiences and spatialities of bodies are produced and reproduced. posthumanism: Diverse theoretical and philosophical approaches that challenge the existence of a monolithic human identity or state. queer: May be used by individuals to describe their gender identity (i.e., gender queer) or sexual orientation, as well as an area of theory (queer theory). Queer theory is premised on the radical disruption and departure from dominant norms, specifically those that position aspects of the world (i.e., nature and culture) and individual identity (i.e., femininity and masculinity, or men and women) as binaristic (i.e., gender and sex binaries). race-conscious approach: Argues for the importance of reflecting on how race affects the object of interest. Specifically, a race-conscious approach in the study of vegan diets interrogates “how one’s racialised experience influences how and why one writes about, teaches and engages to vegan praxis,” according to Breeze Harper (2012, 156) in Sistah Vegan: Black Female Vegans Speak on Food, Identity and Health. This approach opposes “race-neutral” or “postracial” ideas that foster a colour-blind racism by not acknowledging how race conditions the subjective and collective experience, access, and adoption of vegan diets. relational food framework: A relational food ontology is a way of thinking about food with the aim to counter reductive (i.e., nutricentric) approaches to food by reintroducing and recentralizing food’s relational aspects (i.e., the labour relations through which food is grown and produced, environmental and ethical considerations of food items). relationality: A theoretical or philosophical approach challenging the notion that humans exist independent of other living entities; the idea that humans (and other beings) are constituted through relations with others. representational intersectionality: In “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics and Violence Against Women of Colour,” Crenshaw (1991) distinguishes representational intersectionality—with its focus on cultural constructions, stereotypes, and inequalities—from political and structural intersectionalities to stress how cultural representations reproduce systemic

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racism, oppression and inequality, and symbolic and material harm, such as in pop culture images of women of colour that draw on sexist and racist tropes. respectability: The demand for appropriate cultural performance to legitimize civic participation; often applied to black people in the United States, this demand can extend to other populations to authorize their continued disenfranchisement, to foreclose the possibility for solidarity among oppressed groups, or to silence their political resistance. self/other binary: A theoretical tool to better understand one’s identity and social status; by categorizing self (me/us) and not-self (you/them) as an oppositional binary, one is able to separate spheres of control and power. socio-ecological learning: An ongoing process of relational becoming whereby humans negotiate how to develop a more ethical sense of self through participation in mutable and scalar collectivities of living and nonliving entities, recognizing that power relationships and socio-political contexts shape subject positions within these collectivities. speciesism: Individual actions, cultural systems, or social structures that privilege one or more species over others. standpoint theory: Argues that an individual’s own perspectives are shaped by his or her social and political experiences. Standpoints are multifaceted so that the amalgamation of a person’s many experienced dimensions form a point of view through which that individual sees and understands the world. struggle plate: An ugly plate of unappealing food made from poor ingredients, often posted to internet forums so that the cook can be the target of humour. subjectivity: The process through which cultural discourses produce the subject, rather than the subject existing, apart from characteristics of identity such as gender, race, and sexuality. sustainable agriculture: The production of food to meet a society’s needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs. It  often incorporates social, cultural, environmental, and economic justice into its practices.

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transnational feminism: A postcolonial feminist theory and activism focused on neoliberal, patriarchal, racial, colonial, and imperial systems of power that produce unequal social and material conditions for women in the global South and women of colour. veganism: The practice or philosophy of not eating or using animal products. For example, vegans would not consume dairy, red meat, chicken, seafood/ fish, or any of the by-products of these foods, nor would they wear or use animal leather, hides, or fur. Victorian: The Victorian age owes its name to Queen Victoria, who reigned over the United Kingdom between 1837 and 1901. During this era, the United Kingdom witnessed important changes, such as the Industrial Revolution, and the progressive transformation of British society. The reorganization of the working and domestic spheres occurred simultaneously with the entrenchment of gender roles and a more rigid division of private and public spheres. will to health: The concept of “the will to health” is a creative elaboration of one of Michel Foucault’s book titles, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I: The Will to Knowledge. As such, it is strongly related to Foucault’s work, in particular his work on neoliberal governmentality. Thus, the will to health is understood as one of the effects of neoliberalism and its processes of individualization. One’s health, among other things, becomes individualized, whereby the responsibility for the individual’s well-being shifts from the state and its institutions (such as national public health care) to the individual. People are thus made fully accountable and responsible for their own bodies and the choices they make in relation to their health. Ultimately, good health becomes a moral imperative in neoliberal governmentality in a way that stigmatizes those who do not or cannot abide by it. zabiha: Meat that has been blessed and slaughtered according to Islamic law (Shariah).

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CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES Susan Belyea holds a PhD from the School of Kinesiology and Health Studies at Queen’s University. Her research focuses on social and political responses to food insecurity in Canada and Latin America and the Caribbean. She is the director of the Ban Righ Centre at Queen’s University and also teaches and lectures on global food security and the environment. She is active in community advocacy around poverty and food insecurity. Sarah Bowen is associate professor of sociology at North Carolina State University. Her work focuses on food systems, local and global institutions, and inequality. In addition to Pressure Cooker: Why Home Cooking Won’t Solve Our Problems, and What We Can Do About It, she is the author of Divided Spirits: ­Tequila, Mezcal, and the Politics of Production. Jennifer Brady, RD, PhD, is a dietitian and assistant professor in the ­Department of Applied Human Nutrition at Mount Saint Vincent University. Broadly, her work focuses on critical feminist perspectives of food, nutrition, eating, health, and expertise. A particular focus of her current research explores the role of ­dietitians in social justice through socially just practice and advocacy. Emily Contois is an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Tulsa. She received her PhD in American studies from Brown University and holds three master’s degrees: an MA in American studies from Brown University, an MLA in gastronomy from Boston University, and an MPH focused on public health nutrition from University of California–Berkeley. Her research explores the connections between food, the body, health, and identities in the everyday ­American experience and popular culture and has been published in Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies, CuiZine: The Journal of Canadian Food Cultures, Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society, Journal of Historical Research in Marketing, and Yearbook of Women’s History, among others. She blogs at emilycontois.com and can be found on social media at @emilycontois. Sinikka Elliott is assistant professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia. Her research examines family dynamics, intersecting inequalities,

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280  Contributor Biographies

and social policy. She is the author of Not My Kid: What Parents Believe about the Sex Lives of Their Teenagers and, with Sarah Bowen and Joslyn Brenton, Pressure Cooker: Why Home Cooking Won’t Solve Our Problems, and What We Can Do About It. Ella Fegitz is an associate lecturer at the College of Communication, University of the Arts London, London, UK, and at Oxford Brookes University, ­Oxford, UK. Her research interests are on postfeminist subjectivity and sexuality, neoliberal governmentality, media, and culture. She has published together with Daniela Pirani an article on popular culture and veganism called “The Sexual Politics of Veggies: Beyoncé’s ‘commodity veg*ims’” in Feminist Media Studies. Jacqui Gingras, PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of ­Sociology at Ryerson University. Her research and teaching involve theoretical and experiential explorations of health epistemology, health activism, and social movements. She has published in the Fat Studies Journal, Journal of Sociology, and Critical Public Health. She is the founding editor of the Journal of Critical Dietetics, an open-access, peer-reviewed journal at criticaldietetics.ryerson.ca. Emily Gray, originally from Walsall, UK, is a senior lecturer in education studies at RMIT’s School of Education. Her interests within both research and teaching are interdisciplinary and include sociology, cultural studies, and education. Her key research interests lie with questions related to gender, social justice, student and teacher identity work within educational policy and practice, and with wider social justice issues within educational discourse and practice. She is also concerned with popular culture, public pedagogies, and audience studies, particularly with online “fandom” and with media and popular culture as pedagogical tools. Emily is cofounder, with Mindy Blaise and Linda Knight, of Feminist Educators Against Sexism #FEAS, an international feminist collective committed to developing arts-based interventions into sexism in the academy. Maya Hey is a Vanier scholar and doctoral candidate in communication studies at Concordia University, where she studies how fermentation and critical theory can change the way we think about our relationship to (microbial) foods. Her research interests include food and/as media, queering science, questions of consumption, theories of embodiment, discourses of contamination, materiality, and collective ethics—especially through the lens of fermentation. With over 10 years of experience facilitating discussions around contemporary food issues,

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Contributor Biographies  281

she has developed an array of collaborative projects with academic and lay audiences. More information can be found on her website at www.heymayahey.com. Alice Julier is the director and associate professor of food studies at ­Chatham University. She is also the director of CRAFT, the Center for Regional ­Agriculture, Food, and Transformation. Alice is a sociologist who has been teaching and writing about inequality, food, and everyday life for two decades. Her works include: Mapping Men onto the Menu, Family and Domesticity, Julia at Smith, The Political Economy of Obesity: The Fat Pay All, and Hiding Race and Class in the Discourse of Commercial Food. Her book, Eating Together: Food, Friendship, and Inequality, was published by the University of Illinois Press in 2013. She is the coeditor of Food and Culture: A Reader (fourth edition). Deana Leahy is a senior lecturer in health education in the Faculty of Education at Monash University. Her research interests are framed by a concern about the political and moral work that is “done” when we attempt to address food in various pedagogical settings. Her research is interdisciplinary, drawing from a range of social and cultural theories. Deana is the lead author of the book School Health in Changing Times and is on the editorial board of the Health Education Journal. Deana grew up in Mooroopna, Victoria, surrounded by orchards and alongside the now defunct Ardmona Fruit Cannery. ­ arymount Katie LeBesco, PhD, is senior associate dean for academic affairs at M Manhattan College in New York City. She is author of Revolting Bodies: The Struggle to Redefine Fat Identity, coauthor of Culinary Capital, and coeditor of The Bloomsbury Handbook of Food and Popular Culture, Bodies Out of Bounds: F ­ atness and Transgression, Edible Ideologies: Representing Food and Meaning, The Drag King Anthology, and several journal special issues. Her work concerns food and popular culture, fat activism, disability and representation, working-class identity, and queer politics. Teresa Lloro-Bidart is an assistant professor in the Liberal Studies Department at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Her research is focused on the intersections of critical animal studies, critical food studies, and environmental education. In all of her projects, she uses a variety of qualitative research methods to understand how educational spaces and processes are inherently political and produce human-animal and human-nature relations within these political frameworks. In addition to publishing numerous journal articles and book chapters, she

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has two forthcoming books, Animals in Environmental Education: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Curriculum and Pedagogy (coedited with Valerie Banschbach) and Animal Edutainment in a Neoliberal Era, which examines the politics of teaching and learning in aquariums and zoos. She recently received the Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences inaugural Early Career Award. Blake Martin is a doctoral candidate in sociology at North Carolina State University. Her research focuses on the experiences of body image and weight stigma among preadolescent children of diverse socio-economic backgrounds. Lauren McGuire-Wood holds an MA in English language and literatures from the University of British Columbia. Aside from food and feminism, her research interests include contemporary Canadian literatures, diasporic and transpacific literature, natural disaster narratives, and ecocriticism. For her master’s thesis, Lauren examined Canadian literary and film representations of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan. She lives in Vancouver with her partner and her cat and is most often found reading a book on the beach, tending to her veggie garden, or cycling around the city. Mari Kate Mycek is a doctoral candidate in sociology at North Carolina State University. Her research focuses on the intersections of food, inequality, and community development. Alissa Overend is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at MacEwan University, where she teaches and researches in the areas of health, food, and social equity. Alissa’s work has appeared in Food, Culture, and Society, Social Theory and Health, Women’s Health and Urban Life, and Nursing Inquiry. Alissa is currently working on a book on the history and politics of dietary advice in Canada, tentatively titled Food Facts in a Post-truth Culture (forthcoming). Barbara Parker is assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at ­Lakehead University. Her research interests focus broadly on gender, health, critical ­nutrition studies, and food security. In her research and teaching, she engages with intersectionality as theory, methodology, and pedagogy. She is ­currently conducting research that examines postsecondary international and Indigenous student experiences of food insecurity. She has published in the ­Canadian Food Studies Journal, the Journal of Hunger and Environmental ­Nutrition, and the ­International Journal of Indigenous Health.

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Delores Phillips is an associate professor in the Department of English at Old Dominion University, where she teaches and conducts research in ­postcolonial theory and literature. Her work explores consumption and waste in ­a nglophone literature. Daniela Pirani is a PhD candidate in the Management Department at Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, UK, working on gender representations in food advertising. Her interests lie at the intersection of gender performativity, food practices, and consumer culture. She has published together with Ella Fegitz an article on popular culture and veganism called “The Sexual Poli­ tics of Veggies: Beyoncé’s ‘commodity veg*ims’” in Feminist Media Studies. Elaine Power is an associate professor in the School of Kinesiology & Health Studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. She uses social theory and qualitative research methods to understand why we eat what we do, particularly in the context of poverty. She is coauthor of Acquired Tastes: Why Families Eat the Way They Do, published by UBC Press, and with coeditor, Jessica Polzer, Neoliberal Governance and Health: Duties, Risks and Vulnerabilities, published by McGill-Queen’s University Press. Sian Supski is a research fellow in sociology at Monash University. Sian has written two books, A Proper Foundation: A History of the Lotteries Commission of Western Australia, and It Was Another Skin: The Kitchen in 1950s Western Australia. She has also written a number of articles and chapters on kitchens in 1950s Australia and Australian cookbooks and food writing in Australia. Her work is available in Gender, Place and Culture, Cultural Studies Review, Critical Public Health, Thesis Eleven, and Journal of Australian Studies, as well as in edited volumes. She is a commissioning editor of the journal Thesis Eleven: Critical Theory and Historical Sociology. Sian was a visiting scholar at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, Stellenbosch, South Africa, in 2015. She grew up in Perth, Western Australia. Elaine Swan is a senior lecturer at the Future of Work Hub, University of ­Sussex. Her research covers three core areas: critical race and feminist studies of food, critical diversity studies, and studies of therapeutic cultures in the workplace. Working with feminist and critical race theories underpins all her work. She has written three books, 15 chapters, and 20 papers on these topics. Her research on food includes ethnographic studies of food social enterprises

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that broker intercultural connection, which is the topic of her fourth book. She publishes in a range of journals, especially Gender, Work and Organisation. Farha Ternikar, PhD, is an associate professor of sociology and women’s studies at Le Moyne College. She teaches food and culture, gender and society, and race, class, and gender. She has authored several articles on ethnicity and immigrant identity in the Journal of Ethnic Studies, International Journal of Contemporary Sociology, and Sociology Compass. Her research was included in the 2012–13 exhibit Lunch Hour NY: The New York Public Library. She also has published “Ethnicity, Ethnic Identity, and Food” in the Encyclopedia of Food and Agricultural Ethics; “Little India” in Savoring Gotham: A Food Lover’s Companion to New York, and Brunch: A History. Her current manuscript focuses on food, consumption, and Muslim South Asian American immigrants. Adele Wessell is associate professor of history at Southern Cross University. Her research is concentrated in colonial food history, culinary literature, and alternative food systems. She is a member of the Landed Histories C ­ ollective, ­working with food producers and as a consumer advocate for the Lismore ­Produce ­Market. Adele is coeditor with Mike Evans for Locale: Pacific Journal of Regional Food Studies and tries, as much as possible, to publish in open-access journals such as M/C Journal of Media and Culture.

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INDEX Page numbers in italics refer to glossary definitions. Aboriginal sovereignty, 230, 244 Adams, Carol, 84, 93

Adonis Complex, 129

cosmo-multicultural eating, 243

Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams, x, 4, 8, 37, 61, 105, 173, 178, 226, 227, 228

agrarianism, 34, 269

critical discourse analysis. See discourse analysis

Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, 15

critical weight science, 106–112, 270

agriculture. See sustainable agriculture Allen, Patricia, 3

alternative food movement, 269. See also food movement

anthropocentrism, 251, 263, 269

critical race theory, x, 24, 227, 228 cultural capital, 24, 153, 157, 243 De Camargo Heck, Marina, 152 Dean, Megan, 85, 95

ARFID (avoidant/restrictive food intake

Desi, 146, 149, 270. See also chapter 7

Avakian, Arlene, 20

dietary restrictions, 146, 148, 152–153, 155

­d isorder), 86

Beoku-Betts, Josephine, 151

DeVault, Marjorie, 2, 151, 185

dieting, 124, 270. See also chapter 6

masculine and feminine forms of, 7

“big nutrition,” 115, 116

discourse analysis, 126, 270

“biochemistry of discrimination,” 108–109

domesticity, 8, 61, 64–65, 166

Bilge, Sirma, 49, 229, 233 bio-power, 69

Birdie (Lindberg). See chapter 10 biryani, 269

Bittman, Mark, 19, 24

disgust, 65, 166, 190, 262, 263 Domhoff, G. William, 24 Dt’an, 207, 214 Eid, 151–152

Black Lives Matter, 14, 170

embodied knowledge, 25, 62, 71, 81, 112, 206,

Brooks, Gwendolyn, ix

ethical consumption, 46, 72, 84, 95, 155, 185

call to care, 175, 179, 269

fabulation, 9, 253, 261, 270

Charleyboy, Minnie, 213, 214

fat bias, 104, 107, 270. See also chapter 5

Bordo, Susan, 59, 85, 126, 128, 136

Carbado, Devon, x, 178, 179 Child, Julia, 174

Cho, Sumi, 173, 178, 228

collective memory, 8, 206, 208, 209, 211–212, 218, 269. See also chapter 10

Collins, Patricia Hill, 37, 49, 61, 148, 189 colonialism, 148, 149, 206–212, 217–218, 228–229, 269. See also chapter 10

Combahee River Collective, 36–37, 61 community garden. See chapter 2

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257–258, 270

fasting, 59, 65, 151, 219–220

fat studies, 105, 271. See also chapter 5

femininity, 59–60, 63–64, 93, 95, 125–127, 133, 135, 243, 271

Asian, 94

Black, 58, 68, 165, 174 Victorian, 72

white middle-class, 59, 61, 65, 67, 243

feminization, 93–95

fermentation, 271. See also chapter 12

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286  Index

food

colonialism, 148

framework, relational, 188–190, 252, 276 movement, 25, 50n9. See also chapters 5, 9 nationhood and, 207, 211–215 parochialism, 148 porn, 167

regimes, 19, 271

security, 68, 72, 250, 271

food studies, 14, 15, 17, 25–27, 43, 84, 271

feminist, 1–3, 10, 27, 43, 84, 116–117 pedagogy, 16, 21–25, 33–34 as weapon, 215

See also chapter 5

foodscape, 80, 126, 133

foodwork, 2, 3, 151–152, 157, 185, 187, 199, 244, 272

Foucault, Michel, 60, 69–70, 127, 137. See also bio-power; governmentality

Friedmann, Harriet, 19, 259

Frugal Gourmet, The, 215–216, 218–219 Galloway, Tracey, 209

governmentality, 60, 69–71, 272 Grey, Sam, 210–211, 208, 216 Gussow, Joan Dye, 18, 19

Guthman, Julie, 19–20, 112–113

iftar, 152

Indigenous

epistemologies, 273. See also chapter 10

food systems, 208–209, 229, 244. See also Aboriginal sovereignty

resistance, 208

women, 105, 228–229

intensive mothering, 155, 199, 273

intersectional methodology, 36, 231–233, 245

intersectionality, 4–5, 6, 15, 23–24, 36–37, 39, 61–62, 148–149, 178–179, 231, 273–274 feminism, 273

representational, 8, 276. See also chapter 11 Julier, Alice, 105 Ko, Aph, 59, 60, 68 Ko, Syl, 59, 60, 68 lang, k. d., 86

Lappe, Frances Moore, 19 LeBesco, Kathleen, 115

Lindberg, Tracey. See chapter 10 masculinity, 63–64, 127, 128, 133, 174, 241, 243, 274

hegemonic, 272

See also chapters 3, 4, 6

Haber, Barbara, 20

McCall, Leslie, 173, 178, 228

Harper, Breeze, 45, 59, 60, 62, 69, 72, 85

Me Too. See #MeToo movement

halal, 87, 146–147, 153–161, 272 Harris, Jessica, 18

Harvey, David, 60

HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and Universities), 18, 272

healthism, 92–93, 111, 116

Heldke, Lisa, 88–90, 91, 95, 148, 160

McLeod, Neal, 208, 210, 212

Mehnert, David, 60, 69, 83–84, 90 Mosby, Ian, 209

multiculturalism, 152, 274. See also chapter 11 multispecies ethnography, 39, 274 muscle dysmorphia, 129

heteronormativity, 63, 84, 87, 94, 226,

Nash, Jennifer, x, 253

hooks, bell, 61, 63, 260

National Women’s Studies Association

252, 273

hunger, 82, 105, 214, 217, 219–220. See also Dt’an

hunting, 187, 189, 196, 198–199, 208

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National Black Food and Justice Alliance, 24–25 ­conference, 21

neoliberalism, 60, 69–71, 88, 114, 124, 274 Nestle, Marion, 17–18, 19, 104

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Index  287

Newman, Omarosa Manigault, 176–177, 180n5

socio-ecological learning, 34, 38–43, 45, 277.

nutritionism, 88, 97n7, 275

soy, 83, 89, 90–93, 94–95, 250

obesity. See chapter 5

standpoint theory, 36, 277

normalizing discourse, 275

“obesity epidemic,” 104–105, 110–117, 275 “obesity paradox,” 108

obesogenic environments, 112

organic, 146, 154–157, 159, 275. See also chapter 7

orientalism, 94

orthorexia nervosa, 129

See also chapter 2

speciesism, 37, 277

Stewart, Martha, 66, 174, 177

struggle plate, 277. See also chapter 8

Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), 188

sustainable agriculture, 19, 23, 277

Sutton, David E., 209, 210, 215, 219, 220 Swan, Elaine, 231, 232

Parry, Jovian, 87

Van Esterik, Penny, 2, 63

pedagogy. See food studies pedagogy

veganism, 278

Patel, Raj, 208, 210–211, 216

performativity, 34, 36–38, 47–48, 59, 276 Pollan, Michael, 19, 24, 27, 104 posthumanism, 39, 47–48, 276 Potts, Annie, 87

Puar, Jasbir, 227–228 queer, 276. See also chapter 4 queer theory, 81, 96

reflexivity, 15–16, 70, 81–83, 233, 238, 255, 261 religion, 189, 241. See also chapter 7 respectability, 165, 173–177

van Leeuwen, Theo, 232

and race, 45, 58–73, 193 See also chapters 3, 4

Victoria (Australia), 230–231, 234 Victorian era, 59, 174, 278 legacy of, 63–69

vlog, 171. See also chapter 3 Vowel, Chelsea, 208

“war on obesity.” See “obesity epidemic” Warkentin, Traci, 96

weight science, 107, 108, 125 critical, 106–112, 270

Roth, Benita, 26, 28

Weight Watchers. See chapter 6

Sachs, Carolyn, 3

WIC (SNAP for Women, Infants, and Chil-

Sarat, Austin, 211, 212

Scrinis, Gyorgy, 88, 97n7

self/other binary, 259–261, 277

settler colonialism. See colonialism

whiteness, 61–62, 67, 228 dren), 188

will to health, 60, 69–71, 278

Williams-Forson, Psyche A., 3, 8, 18, 58, 175, 179, 226

settler identity, 208

Wright, Laura, 80, 82, 90, 95

Shiva, Vandana, 116

zabiha, 277. See also halal

Shapiro, Kenneth, 90 Shotwell, Alexis, 89, 95

Sistah Vegan (Harper), 3, 62, 85

social determinants of health, 104, 107, 111

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Zafar, Rafia, 19

#MeToo movement, 14, 15

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spine 17mm

—DR. JENNIFER L. JOHNSON, THORNELOE UNIVERSITY AT LAURENTIAN

“One of the major contributions of Feminist Food Studies is that it explores intersectionality through refined angles at both the theoretical and the empirical levels. In a clear and accessible manner, every chapter of the book experiments with moving intersectionality to ‘unexplored places.’ The result is a fascinating and enriching journey into feminist scholarship and its multiple connections with food.”

Parker, Brady, Power, and Belyea

“Feminist Food Studies assembles new scholarship on food and feminism. The collection takes up an intersectional lens that is well-defined in the introductory chapters for new readers. The authors pay homage to the anti-colonial and social justice roots of feminist food studies as a field, a commitment that is enacted and built upon in every chapter. Established scholars and new readers alike will find ideas to forage for that nourish a critical feminist consciousness about food studies.”

—DR. CARLA GUERRÓN MONTERO, UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE

BARBARA PARKER is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Lakehead University. She teaches

in the areas of food, gender, and health; the sociology of nutrition; social justice; and qualitative research methods. JENNIFER BRADY is Assistant Professor of Applied Human Nutrition at Mount Saint Vincent University. She teaches courses on critical perspectives of food; health and nutrition; health inequity and community nutrition; and food, health, and social policy. ELAINE POWER is Associate Professor in the School of Kinesiology and Health Studies at Queen’s University, where she teaches on topics such as food systems; critical weight studies; and qualitative research methods. SUSAN BELYEA is the director of a women’s centre at Queen’s University and teaches courses on social and political responses to food insecurity and agriculture and the environment.

CS FeministFoodStudies FullCover-F.indd 1

FEMINIST FOOD STUDIES

Feminist Food Studies untangles the complex social relations and structures that manifest in everyday food practices for women and girls—from production and distribution to consumption and beyond. Engaging with intersectionality, feminist scholars use food as a lens to articulate social injustices that permeate and are perpetuated by historical, cultural, economic, environmental, and political contexts surrounding food and food systems as well as imagine a more socially just world. Topics include vegan vlogs, the “obesity epidemic,” beliefs about “masculine” and “feminine” forms of dieting, the struggle plate, engagement with the alternative food movement, the disruption of collective memory when food is withheld or denied, and fermentation as a challenge to anthropocentrism. This edited collection not only expands feminist foods studies as an important field of study in its own right but also calls on scholars to explore how oppression and privilege impact their research and scholarship. Engaging and highly readable, Feminist Food Studies will appeal to students in food studies, nutrition, gender and women’s studies, sociology, and anthropology.

FEMINIST FOOD STUDIES INTERSECTIONAL PERSPECTIVES EDITED BY

Barbara Parker Jennifer Brady Elaine Power Susan Belyea

2019-08-12 6:00 PM