Food, Feminisms, Rhetorics (Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms) by Melissa A. Goldthwaite

Food, Feminisms, Rhetorics (Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms) Reviews

• 
  Carolyn Kost

  It's difficult to resist an anthology of feminist essays about food writing, especially one with essays like "Writing Recipes, Telling Histories" and "Understanding the Significance of 'Kitchen Thrift' in Prescriptive Texts about Food." The reader should expect many of the essayists to be academics steeped in Critical Gender Theory (CGT), overly proud of taking the quotidian production and consumption of food as a subject of inflated and overwrought analysis. I kept wanting to ask, "Yes, but so what?" Maybe I've outgrown this unproductive production, but it was generally fun to read.
  
  In the first part, "Purposeful Cooking," we read delightful quotes from the illustrious American food writer MFK Fisher (1908-1992): "Our three basic needs for food and security and love are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot strictly think of one without the others." When we read that recipes are in fact "a highly complex form, one containing discrete parts and serving multiple functions with in a wide range of rhetorical context: ordinary and exceptional, popular and erudite, private and public, practical and literary" (32), what does that contribute? It's a titillating thought-toy for a few seconds...and then? Is that sufficient? This is the problem with so much academic production. It doesn't lead to new understanding or illuminate any aspect of the human experience.
  
  While Goldthwaite tells us that definitions of what it means to be feminist change over time (7), these essays don't explicitly seek to trace them in any way. Abby Dubisar's essay on activists' cookbooks made an attempt, but the logic is flawed. She criticizes cookbook writers in the "new domesticity" movement, who prioritize their rejection of "mass produced consumer capitalism" and embrace of "home and hearth" over their social and peace activism. Moreover, "The key assumption that women should perform cookery duties thus never gets fully questioned" (72). I emphasize that the texts she is using to make her point are cookbooks. A cookbook author's proper focus at the time of writing the cookbook is the production of food, otherwise she or he would be writing something else, a manifesto (or a cookbook of incendiary devices).
  
  The presentist presumption of contemporary superiority to women of the past is troubling. For example, Jennifer Cognard-Black tells us that by reading her grandmother's recipe cards and "analyzing" them, she becomes a "more complex woman reader and writer" able to "honor...critique...change" the world the recipes memorialize (42). Time and again, we see in feminist writing the insertion of patriarchal hierarchies, here the assertion that a woman engaged in academia occupies a higher rung than a woman engaged in creating a home. That must not be a feminist assertion; there are no strata. The obviousness is tiresome: "I argue that all recipe titles and attributions potentially convey a food's ethnicity, class origin, historical period, authorship, and connection to a specific discourse community" (36). Argue? Who would dispute this obvious fact?
  
  The kitchen thrift essay was particularly interesting. "Thrift has much in common with other practices and 'moral goods' such as self-restraint, conservation, and stewardship and 'notions of justice, charity, and the public good.' Understood historically, thrift is a mindful and deliberate approach to daily living that considers the welfare of self and others" (51). To the frugal, it is advisable that "convenience [be] a secondary object (53). We really would do well to recall that.
  
  Kristen Winet's piece on the "shameful act" of culinary tourism was troubling for any number of reasons. She positively lambasts travelers, stating they "veil their colonizing attitudes in curiosity" and quotes bell hooks, who regarded the culinary tourism as "'consumer cannibalism,' a kind of 'Other-eating' that thrives on foreignness and a lack of critical engagement with the people involved in food production and dissemination and can lead to the constant production of cultural difference as a consumable commodity" (103). Yikes. That is absurdly harsh, but it gets worse: "colonialism is pervasive, resilient, and malleable--it leaks into well-intentioned exchanges, inhabits our travels, and benefits the privileged in ways that the privileged are not often even aware of. ...I worry that by not examining new ways of seeing the relationship of Western travelers to their Other-eating, we run the risk of perpetuating a hopelessly superficial non-reflective, inadvertently ignorant perspective....travelers can learn to refuse the us/them framework and upset the packaged idea that the world's foods are there for them to consume as they desire" (112). And if that traveler is male, being served by a female, she has particular vitriol reserved just for him.
  
  It is absolutely true that the typical traveler goes to a restaurant or the market and engages in a transaction, not a relationship, and I have often felt that global travel for short periods with students is akin to touring a human zoo for its lack of genuine and equal human exchange, but to abstain from travel, and this means domestically not merely abroad, unless one can engage authentically is to impoverish our lives significantly.
  
  Winet is the quintessential CGT author. Statements like, "He is in many ways enacting the persona of what communication scholar Jean Deruz likens to a kind of culinary plunderer, someone who is 'greedy to devour the commodified products of other people's home-building practices' by placing himself as the Anglo subject 'reembodying himself in a new location'" (109). Egads, Kristen needs to spend more time outside of the academy.
  
  In contrast, Lynn Bloom draws on feminist culinary autobiographies, like Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, to affirm, "Food is the medium of community and generosity... Planning 'beautiful meals and investing one's heart and time in their preparation is the opposite of self indulgence.' 'Kitchen-based family gatherings are process-oriented, cooperative and in the best of worlds, nourishing and soulful,' in part because 'a lot of talk happens first, news exchanged, secrets revealed across generations, paths cleared with a touch of the arm" (97). Again, nothing new, buy lyrically expressed.
  
  And we return to CGT with Abby Wilkerson's essay on the family farm and farmers' markets made some jaw-dropping statements. Her assertion of the off-putting "'heterosexual coupling" visible at the majority of stands" is laughable when most lesbians and probably gay men would point to the downtown farmer’s market as a meeting place. This irritation with "symbolically 'framing heterosexuality as normal'...linking the wholesomeness of sustainable food to the perceived wholesomeness of the hegemonic family form" is an "appeal to pathos." "At best, it fails to challenge heteronormative patriarchal patterns and, at worst, romanticizes them" (125). This sort of absurd statement is typical of CGT. Heterosexuality is normal. Normal means standard or typical. By any metric, heterosexuality is normal; homosexuals are about 3% of the population. Abby commits another affront to the English language with this sentence: "This is not the sense of reproductive futurity as a channel for the transmission for wealth that is integral to heteronormative temporality" (129).
  
  I found the two chapters centered on books I haven't read to be unreadable.
  
  Sylvia Pamboukian's essay focuses on girls in literature who "poison" others. She wants us to see Mary The Secret Garden, Jo in Little Women, Anne of Green Gables, and Hermione in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets as threats to "hegemonic femininity," that is, selflessness and caregiving. She writes that "girl poisoners display traits not usually associated with good-girl heroines: independence, resilience, and naiveté, and readers warm to them expressly because of these qualities" (158), which is utter nonsense, since those are all classic characteristics of the heroine or shero.
  
  The depiction of alcohol consumption by women on television, according to Tammie Kennedy, serves to "normalize drinking wine as a way for women to navigate the tensions of their personal and professional choices, and this message is reinforced as it circulates throughout various spaces--social media, television/film, gender-based social activities [i.e. book clubs], and domestic drinking practices" (182). The viewer is meant to laugh at the sitcom family ribbing the women's over-consumption of alcohol or be concerned in the dramatic portrayal of the borderline addiction of the high powered professional. Kennedy writes that "wine drinking is equated with success...[and] functions as reward and respite from the emotional complexities for performing women's many roles" (173), helps "to navigate the freedoms and pressures gained from feminist and women's movements, as well as to manage her emotions and modulate her identity within these changing roles" (173). Temperance has historically been a women's issue. Men were the financial providers for the family but drank away their earnings, leaving the family impoverished. Alcohol also fueled their physical violence against their families. "In 2012, Gallup pollsters reported that nearly 66% of all American women drank [alcohol] regularly...purchase nearly two-thirds of the 856 million gallons sold and drink more than 70% of what they buy....women are more likely to drink wine to relax at home after work than men" (172). As Tammie quotes Barbara Ehrenreich, "Going toe to toe with men is a feminist act; going drink for drink with them isn't" (173). This is a deeply concerning trend.
  
  In view of the recent removal of the images of Uncle Ben, Aunt Jemima, and the Native American, the portrayal of Mexican women, Consuelo Carr Salas's essay, "The Commodification of Mexican Women on Mexican Food Packaging" is particularly timely. Salas wants us to see the "imagined nostalgia" that "creates identities for products": "Why do some companies choose to sell their product using a stereotypical image? What is the purpose of the image? Who is the audience of this image? What is communicated by these images?....Each image becomes one more stereotypical portrayal and continuously adds to the collective idea of who Mexicans are" (190). "We as visual rhetoricians, need to examine food packaging in order to recognized how attempts to appeal to the authenticity of a food product can create an essentialized stereotype of certain groups and cultures. Pausing when we encounter food products in the aisles of the grocery store and allowing ourselves to question audience and purpose in conjunction with an analysis of appeals of authenticity will allow for deeper understanding of what these images attempt to do--and allow consumers to question whether they are buying just a product or also stereotypical images of others" (197). I remain unconvinced that consumers are so engaged by the images on the labels of Mexican foods. If I want authentic tortillas, I drive to the tortillería and buy them hot off the grill.
  
  Alexis Baker seeks to understand why the art of Holocaust survivors didn't depict themselves with shaved heads and emaciated bodies and concludes "The soul not the body is the foundation of identity" (202); "the strong sense of self remains intact, regardless of physical conditions of starvation" (210).
  
  Perhaps one of the most troubling entries in the anthology is Morgan Gresham's piece on pro-anorexia websites. She pays particular attention to the House of Thin, created by Mandi Faux, a "transsexual escort model entertainer..." There is not a single mention in Gresham's article that transgenderism and anorexia are both body dysmorphic disorders, comorbid with a host of other mental health issues like depression and OCD. Further, this third wave feminist insists on referring to Gresham as she, which I as a second wave feminist find appalling. Pronouns matter and we must refuse to open the gates to males who desire to colonize our spaces, bodies, and experience. Sex cannot be changed; sex determining chromosomes are in every cell of the body; and the female body cannot be put on like a coat. Beyond that, these websites underscore the current perilous trend among those with disorders like OCD and trichotillomania to embrace them as part of who they are, rather than overcome them. Anorexics are encouraged to make "daily choices about identification." At least this site reinterprets pro ana mia [bulimia] to mean that it encourages "personal development towards a better future" (219), whatever that might mean.
  
  The article on the book Skinny Bitch draws attention to the authors' abusive language, profanity and name-calling, the indictment of "the readers' grotesque identity, intolerable and disgusting in the eyes of the authors" as the readers gain "thinness...self-control and...refined tastes" (236). Rebecca Ingalls compares their techniques with the Bakhtinian grotesque realism that encompasses "excessive corporeality...both decay and rebirth, both shame and merriment, both filth and purity" (223). "The very use of the term 'bitch' in the title of the text could be read as an example of Foucault's 'reverse discourse,' in which a marginalized population...' speak[s] in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or naturality be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary" (229). I'm not buying it.
  
  Any viewer of the BBC2 cooking show Two Fat Ladies, "feminist activists who used cooking as a platform from which to share their polemic" (241) is likely to enjoy Sara Hillin's article. "In this case, cooking and related activities...represent the everyday context from which the two fat ladies produced a complex rhetorical power--one that allowed them to exploit several of the more negative cultural connotations of fatness and somehow build a positive ethos through that very act" (239). They "sought to mobilize and rally others to take up their causes: promoting more ethical manufacturing and sale of meats, educating oneself about health claims related to diet, and ending gender-based size discrimination" (162).
  
  The final essay is on a related fat-positive theme, the subgenre of chicklit that features a plus-size female sleuth as protagonist. As it turns out, there are many subgenres of female detective chicklit with difference emphases and settings: baking, romance, sci-fi, vampire, pizzeria, and coffeehouse. The plus-size sleuth challenges the notion of fat people as "lazy, stupid, and libidinous" (253). "Fatness is a resource--a benefit rather than a liability--and cultural beliefs about fat people are challenged and overturned" (262), along with notions of femininity.
  
  This anthology is worth a read. Skip whatever becomes tiresome and enjoy the rest.
• 
  Mills College Library

  808.06 F6865 2017