Gender and Food: A Critical Look at the Food System synthesizes existing theoretical and empirical research on food, gender, and intersectionality to offer students and scholars a framework from which to understand how gender is central to the production, distribution, and consumption of food.
Shelley L. Koch is associate professor of sociology at Emory & Henry College. She is the author of A Theory of Grocery Shopping: Food, Choice, and Conflict and co-editor of Food, Masculinities and Home: Interdisciplinary Perspectives.
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This slim, dense volume promises a theoretical integration between food systems and gendered inequality (and the gendered division of labor) spanning each aspect of the food system under late industrial capitalism. Four core chapters form the basis of the text: "Growing," "Shopping," "Cooking," and "Eating." In each of these, Koch (sociology, Emory & Henry College) endeavors to tell a story that interrogates the market, as well as the public and private sphere, in how gender (and more broadly, intersections of gender, class, race, ethnicity, and age) shapes the discourse around food production, preparation, and consumption. The book is strengthened by its relatively tight focus in terms of time period and geography, with an emphasis on the modern post-industrial "Global North," though Koch suggests that a more robust research agenda would encompass the Global South as well as an activist bent. A clear and concise use of statistics and visualizations makes the data very accessible and straightforward to follow. Summing Up: Recommended. All academic levels.
