“To Feed Such Hunger”: Proposing a Women’s Gastronomic Literature

Abstract

My project “To Feed Such Hunger”: Proposing a Women’s Gastronomic Literature is a close reading of texts that examines the writing of four authors producing narrative non-fiction food writing in twentieth-century America. Feminist scholarship has established the importance of women’s life writing as historical, political and productive, but food writing, particularly by women, has often been categorised as a separate generic entity. Similarly, the relationship between women and food is rife with existing presuppositions about gender and class dynamics: wherein women cook in a domestic rather than a professional sphere; wherein the way that they eat is always mediated by body-consciousness; where women cook in service of and to provide nourishment for others. If we understand both foodways and life writing as gendered spaces, it follows that food writing is a gendered domain. Historically, women’s food writing has been the domestic cookbook; by comparison, men are gastronomes whose writing showcases their knowledge and taste. My project recognises women’s food writing as a complex arena with no easy or monolithic definitions, in an attempt to ensure that such writing is afforded the attention and nuance so easily applied to men’s writing. I argue that the work of M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child, and later Nora Ephron and Laurie Colwin can and should be understood within the context of the gastronomic tradition: each writer brings her own unique contributions to the category. By opening up this space to include women, we can better understand the ways that gender has impacted the aesthetics of pleasure, taste, hospitality and eating.