Food: Gender, Power and More

Food—yum!—opens us up to similarity and diversity, generosity and self-interest, gender and power. So naturally Lilith’s readers are interested.

Passover is the holiday with the most relentless attention to foods, and to the memories they conjure. But it’s also about the politics of the kitchen—about similarity and diversity, gender and power. Each choice we make can stake out a spiritual, ideological or political position. 

For me, it’s also often about phone conversations, since so many of the people I like to connect with—near and far––are cooking at the same time.

When the phone rang with a graduate student on the other end, I was surprised. Not by the call, since we get queries all the time at Lilith, but by what she wanted to know. Could she interrogate me about Lilith’s reporting on food? In her research into feminist publications, Lilith had emerged as an outlier. Why was this magazine the only one with a positive view of cooking? All others viewed food as a tool for oppressing women or as a toxic substance triggering eating disorders.