PPE Seminar | Clare Chambers (Cambridge): "What’s for Dinner? The Gendered Division of Cooking"

What’s for Dinner? The Gendered Division of Cooking

There is a gendered division of cooking, meaning that women do the majority of the everyday cooking, shopping, and meal planning. The gendered division of cooking is usually considered only as part of the wider gendered division of labour, but this paper makes the case for considering it in its own terms. Cooking is burdensome in ways that do not apply to other housework, making the gendered division of cooking a particular problem that is not compensated for by men taking on other household tasks such as cleaning or washing up. Some of these burdens are practical, some are normative: food matters, and women are held responsible for their children’s weight and health. Thus the gendered division of cooking makes women the victims of injustice. At the same time, women are trained to be hyper-vigilant about food by a culture of appearance norms that associates food with weight and requires women to be slim. This hyper-vigilance about food may give women expertise in food preparation, but also means that they pass on their own disordered relationship with food to their children. Food, then, reveals itself as gendered at both ends. On the supply side, it is women who mainly bear the burden of providing food. On the demand side, it is women and girls who bear the brunt of a toxic relationship with food. Women are therefore likely to be both the victims of injustice related to food and the perpetrators of it. This means that the gendered division of cooking is bad for both women and children, and addressing it is essential.

The Institute of Philosophy hosts a regular workshop series entitled ‘The Practical, the Political, and the Ethical’.
The series was created in 2015 by Véronique Munoz-Dardé (UCL) and Hallvard Lillehammer (Birkbeck) in order to discuss work in progress from visiting speakers. This year the series is convened by Elise Woodard (KCL) and Michael Hannon (Nottingham). Talks are normally 45 minutes (no pre-circulation of the paper), followed by discussion. All are welcome.