Joanne Hollows
Senior Lecturer in Media & Cultural Studies,
Department of English & Media Studies, The Nottingham Trent University, Clifton Lane,
Nottingham, NG5 4DR, Nottingham, U.K.
Tel:(UK+) 0115 8483033; e-mail: joanne.hollows@ntu.ac.uk
In this paper, I want to examine the food pages in Playboy magazine from its birth in 1953 through to the early 1960s. These pages offer a very different picture of the relationships between gender, class and food practices in the 1950s to most accounts, which have emphasized the relationship between femininity, domesticity and food. Furthermore, this paper is also an attempt to open up debates about masculinity and food practices, an area which has received little critical attention.[1]
GENDER AND FOOD CULTURE IN THE 1950S
American food in the 1950s has often been characterized as both increasingly homogenized and feminized. Levenstein has argued that the 'national' diet became based around an increasingly limited number of 'acceptable' foods, strengthening the 'midwesternization' of 'American' food which had started before the war.[2] During this period, the rise of convenience foods has often been linked to a process of culinary and cultural decline. Furthermore, Levenstein argues, class distinctions in food preferences were also less pronounced during this period. Indeed, perceptions about the 'homogenization' and 'massification', the 'conformity' and 'classlessness' of American food during the period can be related to wider concerns about American culture and society in the 1950s, concerns which were also frequently linked to fears about the feminization of American culture.[3]
Food practices in the 1950s have been seen as 'essentially' feminine practices and the kitchen in particular (as well as the domestic in general) was seen as a female domain. As Levenstein argues, popular culture reproduced the idea that cookery was a female pursuit, that competent cooking was central to women's role and that it was women's responsibility to be knowledgeable about food.[4] Critiques of the feminization of food during the period claimed that it had a pernicious effect through the vogue for 'decorative cooking'.[5] With the rise of convenience foods in which 'care' was less easily signified through the labour involved in the preparation of the meal, so this labour was increasingly made visible through the appearance of foods. As Marling notes, 'the cake was the ultimate in aesthetic fare', offering women an opportunity to demonstrate feminine competencies.[6] Nonetheless, as the 1950s progressed, there was a growing awareness that women increasingly saw cooking 'less as a labour of love and expression of creativity and more as part of kitchen drudgery.'[7] Although, by the late 1950s, men took an increased responsibility for cooking with the 'barbecuing boom', this did little to displace the idea that the kitchen was a feminine space; as Esquire's Handbook for Hosts put it 'outdoor cooking is a man's job'.[8]
Both Barbara Ehrenreich and Michael Kimmel have argued that the middle class masculinity in the 1950s was anchored in the concept of 'maturity': 'normal' men were 'mature' men who accepted their responsibilities as a breadwinner, providing for their families.[9] From this position, unmarried men were 'irresponsible', immature and quite possibly 'homosexual'. Nonetheless, during the 1950s, Ehrenreich finds the seeds of 'a male revolt... against the breadwinner ethic.'[10] On one hand, she finds the seeds of disquiet among the critiques of conformity which claimed that men were being emasculated by the 'corporation' and/or women. However, Ehrenreich argues, while these critics pointed to the 'problem' that the dominant mode of American middle class masculinity was feminizing and domesticating men, they could offer little in the way of an alternative model of adult masculinity to take its place.
However, she notes, just such an alternative was being formulated in the pages of Playboy, launched in 1953. Playboy also offered a critique of conformity, offering a version of a distinctively urban 'good life' of 'pleasurable consumption'.[11] If maturity made the private sphere into hard work, then Playboy offered in its place a 'new consumer ethic' with a 'fun morality'.[12] Furthermore, in placing the bachelor in his urban apartment - as opposed to the married man marooned behind his suburban picket fences - Playboy aimed to 'reclaim the indoors for men'.[13] As Hefner put it, 'we plan spending most of our time inside. We like our apartment. We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d'oeuvre or two, and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.'[14]
While Kimmel has argued that Hefner's 'Playboy was a domesticated bachelor',[15] this paper aims to show that Playboy attempted to construct a masculine private sphere based on a rejection of domesticity and femininity. If many critics lamented the ways in which the public sphere was becoming increasingly feminized or 'womanized' - a world in which even bars were no longer a male sanctuary and drinks came in 'the hues and flavors of cake frosting'[16] - Playboy claimed the private sphere as a masculine space. Even the kitchen - the symbol of domesticity and femininity - was reconstructed to reflect the playboy's 'urbane personality'.17 The kitchen in Playboy's penthouse apartment, the magazine claimed, was 'designed for efficiency with the absolute minimum of fuss and haus-frau labor. For this is a bachelor kitchen, remember, and unless you're a very odd-ball bachelor indeed, you like to cook and whomp up short-order specialties to exactly the same degree that you actively dislike dishwashing, marketing and tidying up.'[18] In this way, cooking was distinguished from forms of feminine domestic labour which were to be performed by the cleaner or the dishwasher. Furthermore, cooking, as we shall see, would become thoroughly divorced from labour and become a sign of distinction and of the masculine tastes of the consumer as connoisseur.
MAKING COOKING MASCULINE
Playboy had a food and drink column from the first issue in December 1953 and this would appear in most issues until the mid-1970s.[19] However, the character of the food and drink pages would be shaped by Thomas Mario who joined the staff as food and drink editor for the April 1954 issue and stayed in this position for the next twenty years. Mario's early columns in some ways support people's preconceptions of food in Playboy, emphasizing not only the sexual dimensions of eating and entertaining but also, rather more bizarrely, the sex life of the ingredients.[20] Food is also linked to sex through the sensual pleasures of eating and the seductive effect of cooking: barbecued steaks, it is claimed, will bring about 'yielding rapture' in your date[21], gin will 'maker her cool and cooperative',[22] and the aroma from the chafing dish ensures that 'Your subject is under complete control.'[23] This association between food and sex seeks to further distance the Playboy cook from the domestic cook whose role is to sustain the family.[24]
In these early columns, while foods are linked to the Playboy through sex, Mario also attempts to allay anxieties about whether an interest in food and cooking are masculine activities. The oyster may be an aphrodisiac but it is associated with the delicacy and lightness of fish, linking it to perceptions of 'feminine' foods.'[25] In case we are in doubt the full quote boldly states, 'a very masculine food, the oyster' and he claims to offer recipes for 'Playboy chefs' in the 'hearty styles' that 'men prefer'." Mario hedged his bets in the early columns, in attempting to masculinize cooking as an activity: the reader is advised how to carve, and make sandwiches from, the turkey, rather than how to cook it (by 1956, he would be cooking Christmas dinner for two). The first year also sees a feature on the 'manly art' of barbecuing.[27] However, the barbecue is also located in the urban space of the terrace, to distance it from its associations with suburbia, domesticity and conformity, and shown to be an occasion for producing sensual relationship, rather than reproducing the family unit.[28] 'Playboy at the Chafing Dish' takes cooking out of the feminized space of the kitchen and into the dining-room, and is legitimated by its association with 'the attics of artists and writers and... the dens of playboys and playdaddies... [to become] the symbol of larkish living and high-fed wooing'.[29] These associations with 'manly cooking' are further secured with the overt ways in which Mario draws on traditions of masculine gastronomic writing rather than feminine domestic cookery.
While the poor quality of Mario's writing has frequently been noted, his columns draw on two of the key features of gastronomic writing identified by Mennell.[30] First, Mario is obsessed with the "'correct" practice' detailing not only how to cook, but also how to eat and serve: for example, his new year's day brunch is to be served on 'highly burnished Sheffield silver platters'.[31] Second, he uses 'a brew of history, myth and history serving as myth'[32] to introduce his recipes and these, unsurprisingly, are frequently linked to the the exploits of literary and historical heroes. However, most significantly, Mario also takes on the social functions of the gastronome identified by Mennell. Mario's column can be understood as an attempt to 'democratize' elite knowledges about food.[33] The gastronome, Mennell argues, 'is essentially urban in character' and pushes the reader 'towards discrimination, choice and delicacy in matters of eating'.[34]
Mario also draws on this gastronomic tradition to construct the Playboy gourmet as someone who can be 'known' and 'distinguished' through his consumption practices, not only as masculine but also as someone with 'class'. The ability to read other people's food practices as a sign of distinction and discrimination is made explicit in Mario's column, 'Is She Your Kind of Dish? How to Read Menus and the Feminine Mind' in which he asserts 'Any man can be his own private eye. All he needs is a menu.'[35] The 'wrong' woman is distinguished by too much attention to questions of economics - her choices are guided solely by expense or thrift - or by a disinterest in food altogether. The 'wrong' woman is disinterested in the pleasures of eating (and, hence, pleasure itself) whereas the 'right' girl's 'eyes glisten when you hand her a menu because she sees a good time ahead': she enjoys food and is excited by food.[36] However, this girl can also produce anxiety - what if she classifies you by your tastes and finds you lacking - and so Mario's column takes on an educative function, offering an extensive glossary of continental food terms so you, too, can be distinguished by your knowledge and your tastes." This emphasis on pleasure and discrimination through consumption found in the food pages is also homologous with other aspects of the Playboy lifestyle disseminated throughout the magazine.
ANTIMONIES OF TASTE IN PLAYBOY
Alan Warde has argued that food tastes and knowledges tend to be organized around four antimonies or binary oppositions: between novelty and tradition; economy and extravagance; health and indulgence; and care and convenience. These antimonies will be deployed in different ways in different contexts but they act as 'values which legitimize choice between food stuffs'.38 In examining how Playboy deals with these different antimonies - some which are more crucial than others - it becomes evident that attempts to resolve them are also ways in which Mario's columns construct food competencies, dispositions and practices as gendered and classed practices.
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i) economy and extravagance Although extravagance in food consumption is not the only way in which food practices can be used as a form of class distinction, Mario's columns are careful to make little mention of economy as a value guiding food tastes. For the Playboy gourmet, budgetary constraints are not an issue: Mario advocates using 'quality' cuts and ingredients that symbolize extravagance such as truffles. The emphasis on extravagance and the refusal of any concern for economy can be seen to have two functions within the magazine. First, budgeting is associated with the role of the housewife and therefore needs to be disassociated from the masculine consumer. Second, it is the ability to consume which defines the Playboy reader: while consumption is shown to be about the exercise of taste as well as simply spending money, the ability to spend on the self, rather than on the family, is integral to the construction of the playboy. This mode of consumption, which privileges the disposable and the fun, also defines 'a lifestyle very different from that suggested by the station wagon and the Bendix'.[39] It also anticipates the discovery of the single adult consumer by the marketing and advertising industries by at least a decade. ii) health and indulgence The antimony between health and indulgence is more contradictory in the ways in which it is deployed in Playboy. Whereas a taste for the healthy, the restrained and the light has been associated with middle class food preferences which are distinguished from the celebration of indulgence and plenty by the working class, healthiness has also been seen as a characteristic of feminine food practices and indulgence a characteristic of masculine taste.[40] Playboy's emphasis on indulgence, and consequent marginalization of questions of health in food tastes, can be partly understood as an attempt to distance the food pages from associations with the feminine. In Playboy in the 1950s, health could only be associated with 'quality' and 'fresh' ingredients rather than the concerns about health foods and dieting. If the need to gender food tastes partly explains this, then it can also be partly attributed to the declining interest in healthy eating among the middle classes for most of the 1950s.[41] However, by 1960 even Mario would be forced to make fat a masculine issue, in a column titled 'eat great, lose weight'.[42] His solution to the problem of looking good was to opt for a mode of food consumption which balanced the healthy and the indulgent. This mode of eating is precisely the disposition towards food that has been associated with the new middle classes: for Mike Feathersone it is a form of calculated de-control, 'an ability to move in and out of the condition of self-control thereby to experience a wider range of sensations and emotions', an approach to food which Warde claims is more characteristic of men.[43,44] iii) novelty and tradition Playboy deploys Warde's third antimony, between novelty and tradition, in a manner which also constructs the Playboy reader as a member of an emergent taste formation associated with the new managerial-professional middle class. On one hand, Mario has a tendency to avoid recipes which are redolent of a feminine, domestic tradition of home-cooking (although some American favourites such as the hamburger are included). However, he also tries to avoid fashions in 1950s domestic cookery which were largely at the level of decoration rather than taste. In this way, he distances his reader from feminine culinary practices. Instead, Playboy's cookery columns favour recipes that are both 'exotic' - and hence novel - and at the same time 'authentic', and hence traditional. In this way, the Playboy reader is directed towards novel 'foreign' (and sometimes 'regional') traditions.[45] In this respect, Playboy is generally a step ahead of many women's magazines aimed at a mass-market during the period and again anticipates changes in American food practices in the 1960s where the search for the diverse, the innovative and the 'authentic' from 'ethnic' traditions would be a major way in which the new middle classes established a sense of distinction through their culinary practices. In this way, the playboy's urban lifestyle is also fused with a cosmopolitan lifestyle in which 'globalized cultural capital' - knowledges about the 'exotic' and 'authentic' -are cultivated.[46] Furthermore, as Lupton argues, this search for the 'new' from the 'exotic' can be 'considered a means of improving oneself, adding "value" and a sense of excitement to life... variety and innovation in food practices are expected and valorized. This is particularly the case for individuals who view food preparation and eating as aestheticized leisure activities rather than chores.[47] iv) Care and Convenience This notion of food practices as 'aestheticized leisure' rather than domestic labour is central to the approach to cooking taken in Playboy and relates to Warde's fourth antimony between care and convenience, the antimony which in Warde's work is more closely associated with gendered food practices. This antimony centres on the contradictory demands placed on women by the role of food as a signifier of care - in which the labour performed is a way of demonstrating care for the family and may act as a form of gift - and the need for convenience, as women juggle domestic labour with other demands on their time, in particular, paid labour. This antimony also raises the problematic relationship between 'home-cooking' and 'convenience foods' in the 1950s discussed earlier. The very terms of this antimony are based on a model in which women bear the responsibility for food preparation.[48] Because caring, and sustaining affective ties, have been seen as 'essential' to the performance of femininity,[49] it makes it difficult to think of food as an expression of care or love as masculine. Mario's food columns in Playboy very much emphasize taking 'care' in the production of meals and while he does acknowledge the use of convenience foods, these are given little credence and tend to be seen as the preserve of the man who lacks skill rather than time. Indeed, the majority of Mario's recipes are labour-intensive and complex, a trend which is accentuated as the decade progresses. Yet while the care women take in the production of meals has been seen as a way of demonstrating familial or marital love,50 the 'care' taken by the Playboy chef has other dimensions: rather than demonstrating or sustaining love, the Playboy chef creates a recipe for romantic and sensual love. However, the Playboy chef also uses his food practices to demonstrate a particular form of care for, and an investment in, 'the self' which has been associated with the new middle classes, in which there is 'a morality of pleasure as duty'.[51] As we have already seen, the playboy's 'correct' playmate in the restaurant is the woman who takes pleasure in her food. It is here that we can also begin to understand the taste for indulgence in Mario's food columns which is based on a refusal of the restraint which characterizes the traditional middle classes' food practices. This is not only a characteristic of an approach towards the pleasures of eating and cooking, but also is characteristic of a disposition towards certain types of foods in which new and exotic recipes are used to add the novelty that makes a meal 'entertaining'.[52] If the care performed in the food habits of the Playboy chef is based around a self that finds food a source of pleasure and entertainment, then this also suggests that the care invested in the meal is not a product of domestic labour but 'aestheticized leisure': cooking is a creative activity in contrast to the drudgery of the other household chores which the Playboy delegates to paid female labour. This emphasis on cooking as leisure rather than labour has also been seen more widely as a characteristic of masculine culinary practices. Adler's work on married men's contribution to domestic cookery suggests that men rarely contribute to routine everyday cooking and instead treat cooking as a hobby and their meals into 'special events.'[53] Indeed, the recipe columns in Playboy largely focus on cooking as a special event: there are few recipes for one, or even two, and the emphasis is on 'entertaining' rather than everyday cooking. Whereas the domestic cook is claimed to add love to ingredients in order to create the meal as a 'gift' for her family, the Playboy chef adds a sense of excitement and creativity: his 'gift' to his guests is not only the meal itself but a performance or show. When the screens that separate the kitchen from the dining room in the Playboy apartment are drawn back, the chef is on display: 'it is our bet that the manipulation of this broiler, and the sight through the dome of a sizzling steak, will prove for your guests a rival attraction to the best on TV. And you'll be the director of the show.'[54] However, this performance can also be thought of as another kind of performance, a performance of status through the commodities you select and the ways in which you make use of them. Indeed, Mike Featherstone has argued that a key trend in twentieth century consumer culture is the emphasis on the performing self [which] places greater emphasis upon appearance, display and the management of impressions.[55] This trend, he argues, became accentuated with the rise of the new professional-managerial classes who invested in the art of lifestyle. A similar point is made by Barbara Ehrenreich who argues that the new middle classes in the 1960s demonstrated their distinction through their consumption practices, practices which Levenstein argues also characterized changes in food habits during this period. This rise in the status of cooking, he argues, coincided with a masculinization of cooking in which it became 'an acceptable male pursuit': 'As more males mastered home cooking, its status rose; as its status rose, it became more acceptable for males to do it.'[56] |
CONCLUSION
In this paper, I have tried to suggest that Thomas Mario's food pages in Playboy in the 1950s were a space in which food practices were constructed as masculine practices in an era in which cooking was seen as a quintessentially feminine activity. Furthermore, I have tried to demonstrate that these masculinized food practices also conform to a mode of consumption in general - and food consumption in particular - that have been identified with the practices of the new middle classes from the 1960s onwards. In this way, Playboy's food pages can be seen as examples of an emergent approach to cooking as a form of distinction and as a masculine leisure activity.
However, there is no suggestion here that Mario's recipes were necessarily transformed into practice by the Playboy reader. Any study of cookery books and cookery columns must deal with this dilemma: indeed, Marling in her study of recipes aimed at women in the 1950s, were 'food fictions,... kitchen dreams never actually meant to come true. '57 Nonetheless, both Mennell and Warde have suggested that they do influence practice insofar as they disseminate food knowledges. Indeed, Warde suggests that they fuel 'the imagination about food, style and pleasure' and 'offer an implicit set of answers to the questions what and how shall we eat?'58 In this way, Mario's columns address men as members of a new class formation about what and how to eat.
EndNotes
1This paper comes out of on-going research into Playboy magazine which is being carried out by Mark Jancovich and me In this research, still in its early stages, I am exploring questions about food practices in relation to more general questions about consumption, while Mark is conducting a wider cultural history of Playboy. This is also part of a developing research interest on my behalf on gender and food.
[2] H. Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty: a social history of eating in modem America, New York: Oxford University Press, 1993
[3] This uses a familiar trope of 'mass culture as woman' in which the feminine is equated with the pathological (see A. Huyssen, Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism's Other, in T. Modleski, ed., Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1986).
[4]H. Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty, p. 103
[5] K. A. Marling, As Seen on TV: the visual culture of everyday life in the 1950s, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1994, p. 222
[6] K.A. Marling, As Seen on TV p. 224
[7] H. Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty, p. 131
[8] H. Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty, p. 132
[9] B. Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment, London.- Pluto, 1983 and M. Kimmel, Manhood in America: a cultural history, New York: Free Press, 1997.
[10] B. Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men p. 13
[11] B. Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men: p, 44
[12] B. Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men p. 45
[13] B. Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men: p. 44
[14]H. Hefner, Introduction, Playboy, December 1953, p. 3
[15] M. Kimmel, Manhood in America, p. 255
[16] P. Wylie, The Womanization of America, Playboy, September 1958, p. 52
[17] Playboy's Penthouse Apartment, Playboy, September 1956, p. 54
[18] Playboy's Penthouse Apartment, p. 60
[19] The first issue contained a recipe for 'Cuban Sob-Sob Chicken and Rice' and was introduced by way of a travelogue. Indeed, this contains little discussion of food and instead the dish gets its meaning from its place in a man's tale of adventure in an 'exotic' location. The dish is given additional man-appeal by the warning at the end of the recipe that 'this dish is HOT', despite containing no spices. See: B. Roderick, Matanzas love Affair, Playboy, December 1953.
[20]In his first column, 'Pleasures of the Oyster' (April 1954, p. 40), Mario is quick to note the history of the oyster's aphrodisiac qualities, linking them to Roman orgies, and backs this up with literary references, such as Byron's claim that oysters are an 'amatory food'. However, we also learn about the sex life of oysters with a lengthy discussion of their 'hermaphrodite lifestyle'. Likewise, in 'The Private Life of the Turkey' (November 1954, p. 45), Mario informs the reader that 'polygamous' turkeys are 'the most outstanding two-legged philanderers in the world'. Indeed, the bird enjoys the Playboy lifestyle: he is a 'full-blooded American' who allegedly enjoys 'racing, drinking, movies and adventure'.
[21[] T Mario, How to Play with Fire, Playboy, July 1954, p. 35
[22]T Mario, By Juniper, Playboy, August, 1954, p. 37
[23] T Mario, Playboy at the Chafing Dish, Playboy, September 1954, p. 29
[24] It could be argued that this anticipates transformations in eating in the 1960s and 1970s in which 'The search for new food tastes also fits in with a turn towards sensuality. A heightened appreciation for the pleasures of the table marched almost in lockstep with the increasing popularity of notions that all and sundry should enjoy a wider variety of intense sexual experiences (H. Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty , p. 218)
[25] See, for example, P. Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, London: Routledge, 1984 and D. Lupton, Food, the Body and the Self, London, Sage, 1996.
[26] T. Mario, Pleasures of the Oyster, p. 40
[27] T Mario, How to Play with Fire, p. 23
[28] As Scott Donaldson notes, the suburbs had become identified with the 'homogeneous, conformist..., conservative, dull child centered, [and] female-dominated.' (cited in A. Clarke, Tupperware: suburbia, sociality and mass consumption, in R. Silverstone, ed., Vision of Suburbia, London: Routledge. 1997, p. 143)
[29] T Mario, Playboy at the Chafing Dish, p. 29
[30] S.Mennell, All Manners of Food, Oxford: Blackwell, 1985
[31] T.Mario, The New Year's Day Brunch, Playboy, January 1963, p. 63
[32] S.Mennell, All Manners of Food, p. 270
[33] However, just because the gastronome democratizes food knowledges, this does not presume a 'trickle-down' theory of food practices.
[34] S. Mennell, All Manners of Food, p. 273
[35] T Mario, Is She Your Kind of Dish? How to read menus and the feminine mind, Playboy, October, 1954, p. 39
[36] T Mario, Is she your kind of dish?, p. 39
[37] This may also be partly attributed to the snobbery associated with the owners and staff in the expanding sector of restaurants offering haute cuisine, especially in urban centres such as New York. Levenstein argues that these restaurants catered to people whose status was displayed through their consumption practices and who had the competences to understand French food (Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty, p. 140).
[37] A. Warde, Consumption, Food and Taste: Culinary Antimonies and Commodiiy Culture, London: Sage, 1997, p. 55
[39] B.Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling: the inner life of the middle class, New York: Harper Collins, 1989, p. 178
[40] P.Bourdieu, Distinction
[41] H.Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty, p. 137-8
[42] T.Mario, Eat Great, Lose Weight, Playboy, August 1960
[43] A. Warde, Consumption, Food and Taste, p. 93
[44] Furthermore, as Deborah Lupton argues, 'While the "civilized" body may be seen to be sensually or corporeally repressed in the search for control, the other side of this process is the proliferation of sexual experience and enhanced sensitivity to pleasure.' (Food, the Body and the Self p. 153)
[45] This includes a heavy dependence on a French culinary tradition, and, in the period discussed in this paper, includes special features on Italian, Greek, Creole, German, Indian and Chinese cookery. The Playboy Gourmet, Mario's 1961 cookbook based on his cookery columns not only reproduces this affection for French cuisine as the legitimate tradition, but also includes a lengthy section on 'Foreign Fare'.
[46] D. Bell and G. Valentine, Consuming Geographies: we are where we eat, London: Routledge, 1997, p. 135-6
[47] D. Lupton, Food, the Body and the Self, p. 126
[48] It would initially seem difficult to simply apply these terms to a masculine form of food practice. Indeed, there has been an unsurprising emphasis on women's role in preparing food for the family. While this work has taken into account the domestic division of tabour, and explored the responsibilities taken by men for domestic labour, the primary use of female-response groups means we have quantitative information on what men do but lack qualitative data on many of the meanings that men bring to food preparation. (See A Beardsworth and T Keil, Sociology on the Menu: an invitation to the study of food and society, London: Routledge, 1997, p. 87)
[49] B. Skeggs, Formations of Class and Gender, London: Sage, 1997
[50] D.Lupton, Food, The Body, and the Self, p. 47
[51] P.Bourdieu, Distinction, p. 367
[52] M.DeVault, Feeding the Family: the social organization of caring as gendered work. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991, p. 212
[53] D. Bell and G. Valentine, Consuming Geographies, p. 73
[54] The Playboy Apartment, p. 60
[55] M. Featherstone, 'The Body in Consumer Culture', in M. Featherstone, D. Hepworth and B Tumer, eds, The Body: Social Process and Cultural Theory, London: Sage, 1991, p. 187
[56] H. Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty, p. 226
[57] K.A. Marling, As Seen on TV, p. 231
[58] A.Warde, Consumption, Food and Taste, p. 44
