TABLE OF CONTENTS Roy C. Wood
Any examination of the relationships between gender and culinary taste (and especially women s food tastes) in the public arena of dining, faces two distinct problems. First, there is comparatively little research on the topic. Second, any adequate conceptual framework for investigating the topic is necessarily dependent on understanding something of the development of the sociology of food and eating as a distinctive field of inquiry. In practice, this means focusing on a body of literature characterized by the study of the nature of meals and meal taking in an emphatically domestic context. In this chapter, an effort will be made to mine this literature for appropriate concepts, linking these to the limited available research information and some informed speculation on gendered differences in taste in public dining.
Meals can demonstrate the nature of status differences and relationships in society. The distribution of food as a means of articulating social status is common in many societies. In their seminal collection of social anthropological essays, Jerome, et al. (1980) and their various contributors offer many examples of how in tribal, agricultural and otherwise non-industrial communities, women are disadvantaged in terms of access to food. One of the collection s most memorable observations is contained in a paper by Rosenberg (1980, p. 184) who reports Simoons (1967) comments on the skinning, cutting up and preparation of reindeer for eating by women of the Siberian Chukchee tribe. In return for this service Chukchee women receive...
