Food Practices under the Lenses of Gender. The Appearance of Masculinity

Gender and food share many common aspects. They both lend themselves to the elaboration of a similar constructivist approach which aims at denaturalizing and desessentializing concepts that, for a long time, have been interpreted only in biological terms. If the categories of woman and man are not the exclusive product of the “nature” but are socially constructed and negotiated, food practices have largely overcome – at least in the Western world – their role of activities exclusively linked to vital and physiological functions. In modern societies, nutrition has become more and more a lifestyle (Poulain 2008), shaping rites and tastes and, therefore, forms of social distinction (Bourdieu 1979). It is so interesting to deal with the trajectories of the masculine reinterpretation of food practices as they are able to tell us a lot about the contemporary transformations of masculinity and the social inequalities which shape these transformations.