Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Introduction: Of Meatloaf and Jell-O… Part 2 The Power of Food Chapter 3 The Cup of Comfort Chapter 4 Honoring Helga, "The Little Lefse Maker": Regional Food as Social Marker, Art, and Tradition Chapter 5 "I Am an Act of Kneading": Food and the making of Chicana Identity Chapter 6 Taking the Cake: Power Politics in Southern Life and Fiction Part 7 Media Images Chapter 8 Is Meatloaf for Men? Gender and Meatloaf Recipes, 1920-1960 Chapter 9 Bananas: Women's Food Chapter 10 There's Always Room for Resistance: Jell-O, Gender and Social Class Part 11 Class, Race and Food Chapter 12 Beating the Biscuits in Appalachia: Race, Class, and Gender Politics of Women Baking Bread Chapter 13 "Suckin' the Chicken Bone Dry": African American Women, Fried Chicken, and the Power of a National Narrative

About the Author

Sherrie A. Inness is associate professor of English at Miami University. She lives in Fairfield, Ohio. She is the editor of several books including Running for their Lives: Girls, Cultural Identity, and Stories of Survival and Delinquents and Debutantes: Twentieth Century American Girls’ Cultures.

Reviews

In Cooking Lessons: The Politics of Gender and Food, nine scholars look at the many ways ethnic and regional food traditions, marketing strategies, cultural stereotypes, and economic forces form or entrench gender roles. These often entertaining essays also investigate the ways that women have used the very foods they prepare to resist and redefine those gender roles. Editor Sherrie Inness has gathered essays from specialists in American studies, literature, history, communications, women's studies, and creative writing that focus on particular foods—each food item serving as a location where women's identity politics play out. The essayists mix ethnographic research with history, literary analysis, and personal anecdotes to help us see that foods like meatloaf, fried chicken, tortillas, Jell-O, bananas, biscuits and cornbread, or even an ordinary cup of tea, always contain gender as one of their ingredients.
*Anne L. Bower, editor, Recipes for Reading: Community Cookbooks, Stories, Histories*