Emily Contois: Food and Gender

06/15/21 • 43 min

Why are salads considered feminine? Why is steak seen as a manly meal? Gender and the roles they have come represent is one of the many factors that shape the way our culture perceives food, thus dictating our relationship with eating. Emily Contois has spent her career as an interdisciplinary researcher and teacher exploring the ways in which gender, power dynamics, marketing and media contort our views on food. Her recent book, Diners, Dudes and Diets: How Gender and Power Collide in Food Media and Culture is an analysis on the rise of the “Dude" and how Diet culture and marketing companies changed their messaging to target the dude demographic.

In this episode of Amuse-Bouche Emily Contois joins host Kae Lani Palmisano to discuss food and gender, how the Great Recession changed the way marketers position diet programs, how Guy Fieri fuels the dude machine, and ways we can challenge the patriarchy through the media we consume and produce.

You can find more of Emily’s work on her website EmilyContois.com and at @EmilyContois on Instagram and Twitter. And you can buy Diners Dudes and Diets wherever books are sold!

Follow Amuse-Bouche on at @amusebouchepod on Twitter and Instagram and be sure to subscribe to the Amuse-Bouche newsletter on Substack. Every week you’ll find even more food stories, recipes, and gardening updates. It’s a free newsletter at the moment, but I do accept tips. So consider helping a sister out by throwing her a few bucks a month. You can also support me by engaging with the show and following Kae Lani at @KaeLaniSays on Instagram and Twitter.

You can find more of Emily’s work on her website EmilyContois.com and at @EmilyContois on Instagram and Twitter. And you can buy Diners Dudes and Diets wherever books are sold!

Previous Episode

Annemarie Dooling on the sweetness of doing nothing

Annemarie Dooling is constantly in motion. When she's not performing her duties as the Engagement Experiences Product Lead with the Wall Street Journal, she's a writer, burlesque dancer, magician, a fan of antiques, and a home cook. Between her job and her cultural pursuits, it's rare for Annemarie to slow down. But in her recent Wall Street Journal article, "How Being More Productive Starts with Doing Nothing," she's embracing the Italian concept of dolce far niente, the sweetness of doing nothing.

In this episode, Annemarie shares how activities like brewing a pot of old fashioned coffee and constantly whisking the cream and cheese for Cacio e Pepe are opportunities to embrace the nothingness.

You can follow Annemarie Dooling at @TravelingAnna on Twitter and Instagram.

Follow Amuse-Bouche at @AmuseBouchePod on Twitter and Instagram. For more food stories and recipes, subscribe to the Amuse-Bouche newsletter at amusebouche.substack.com. And to see what our host Kae Lani Palmisano is doing check her out on Twitter and Instagram at @KaeLaniSays.

Next Episode

Bettina Makalintal: Dining in the Suburbs

For a long time, food media portrayed the suburbs as a dining wasteland full of chain restaurants and unimaginative menus. But suburbia is changing. According to Bettina Makalintal, staff writer at Vice Munchies, we should be paying more attention to the evolving suburban foodscape. In a recent series Bettina helped develop called "State of the Suburbs" Bettina and other Vice writers make the case for how the burbs are burgeoning with culinary artisans, local farmers markets and clever restauranteurs taking some pretty ambitious leaps of faith, even in the midst of a global pandemic.

You can find more of Bettina’s work on Vice Munchies. You can also follow her on Twitter and TikTok @bettinamak and on Instagram @buttina — she also has an inspiring food styling Instagram called @Crispyegg420.