Chicano Culinarius: From Cowboys to Gastronomes

Abstract

In her analysis of contemporary advertisements, Susan Bordo affirms, “Men are supposed to have hearty, even voracious appetites. It is a mark of the manly to eat spontaneously and expansively, and manliness is a frequent commercial code for amply portioned products” (16). Women, in contrast, are not “permitted to lust for food” (18) and are advised to consume as little as possible. The construction of femininity as hunger helps control their sexual appetites which, in Bordo’s view, “threaten to deplete and consume the body and soul of the male” (21). Implied is not only that food and sex are close associates but that women’s gluttony is of the cannibal kind. Hunger also prevents women from occupying a space in social life. Bordo continues: “Men Eat and Women Prepare. The metaphorical dualities at work here, whatever their class meanings, presuppose an idealized (and rarely actualized) gender division of labor in which men strive, compete, and exert themselves in the public sphere while women are cocooned in the domestic arena” (21).

The title is inspired in James Boswell’s The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson where he defines man as homo culinarius. What distinguishes men from animals, he claims, is cooking: “The beasts have memory, judgment, and all the faculties and passions of the mind, in a certain degree; but no beast is a cook” (177n).