ABSTRACT
This chapter reflects in part on the ways in which the feminist politics of the past forty-five years has entered into and shaped our research, our reading and our relationship to food. The 1970s slogan 'The personal is political' encapsulated the argument - still pertinent today - that 'politics' is as much about domestic economies as about 'The Economy', that even the private spaces of the home are linked to wider structures of power. In the chapter, the author argues that if we take anything from the legacy of the past forty years of feminist and anti-racist politics, it is the understanding that we live our raced, classed and gendered identities and we do our intellectual work, as embodied people. The author talks about Isabella Beeton, who claimed her appeal was scientific, called the kitchen 'the great laboratory' of the household and prefaced general accounts, for example of soup making, with notes on the Chemistry of Foods.
