ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to move away from the gendered myopia that has tended to characterise much Anglo-American scholarship on food by focussing specifically on men. Academic scholarship has increasingly emphasised the multiple, fluid, dynamic and contested nature of masculinities and femininities, constituting a process of 'endless becoming'. Jay Mechling has pointed out the paradox that the American Boy Scouts movement apparently endorsed the philosophy that teaching boys cooking skills and an ethic of caring for others, usually a 'feminine' preserve, could actually enhance their masculinity. While masculinity and femininity are clearly relational, implicating relations of privilege and power, scholarship on gender has highlighted that power is not something that is either experienced or practiced by all women. Reporting shifts in the domestic participation of a group of Norwegian men over a 15-year period, Helene Aarseth indicates the persistence, at least until the 1990s of gendered discourses in the articulation of certain tasks as more 'naturally' undertaken by women than men.
