ABSTRACT
This chapter directs attention away from the representation of middle-class consumption produced by professionals, towards the practices that produce it in the domestic setting. It analyses middle-class women's agency as consumers and to explore contemporary notions of motherhood in relation to food consumption and gendered bodies. The chapter focuses on the multiple meanings of women's food practices as a gendered form of 'adjustment' to new realities in post-liberalization India. It links the overall transformations that have affected middle-class food practices in Calcutta, to a less visible but very significant trend, namely the fact that more and more mothers are becoming vegetarians. The chapter argues the role of vegetarianism, as an extremely significant practice associated with the control of women's sexuality and the cultivation of the self, takes on a new urgency in the context of consumerist society and medicalized maternal bodies among middle-aged Bengali women.
