ABSTRACT
Any examination of the relationships between gender and culinary taste (and especially women’s food tastes) in the public arena of dining, faces two distinct problems. First, there is comparatively little research on the topic. Second, any adequate conceptual framework for investigating the topic is necessarily dependent on understanding something of the development of the sociology of food and eating as a distinctive field of inquiry. In practice, this means focusing on a body of literature characterized by the study of the nature of meals and meal taking in an emphatically domestic context. In this chapter, an effort will be made to ‘mine’ this literature for appropriate concepts, linking these to the limited available research information and some informed speculation on gendered differences in taste in public dining.
