ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the cooking practices of 18 Japanese men who said that they prepare food regularly; one of them was married and the rest single. One identified himself as ‘beefy’ and eight were interested in producing a slim-muscular somatic self. The chapter focuses on interpersonal and intrapsychic scripting that serves the men to filter cultural scripts that produce embodying and embodied culinary practices of the self (de)linked to the control of body weight. In theory the gendered self together with the somatic self of the Japanese have become ‘decentred, fluid or fractured’. Recreational cooking and the consumption of alcohol have been nonetheless integrated by the food industry and the mass media biopedagogies which enforced the commodification of the male somatic self: drinking alcohol can be an active element of a balanced diet for men. The chapter concludes by emphasising how the preparation of food serves to engender a male somatic self in terms of happiness, health and sexuality.
