TikTok masculinity and the Tradwife (with Feminist Food Journal)

What else should we consider when shifting to natural, whole foods—beyond just their health benefits? Feminist Food Journal co-founders Isabela Bonnevera and Zoë Johnson explore the deeper questions: whose labor makes these diets possible, who can afford them, and how culture and experience shape our food choices. We dive into these issues and uncover how a simple "natural foods" search on TikTok exposes striking gender dynamics.

For more info, transcript and resources, visit: https://tabledebates.org/podcast/
episode82

Guests

• Isabela Bonnevera, FFJ + ICTA-UAB
• Zoë Johnson, FFJ + GPPi

Host

• Jackie Turner, TABLE

Episode edited and produced by Matthew Kessler. Music by Blue dot sessions.

Transcript

Matthew Kessler

Hey old and new podcast listeners. Matthew Kessler here.  Feed, a food systems podcast is back with some new episodes. Just as I head on parental leave for this Spring and Summer. 

While I’m away, I’m excited to share some fascinating conversations we’ve already recorded, including this one, and then, I’ll hand over the hosting mic to a colleague of mine, who we’ll meet in a few weeks. 

For this episode, Jackie Turner, TABLE’s communications manager sits down with the brilliant co-founders of Feminist Food Journal to share some of their views on natural diets and ultra processed foods that aren’t always talked about.

Jackie Turner

Hey everyone, Jackie here. It’s been about 10 months since we recorded this conversation so I asked Matthew if I could record an update for this episode. A lot has changed in the last several months. As the title suggests, this episode discusses TikTok trends around food and lifestyle. Since this conversation, terms like ‘trad wife’ and this sort of ubermasculinisation of young men’s social media feeds have been connected by experts to a conservative shift that extends beyond social media and into politics and daily life. 

And I find that this conversation about what is healthy for you—and what will Make America Healthy Again—has an influence on our politics, including the US election. And while Matthew and I are American and obviously have an eye on the news there, this is increasingly a global trend. 

I guess what I want to do is reframe this conversation for the moment we’re living in. What does it mean to eat healthy? Who decides what it means and then who bears the burden of that?

Clip 1

UPFs high in fats, starches and additives, now make us 73% of the US Food supply.

Clip 2

Ready meals, chocolate biscuits, sausages fizzy drinks, we know that processed food is bad for us.

Matthew

This trend of more and more people eating more and more ultra processed foods is pretty alarming, especially from a public health perspective. To combat this, you may have heard some people say ‘we need to eat more natural foods’.

In earlier episodes, we talked about the fact that a natural diet doesn’t really exist. But here we’re exploring a different angle - what does eating less processed foods mean for women, for food labor in the kitchen? It’s not such a stretch to say food processing was revolutionary in advancing progressive social change. 

So what do the Feminist Food Journal co-founders have to say about this? Here’s Jackie Turner to guide our conversation.

Jackie

The nature of my job is such that I spend a lot of time online and a lot of it in spaces where policymakers and academics are talking about the future of food. But one of the intriguing things about the internet is that these food spaces are bleeding together, and allowing for discussions that mix theory, data, values and practice. It's really fascinating to see that play out. And I know from reading and listening to the work of our guests today that the feminist food journal also thinks about food in an interdisciplinary way. I'll allow you two to introduce yourselves and your work..

Isabela Bonnevera

Hi, Jackie. Thank you for having us. My name is Isabela Vera. I'm originally from Vancouver, Canada, but I currently live in Barcelona, Spain.

I'm a PhD student here in Barcelona at the Environmental Science Institute, UAB, where I study the intersection of urban food policy and food justice for immigrant communities in the Global North. I work as an independent food systems researcher. And I’m also a writer and an editor

Zoë Johnson

My name is Zoë Johnson. I'm also from Vancouver, but I'm currently living in Berlin in Germany. I have an academic background in gender equality and food systems, and then later international development and gender. And then more recently, I've started studying illustration.

Isabela

So Feminist food journal. FFJ, for short, is a magazine and podcast dedicated to feminist perspectives on food and culture. We really aim for people to tell their own stories, stories about their communities, in a way that highlights the entanglements of gender, food, and whatever issue theme we're working on. Sometimes food is really in the spotlight. But sometimes it's more of an entry point towards other cultural, political issues, or even more personal things like identity, family, belonging. But our goal with them is really for people to come away for reading, or listeni ng - if it's an audio story -  with a different perspective on how patterns of oppression and power unfold around them, including those that often go unseen.

Jackie  

I want to start out our conversation today, talking a little bit about this juxtaposition that I've been seeing a lot in conversations around diet lately. There's this tension between Ultra processed foods and quote unquote, natural foods. One person who's pretty vocal about moving away from ultra processed foods, who you may have heard of is Michael Pollan, the author of several books, probably the most famous being the Omnivore's Dilemma. He said things like “eat foods, not too much, mostly plants,” and “don't eat anything your great great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food”. And a lot of people really identify with this call to move towards local eating, organic eating, and some might call it natural eating. 

You two often apply a gender lens to conversations about food. And I'm wondering, what strikes you about this call to eat less processed foods? Do we have an idea of who might be making these less processed foods? Should the world move in that direction?

Zoë

I think Michael Pollan's argument is fundamentally kind of reductive. And it's a dramatic oversimplification, which is also why it's so attractive and so easy, right? You're like, Okay, this little quippy thing that I can do as an individual to make my health better, but also, like, I think he really frames it as this way to then make the food system better. 

But I guess, like, we need to think about as you say, whose labour would we depend on if we were to move away from less processed foods, but also, like, what are the assumptions underlying his argument? 

There’s an argument he has made he is saying is perpetuating fat stigma, which is definitely bad for women.  He's been accused of blaming feminists for the demise of cooking, Yeah, he doesn't actually do really clearly, but there's there's some kind of assumption about like, women moving out of the kitchen and then now we all need to eat processed foods because yeah, women aren't cooking as much, and also there's like a class argument of course because yeah, it's great we can all eat mostly plants, but we can't all afford to shop at our local farmers market and can all afford to be constantly eating like super - what are very often very expensive, kind of quote unquote, “whole foods”.

Pollan himself is coming from a place of immense privilege, of upper-middle class white academic and many other things. All this to say it’s really dramatic oversimplification and comes from a place of immense privilege. If we accept that, then we can move on to asking some of the more difficult questions.

If we were to reframe and interrogate Pollan’s argument, away from this really individualistic and moralistic perspective - ‘what does it mean to eat well and what does that say about me as a person?’ and I think your point of so many people identifying with this movement. I like to eat local foods and I like to eat “whole foods”. And that is really part of my identity as an individual. However, I do think this moralistic frame is really problematic and leaves a lot of people out and shames them in ways that I don’t think are productive and aren’t actually sparking systems level change.  

So yeah, I guess we need to move away from the individualist moralist perspective and take a more intersectional lens. So what would it actually mean to eat less processed foods? Like not just me as an individual, but at a systems level? And, and who ultimately would benefit from eating less processed foods and who wouldn't?

Jackie 

One thing that I've been really excited to talk to both you about, and this sort of follows on from Michael Pollan, because he's obviously influenced a movement that has taken on its own legs, and is about how these trends show up on social media. And I know that for some people, if you're not perpetually online, like I am, what I'm about to talk about might seem a bit fringe, but a lot of these trends do show up in advertising. And they influence restaurant menus, and the recipes that get published online, and the cookbooks that show up in bookstores and even academic research. 

We could spend a lot of time talking about all the ways that femininity is represented on Tik Tok especially. But it's also I think, really revealing to talk about how masculinity is represented because what's fascinating to me is how the same words can get used around food like ‘natural’, and these can be visually and aesthetically showing up in completely different ways.

There's this one trend on TikTok I kept seeing when I was searching for natural foods, where like all you see is like a man's hands and like chopping things on a wooden chopping board. There's like this picturesque like field or a waterfall in the background. There's always like meat involved in what he's cooking on like a wood fire, and he pops wood to like cook this stew or whatever. And cutting the meat or vegetables always involves like the biggest knife you've ever seen. You don't see any packaging the raw meat is just like suddenly in your face. And there's definitely this sort of like implied Self Reliance here that's being associated with masculinity. So I do have one clip that I do want to play that highlights this masculine relationship with food, and especially with natural food. I'll play this and then we'll talk about what jumps out at you.

Aside
Hi this is Jackie. This video’s audio was removed for copywrite infringement since recording this, so we asked a friend to read the transcript of the video in the spirit of the original video and hopefully that will give you the context of the clip. We’ll also link to the TikTok creator in the show notes–he has a lot of videos that are similar if you’re curious.

Tik Tok 1 

I've spent years refining my diet and I'm going to show you what works for me with regards to the food I eat. My diet focuses on natural and whole foods. For breakfast I had six organic eggs, 50 grams of organic salmon, one avocado and two pieces of sourdough. I know sourdough isn't a natural food, but it is, in my diet, an essential as I do enjoy bread and it’s healthy. Lunch: I made two beef back ribs. I season them with salt, olive oil, and smoked paprika. These took four and a half hours in the oven at 135 degrees Celsius. In the meantime, I ate 250 grams is 20% beef mince with melted cheese and avocado and then took my dog Chase for a walk and had an organic apple and we also practiced some training with him just did some spins and twirls before I launched the ball into a bush and it took me absolutely ages to find. I then came home and indulged myself in my beef back ribs, which I waited absolutely ages for and they came out to absolute perfection. I had some mango, did some grounding work and also some reading, as this is incredibly important, before making my final meal which was two wild salmon fillets with lemon and black pepper and also had an organic banana and organic apple and some cherries to go with that. And that is everything that I ate for the day. Peace out. 

Jackie  

I'd love to hear your first impressions of this this clip.

Zoë

I'm actually not on Tik Tok but i i Do I feel like I have seen a lot of the videos somehow anyway like they're they're like proliferated out beyond TikTok itself. It's it's like laughable somehow there's like this like beautiful blonde man with his curly hair, like in his backyard. I'm like - who, nobody lives like that. Which I know, you know, are that is what online is like, you know, we're all putting out this particular image of ourselves. That's not necessarily like totally reflective of reality, but I just think the way that he uses or like all the visual cues that are meant to make us think that he is this pinnacle of masculinity of like. As you said at the beginning like these like big pieces of meat and his naked torso and like he's kind of constantly straight face like he's never really smiling. But kind of looking tough and like his, even the type of dog he has.

But then I think it's also funny how, in some ways he is portraying like, himself has this like evolved man also right? Like he's reading a book and he's like got a beautiful garden and like it's not just this man meat, push ups like whatever I don't know there's there's this he's trying to also portray this kind of softer side which I think is a very important way in which idealized masculinity is evolving.

Isabela  

Yeah, I mean, something that strikes me about it is how individualized like, or how individual like the whole thing is, right? Like he uses all this ‘I’ language, it's I, I, I. There's like no concept of relationality to any of the foods he's consuming. There's no concept of relationality to the planet. He doesn't talk at all about - the diet is all about how it nourishes him. It's not spoken about in relation to nourishing anything else or extracting from anything else. And then servings, right, they're all individual while he's eating like twice as much as I think a lot of people eat. But in theory, those are individual servings of foods. So I think it all kind of feeds into this idea that he's this like, self -sufficient, like Zoë said, sort of like modern, rational man, who is taking care of himself almost in a vacuum. 

Jackie 

That's a really important point that like there isn't anybody else in the video that he's, he's even refers to it is all about him.

Zoë

Maybe this also is getting to the like, thinking about food really as like, as nutrition and as its constituent parts, which is it seems like more of the direction that he's leaning in. Right? Like he's not as Isabela said, he's not thinking about the broader social issues around where his food came from. But then he's also not thinking about the ways in which food, the social aspects of food and eating, but really, like I'm fueling my perfect body… it's really food as fuel as opposed to food as culture or food as, as anything else.

Isabela  

And he kind of discounts like the one food that had an element of relationality in it, which was sourdough. And of course, as humans working with bacteria on the basis, I guess that it's not natural. Well, I don't know what the criteria is, I guess it's something that hasn't been transformed whatsoever, but I'm pretty sure teriyaki sauce isn’t natural either. 

Jackie 

So both of the videos that I have chosen to show today were found just searching like ‘natural foods’ and they all came up on like the first page of results really on tick tock or within the first like maybe 10 or 12 videos. And there were a lot that were like this where it's a guy kind of emphasizing his diet and kind of counting the foods. There were a lot of them where they don't actually say it, they just play music behind it and show the foods that they eat but it's all around the same sort of like eggs, meat, maybe some fruits, almost like deconstructed, and it's really interesting what we were just talking about with like the individualized side of it and sort of this like focus on or like lack of community, or lack of communal care because like the flip side of it is the other video that I'm going to show which is another video that came up for the same search terms, but shows like the feminine flip side of this. 

There are 1000s of videos that are a lot like the one I'm about to show. Lots of women influencers that you will see like embodying the sort of like farm based homesteading. Make it yourself content with like a wholesome aesthetic, maybe they start the video harvesting or foraging and then they go back to the kitchen that has these like vintage looking appliances and wooden cutting boards. And the emphasis is definitely on using homegrown or locally grown ingredients. But it's obviously like food prep for like more than one person and maybe a family. So with that in mind, we'll just play the clip. 

Tik Tok 2  

Let me show you how easy it is to make homemade chicken broth. About nine years ago, I went on a food journey teaching myself how to replace store bought foods in our home with homemade versions. I'm not going to tell you that making your own broth is cheaper. But I do believe that it is healthier. I have a unique situation because I raised my own chickens for meat and eggs are this recipe you will need some celery, carrots and onion, a whole head of garlic, some herbs and a whole chicken. Place all of that into a pot with salt, peppercorn, some nutmeg, apple cider vinegar and fill the pot with water. Bring the broth to a boil cover and let it simmer for about two hours or until the broth is flavored and colored to your liking. You can let this simmer for up to 12 hours which will make a thick concentrated bone broth, then the liquid is poured through a fine mesh sieve and into a prepared jar you can choose to skim off the fat or leave it if you're planning to leave this in the fridge, let it cool down on the counter and then transfer it I'll show you how to pressure can your breath to store for up to 18 months. And part two 

Isabela 

To me striking what is striking about this one compared to the other one was a is a very individual like I centered language is that in the script, if that's what you want to call it, she's almost removed herself completely. Like she uses very passive language like the soup is seen this happens to this without centering the fact that it's her doing the labor of ostensibly to feed her family. So that's really interesting contrast to know between those two.

Zoë 

Yeah. And she's also like, she's very much teaching in a way that he wasn't.

Jackie 

Yeah it’s very, like, it's very how to, like I imagined the recipe, either linked in her bio, or in the description about like, what she uses, and she's very much showing the process whereas he was almost like, this is inferred. And if you really wanted to do it, you could do it really easily. And I don't have to tell you how, like what seasonings I put on the meat or, you know, where I got my mangoes or whatever, you know. And hers is very much, you know, the step by step process. And she really talks through like each part of the labor she even mentions that she raises her own chickens like, you know, there's lots of steps there and lots of information that is meant for other people. And there's also mentions of like nutrition like her motivation for doing that. That I think is like really interesting contrast to the previous video. He kind of acts like you should know that this is the healthy way to eat.

Zoë 

Yeah and even the way she says it is very like an I think there's like it's very, I don't know classically feminine and it's like not not being super assertive. I mean I think everything you said also about the aesthetic is was very funny. Like, like who is this woman and why she like out of time somehow. 

Isabela

No one actually wears that. It’s more like a Halloween costume.

Jackie 

It's funny because like what she's wearing actually like transitions really well to like the next bit I wanted to talk about which is like there are a lot of terms that are associated with sort of like, natural food on on social media. And one of them is this term called ‘Trad wife’. I don't know if you guys have heard of this. But this comes up a lot in these videos like women who are kind of dressed like this almost as like a throwback to either pioneer culture or sometimes it's like vintage 1950s kind of dress and in some but not all of these videos with like natural recipes and food prep. They're like cultivating this homesteading aesthetic. And these video creators will refer to themselves directly as Trad wives and some espouse these views about women's role in family life. Some of them talk about being liberated from having careers that they like prefer food labor. And even some of them are like directly being like, you know, screw feminism like this is this is the life that I choose. So take that, you know, this is my choice. I'm just interested to hear what you think of that.

Zoë 

I always think it's funny when women reject feminism. Because I think I mean, I guess it comes from like a fundamental misunderstanding of what feminism really is because it's really about choice. And if if she wants to be a Trad wife and doesn't want to have a career, like, that's absolutely her choice. 

But talking about class in this circumstance is also really interesting. Because like, of course, if I make the choice to cook and stay home and cook and clean for my family, that's like one thing, but what are all of the reasons why I can afford to do that as like, or whoever can afford to do that. Or whoever can afford to do that. It's so often, yeah, beautiful, young, white women, I think in these videos. And yeah, the immense amount of like, privileged to have that choice. Because of course, there's loads of other women who are not who are not afforded the same choice of like whether or not they feed their families and wouldn't be able to stay at home. Because like, realistically, in the way that our economic systems work, it's very hard to survive on a single income, especially if you have a huge bunch of kids.

Isabela  

I guess I see it as a type of reactionary politics, that is, in a way aiming to put limits on the freedom of other people. In a way, it’s kind of, because the trad wife is less about like, I'm a Trad wife, and this great, it's a lot about, I'm a trad wife, and here's why you should be too. And diminishing all these other alternative identities and pathways that are relatively newly open to women if we think about the grand scheme of history, right. So I guess I see it also as a sort of conservative backlash to the avenues that are available now. The same way you've seen reactionary politics with every large societal shift. And I guess in that sense, it's nothing new. But I do see it as a fundamentally limiting narrative that is less so celebrating one person's decision, but rather trying to show why that decision should be made by many other people.

Jackie 

Yeah, the piece that I was really interested in, and shared with you guys before we before we spoke, that is by Gabby Del Valle in the Baffler that sort of lays out this Trad wife trend and in specific to one, one, TikTok account in particular, but the author kind of calls this trend, a form of cosplay. Sort of like a cosplay of early settlers in the United States and, and a way of sort of obscuring the genuine hardship of that life and historical reality and the general hardship of rural life in general. And so like bringing class into is definitely a lens to view this trend because it is primarily seeming to be perpetrated by or not perpetrated, but participated in by upper class white women. And in fact, women who sometimes obscure their own financial wealth and kind of make it seem like they're sort of, like using scraps to create this life, but in reality, they actually, you know, requires quite a lot of capital to own land and to run a farm at a time when in financial hardship and prices of food and crafts are kind of devalued in our society. This piece is hilariously titled Land Ho. We’ll link to that piece in the show notes

So far, we've like framed this conversation around whether natural foods can be seen as like, this like burden that's placed on women. And I want to turn to the other side of the equation and ask whether like, processed pre prepared foods that have maybe more technology behind them and like innovation. Is there a positive case to be made here for this in that it sort of allows women to have like, you know, other parts of their life outside of the home? What are your thoughts around this?

Isabela

On whether there's a feminist case to be made for the fact that techno foods can be an emancipatory step forward. I think it's not as black and white as this. And I will start by saying that I think natural foods themselves are not a step back. It's just that expecting women to do the labor, to juggle the food labor associated with them, without other structural changes is regressive. And also potentially subjugative depending on the pressure associated with doing so. And an example that came to my mind is how preschools in Canada have been encouraging families to send their kids with healthier, more natural snacks. And I think this begs the question exactly what Zoë was talking about, like, who does this work? There are also questions around what cultural foods are recommended and validated as good. That's a wider discussion.

On gender, I think we need to think about how to balance the fact that women do bear the brunt of care work, including food related to care work, but also the fact that there is value a lot of value in care.  

When we think about value and care, there's one scholar in particular, she does great work. Her name is Miriam J. Williams. She's an urban cultural geographer. And she theorizes a feminist ethics of care as one that recognizes our collective interdependence and responsibility to care for and sustain human life.. And there’s no way to escape care. We’re cared for by organisms that we can’t even see that sustain life on earth. The idea behind her theory is that a world without care is a world that crumbles, because we're all dependent on one another. And a world with only neoliberal ideas of care is one in which we're entirely dependent on markets to fill that void. And it's obviously not by accident that women spend three times more time than men on care related tasks. So I guess just with these points in mind that care is important. But also the burden of care work is not equitably distributed. 

When we’re talking about food, the question that comes is how can food related care work more equitable.And I think one answer centers around coming together in the kitchen. Rebecca May Johnson, she's a food writer I think last year - must have been last year, she had a really great piece in the Financial Times about her fantasy kitchen, which will be placed off site from a living space. And it would involve people taking turns rotating, and each cooking only once a week with a changing menu. And I think these types of collective kitchens, they do exist in some communities, and people will come together, they will share the burden of procuring the foods, they will cook it together, and then they will take lots of portions home and split the costs. And that can save them a lot of money and time. 

I think this element of emancipation is really interesting. To know emancipation is about freeing yourself from one's control, it's about having options. I think today we appeared, we think we have a lot of options, but a lot of them are false or kind of unavailable to the other constraints that we face. So it's about generally having options. And I think we think about emancipation, I think it's important to attend to the embodied elements of emancipation and liberation, and thinking about what makes people feel good in their bodies. And I don't think we can say, de facto, that is all natural food that is processed foods, and let you know sort of painting some foods as bad. I think food for all the myriad structural factors, that shape and survival on our plates, it is experienced in the body. And joy is an important part of food and joy might come from cooking for yourself. It could come from not cooking at all. And it could come from foods that give us a hit of nostalgia, of memory, new understandings of culture connections to other cultures.

And I was thinking like, you know, I'm a North American who lives in Europe, like sometimes I just want to eat goldfish. I like really bad cheddar cheese. And that brings me a lot of joy. And I think that joy for me is a form of liberation, that you're free to feel good in your body. You have the opportunity to do so. Though there are obviously limits to this

But I think to some degree, we need to honor the fact that certain foods will always bring us joy. And then finally, I think also, talking about emancipation for women, I think learning new skills and honing skills is emancipation. And I think it's important to consider cooking and food work as important knowledge and skill. You know, food incorporates cooking science, math, it's gastronomy, its history, culture, it's more than all of that. And the act of procuring food can also stimulate community can build your social capital and networks of care. And if you don't have these skills of these networks, you are not at all freed by control, sorry, free from control by the market. And in that sense, you'll also not be emancipated either.

Jackie

I really relate to that as somebody who who's really into like, a lot of the food skills, stuff like sourdough bread, baking and, and fermentation. Like, they're very, they're, it's really fun to do, and it brings me a lot of joy. And so like, on one hand, I can see like this return to less processed foods being something that that puts a lot of, that's a lot of time and energy. But I can also see it as something that that is a bit freeing, and allowing me to get away from screens, and such. I don't know, if you two have food, hobbies that you enjoy.

Zoë

Yeah, I also really, I mean, I love to cook and spend time in the kitchen and I love doing the extra complicated things of you know, making everything from scratch, exactly as you say, because I think it's such a nice opportunity to get like reconnected with. It's like, it's very physical and tactile. And that's very different from most of my work sitting in front of a screen and thinking about ideas and making things in a in a very digital space, which is just a very different experience. But that said, I also appreciate why people might not want to do that. And, and as Isabela said, I think that's also okay. And it's okay to to share that labor or I mean, if you can afford to to pay someone else to do it for you. I think it's interesting. My partner's mom is polish or my partner’s polish. But she left Poland before the wall fell and, and I I just think she I really like knitting and I really like breaking bread. And my partner and I often make Polish food and perogies from scratch and all this stuff. And she's always kind of I mean, shaking her head in some way of like, Yeah, I had to do this all in communist Poland. And like, why would I like why would I knit myself a sweater when I can go to the store and buy one? You know, and I think, again, maybe coming back to this idea of privilege, like when you don't have the choice about how you spend your time and about which things you want to do because they bring you joy? I guess, also coming back to the thing I said earlier about, like the moralistic element. Like I don't think that I am morally superior, because I want to knit my own sweaters and make my own bread. Like I do that those things, because I'm so lucky that I have the time and the Yeah, the freedom to make those choices and sort of see and that's, that's great. That's the good part of it.

Jackie

Obviously food tech is a huge and growing industry, how do you see all these social dynamics we’ve been talking about playing out in the future of that sector?

Isabela

e featured in our first feminist food journal issue, milk, an article by a journalist called Ingrid Taylor. And she profiled women who were founders of biotech startups, working on cultivated milk with high precision fermentation and cultivated breast milk as well. But it was interesting to see in her article, that the dynamics she highlights a woman gravitating towards these sectors, potentially due to the links between human and non human reproductive justice, animal welfare and the environment. Mirror the findings of women being overrepresented in alternative food activities, is obviously a super different world than grassroots community food solutions. But it's interesting to note those patterns just the same. But I saw some data showing that they're way higher rates of women on founding teams of startups in the alternative protein sector and much higher rates of all women teams, than in the startup sector as a whole. So I think it's, yeah, it's just interesting to see those links. And I guess it's unclear where the sector is going, if it would live up to the hype, if it's going to crash and burn like everybody thought it would. But I also saw that startups with women on the alt-protein sector are only getting about 10% of the funding that goes towards all proteins in general. So there's obviously a long way to go there in terms of gender equity In the corporate, the corporate sphere..

Jackie

To wrap this conversation up, what do you hope for in the future?

Zoë

I think certain discourses around what is like natural versus not natural food really creates this sense of fear and shame about what we eat, and also what we feed our children. And I think that these discourses disproportionately impact women who are overwhelmingly the provisioners and feeders of families. 

So like, again, coming back to the example of obesity. We did a really a had a really nice conversation with two scholars for FFJ podcast about the war on fatness for our war issue. And one of our podcast guests was talking about how this war gets waged on women's bodies in unique ways. And then of course, obviously, like black women's bodies, Indigenous women's bodies also in more and more unique and important ways. And a lot of it has to do with women as like nutrition gatekeepers, and so like women are seen as responsible for if they have fat kids, for instance that like this is somehow a moral failing on their part to like not take care of their children properly. And then also, there's all this pressure about preventing not only themselves from becoming fat, but also their whole families and their children. 

I hope for a future in which all bodies are nourished and taken care of, and not marginalized or oppressed or shamed or demonized for their food choices…. I hope for a future in which our food system, where we can move beyond the neoliberal politics of food and health and this like individualization of responsibility towards like a much bigger discussion about the social, political and structural forces that shaped the way we live and eat. 

Isabela

It’s a bit more of a personal example. Like when I think about my desired future, I think it's a bit contrived, but it's really a balance and everything. And I think of my mom, you know, who was kind of an early adopter of organic food. Now she gets a CSA, but sometimes she does not want to cook after work. And we just eat ramen noodles. And it's great. And, you know, sometimes she'll buy things like kimchi instead of making it special fermented sauces for people who make them locally, in Vancouver, and there are obviously huge class privileges inherit in this balance. And you know, food is obviously it's essential to our lives. And you know, it's like economists would call it food is price inelastic. So when people have to spend more in other areas, they will reduce their spending on food. And that's why policy change and other areas like childcare, actually, Zoë and I  our home province of British Columbia is trialing $10 A day daycare. Now, the interesting one day to assess impacts of that on food insecurity, etc. But also in housing and transit is really essential. And so is opening up the realm of quote unquote, good food to the public sector through things like community kitchens, procurement practices, like I spoke about before. And yeah, I think these opportunities should involve also putting food skills across all genders and new ways of collaborating on food together.

Jackie  

Great. Thank you both so much for this chat. This has been awesome, and I really appreciate you sharing all of your thoughts.  

Isabela  

Thanks for indulging us.

Zoë 

Thank you so much for having us.

Matthew

Feminist Food Journal is an online magazine and podcast dedicated to a feminist food future. You can join the thousands of subscribers at feminist food journal.com

Their collection of writing is highly evocative and delightful and I think you’ll really like it.

Huge thanks to Isabela Bonnevera and Zoë Johnson, and to Jackie Turner for the interview. We’ll link to the essays and TikTok videos mentioned on the episode webpage and the show notes. Also, we’ll link to an essay that TABLE writer Tamsin Blaxter contributed to FFJ’s MEAT issue.

TABLE is a collaboration of U Oxford, SLU, Wageningen U in the Netherlands, University of the Andes in Colombia, and National Autonomous University of Mexico. 

You can stay update the work at TABLE and get a round up of the latest food systems publications, jobs and events by subscribing to our newsletter Fodder at tabledebates.org

The episode was edited by Matthew Kessler, with special thanks to former TABLE intern Tatiana Dickens. Music by Blue Dot Sessions. Talk to you soon.