femivore’s dilemma

For the record, I know as many men as women who are raising chickens and tending gardens (though my data are as anecdotal as Orenstein’s). Mostly I know couples who are making the choice to produce more of their own food. Yes, some educated high-achieving women disillusioned with work are quitting their jobs to create a homemade home. But I suspect a good number of men would appreciate the same choice. If more women than men are leaving careers to create more meaningful lives at home, it may reflect the greater freedom women have to do so.

Lisa Graham McMinn on Her.meneutics in response to The Femivore’s Dilemma in the NYT a few months ago.

While I don’t normally read “Christianity Today,” I found Ms. McMinn’s article to be insightful and poignant.  The Femivore’s Dilemma is one of the first articles that bonded the three of us ShutUpFoodies writers.

Around the Blogs with Julia Childless

Food is never just food. Food is love. Food is solace. It is politics. It is religion. And if that’s not enough to heap on your dinner plate each night, food is also, especially for mothers, the instant-read measure of our parenting. We are not only what we eat, we are what we feed our children. So here in Berkeley — where a preoccupation with locally grown, organic, sustainable agriculture is presumed — the mom who strolls the farmers’ markets can feel superior to the one who buys pesticide-free produce trucked in from Mexico, who can, in turn, lord it over the one who stoops to conventionally grown carrots (though the folks who grow their own trump us all). Let it slip that you took the kids to McDonald’s, and watch how fast those play dates dry up.

The Way We Live Now – The Fat Trap – NYTimes.com

Peggy Orenstein—she of the Femivore’s Dilemma—has a pretty good piece on rethinking her relationship to food as she raises daughters.

-Julia Childless