Gender Roles In Cooking

Research Paper Cooking can be primarily related to gender identity. In the past, women were expected to know how to cook and prepare meals for their household. Nowadays, gender roles have shifted. The kitchen becomes a place that employs ideologies about feminine and masculine traits (Swenson 37). In Mexico, women continue to face gender bias; they are under the social pressure of having to perform the society’s standards for women in the household such as being a domestic cooker. In this paper, I am going to address the role of women and men in the kitchen and analyze how the kitchen has helped in defining gender roles, especially in Mexico.

Throughout Mexican history, the preparation of food has always been classified as women’s task. Occasionally,

Many magazines, including Men’s Health, Men’s Fitness, and Muscle and Fitness, are focused on men of all ages who yearn to enhance their physical appearance (17). With the standards put into acquiring the ideal body type, the food industry is providing men more convenient ways to improve and maintain their body image (23). In the three magazines that were mentioned in the article, the idea of cooking continues to be gender biased. The author mentions that the use of food in these magazines is also associated with gender roles. Most of the articles and advertisements focus on ready-to-eat food and food that requires nearly no preparation time. Parasecoli states, “Cooking food seems to constitute a threat to the reader’s masculinity; men consume, they do not get involved with the chores related to food” (35). It obviously implies that cooking is associated with women in these magazines and is thus a threat to masculinity. The idea of gender role is heavily emphasized from the traditional ideology to the modern food advertisement. Even though this phenomenon is not directly related to Mexico, the idea it presents corresponds with the gender roles in Mexican food