Guest Editors’ Introduction: Special Issue on Critical Food Studies in South Africa: Feminist Perspectives

Editorial

In Search of the Perfect Curry: A Gender Perspective on Durban Curry in Two Contemporary Cookbooks

The article focuses on the meanings of the curry in two contemporary cookbooks, Durban Curry (2014) and Durban Curry: Up2Date (2019). These texts are read partly in conjunction with Indian Delights (originally published in 1961), a pioneering volume focusing on Indian food, which serves as an intertext to the books analysed in this article. The article offers a textual and symptomatic gendered reading that describes some representational and discursive aspects of curry-making as shown in the foodways and foodscapes presented in the two cookbooks. The article motivates that the meaning of curry is not in its singularity, but is instead in the plurality of its shifts, changes, appropriations and mobility over time.

Embracing Humanity and Reclaiming Nature: Neglected Gendered Discourses in the Struggles of Western Cape Farm Workers

This essay reflects on the unheeded cry from South Africa’s most marginalised people—farm workers—for recognition of their personhood and right to dignity. Their continuing struggles for decent wages and living conditions in South Africa’s neoliberal agricultural system, which primarily values efficiency and profit, risk further entrenching a dehumanising system and reproducing similar conditions of exploitation. Among other radical writers, Frantz Fanon has alerted us to the need to strive for a “universal humanity” as a way out of this paradox, while many indigenous peoples’ movements have gone further to insist that we reclaim the sacredness of all of nature and recognise that humans and their economy are derivative from and subordinate to nature. These alternative and counter-colonial traditions often implicitly or explicitly invoke ideas about the feminine and the sacred in their definitions of resisting or transcending oppression. Such movements suggest that what is needed is to reclaim our sacred attitude to nature and to one another, and to fundamentally restructure and transform the blueprints of our societies to reflect this attitude.

Textualisation of the Domestic Self: Hildagonda Duckitt’s Autobiographical Cookbook

Hilda’s Diary of a Cape Housekeeper (1902), by Hildagonda Duckitt, is an example of culinary literature and essentially a diary of life in the Cape at the time (one that includes recipes, notes on gardening, etc.). This text is investigated in this article with the aim of examining the responsibilities of women with respect to food, food preparation and the kitchen, the depiction of men with respect to food, its preparation and the eating thereof, and the influence of class and the ethnicity of the author’s intended audience. The article notes how these responsibilities have changed over time, particularly with regard to their content and appearance, as well as discusses the relationship between cookbooks and men. Cookbooks have become a mainstream subject of academic study, of popular culture and the media, not least of all for the insights that they provide about gender (especially in terms of the division of labour), ethnicity and culture, and while they have traditionally been aimed at white women, this is no longer always the case. Such gender issues are the primary focus of this article. The context of the book, namely South Africa under British colonial rule during the late 1800s and early 1900s, is also considered in order to shed light on the questions of ethnicity and culture. Duckitt’s affinity for the British Empire is explored, as well as her views about the indigenous people of South Africa, their roles with respect to food, and their place in the colonial home. Lastly, the article takes stock of Duckitt’s voracious appetite for new knowledge and its production, despite the patriarchy of the time.

“We Eat Sushi Now”: Targeting Hungry Students at South African Universities

Media reports, research, and student support services are paying an increasing amount of attention to the hunger experienced by students at South African universities. This article demonstrates that most of this attention is rooted in a food security paradigm, or in approaches that mitigate the effects of student hunger. It avoids addressing the causes of hunger, which lie in oppressive systems such as the neoliberal world food system and the operation of the entrepreneurial public university. Our discussion of trends at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) takes two trajectories: We explore the ways in which universities’ practical and research priorities reinforce hegemonic responses to hunger, and we reflect on explicitly politicised currents of critical work around students and hunger. What certain scholars and activists have termed “critical food system literacy” signals how transformative strategies and knowledge production are being developed at some universities—sometimes beyond the parameters of what is conventionally seen as food-centred advocacy, activism, or research.

On Becoming Food

This essay reflects on pregnancy as a process through which women are encouraged to become “good mothers” by “eating well”. It uses nutritional guidelines for pregnant women to explore the way in which pregnant bodies are conceptualised as filtration systems that, through self-discipline, can prevent pollutants in food from reaching the foetus – thereby ensuring foetal health, and ultimately population health. This process risks taming or domesticating the political agency of women under the guise of celebrating them as good mothers.

“Hot Chicks on Board” – Gender, Meat, and Violence in Food Marketing in, and from, South Africa

From local wholesale delivery trucks that transport the flesh of chickens, to sexist adverts by South African-owned fast-food chains with national and international reach, the gendered nature of the marketing and consumption of meat in South Africa is evident in multiple media. This article analyses vehicle livery and television and printed adverts devised to sell meat to consumers, and argues that the representations of bodies – those of womxn and the bodies of other species – as being available for consumption (visual or otherwise), is an expression of the gendered social processes associated with food “production” and consumption (visual and physical) and the patriarchal capitalocene. The representations and production of food are innately linked to multiple forms of violence, including the repetitive visual aggressions associated with the female form being constantly under scrutiny and available for consumption. In the visual representations of convenience foods, the food and the absent referents they rely on deploy stereotypes of heteromasculinities and (hyper)femininities and are used to reinforce hierarchies of gender, species, and economic systems (and the violence associated with them). These images and food items thus act as “ordinary” indexes of patriarchal, capitalocene power relations.

The “Gospel of Fatness” and Acts of Sitophobia: The Foodscape and Power Relations at the Grahamstown Lunatic Asylum, 1890 to circa 1910

The article explores the foodscape of the Grahamstown Lunatic Asylum, South Africa, from 1890 to circa 1910. The staff of the asylum were disciples of the “gospel of fatness” in which a patient’s weight gain was regarded as an index of restored physical health and possibly also the onset of convalescence from mental illness. Nevertheless, the practice of this gospel at the asylum did not amount to an equitable distribution of food. Instead, the diet scale that the patients received was based on their race, sex and status as paying or non-paying patients. Although the patients were able to secure more food rations via sanctioned and illicit foodways, it is of significance that some patients sought to resist the regimen of the asylum and its dietary scale by acts of sitophobia – the refusal to eat. The study concludes by investigating the themes presented in the acts of sitophobia committed by women.

Gendered and Ecological Struggles in Southern Africa: Land and Seed

Situating feminist investigations of food in Southern Africa within a broader discussion of the ecological crisis and the appropriation of nature reveals important connections between ecological and women’s struggles. This article draws on ecofeminist scholarship regarding ecological struggles pertaining to land and seed in order to explore the politics of food and its relation to women, nature and society in Southern Africa. It highlights that inherited and assumed ideas of nature have a direct bearing on the dominant conception of food. The article emphasises that feminist agencies are often silenced in food struggles and food scholarship despite the gendered nature of foodwork and women’s defence against nature’s appropriation. In concluding, the article invites us to see food in its totality and develop a new food logic.

Trapped in Debt: Gendered Life and Western Cape Farms

This article draws on interviews with women farm workers and trade union organisers as well as my observations as an activist working with farm workers in post-apartheid South Africa. It highlights women farm workers’ entrapment in past and present cycles of disempowerment, drawing attention to the paradox that the producers of food are often those who have least access to the most basic human rights, including the right to food. Poor working conditions and low wages create indebtedness and a dependence on farm owners and therefore perpetuate powerlessness. The article highlights the complexities of how these farm workers navigate worlds of food production and food purchasing.