Lauren Malka: “Gastronomy is masculine, gluttony is feminine”

Can you name a legendary scene, from cinema or literature, in which a group of women gather around a table to happily devour the dishes presented to them? If this is difficult for you, try the exercise with men instead. Miracle (or not): there are many. So where are the eaters? It is this thorny question that Lauren Malka addresses in a fascinating work, which scrutinizes women’s intimate relationship with food.

Interview with Lauren Malka, author of “Eaters: History of those who devour, savor or deprive themselves to excess.”

To miss. Why this book?

Lauren Malka. Because women’s relationship with food remains a taboo. Like sex, our passion for cooking is everywhere in the media, in fiction, on Instagram… but it is only from a male point of view: through images of men eating or women licking, biting and doing everything to make yourself appetizing. . The intimate, conflictual and tiring relationship that women often have with food (and with the act of eating) remains a blind core whose history and construction have not been studied. Instead, we trivialize the way women perpetually feel guilty about eating, often seeking subterfuge to not do so, apologizing when they do… sometimes to the point of upsetting their body and their desire.

Your book shows that throughout history men have strengthened their brotherhood around large banquets, and women their brotherhood by exchanging advice on how to shine in the kitchen or lose weight. Where does this gender divide come from?

When we look at literature, cinema and mythology, men eat while women simply prepare and serve the food. It’s a model that goes back a long time and has continued to strengthen throughout history. One of the first fundamental steps in its construction is found in the ancient imagination. Greek mythology, like the Bible, believes that women are much more vulnerable to the sin of gluttony. This sin is the first, from which all the others derive. He who sends humanity to its ruin. Pandora, who is the Greek equivalent of Eve, is depicted as a womb, devoted to her impulses. The woman is a gaping hole that drains the man’s reserves (and therefore his sexual energy).

Another crucial stage of this gender construction: the invention of gastronomy. It is a way for men to continue eating while freeing themselves from the sin of gluttony. The invention of this gastronomic eloquence is an erudite and cultured way of eating. They officially exclude women who risk distracting them. At the time, they were forbidden to eat seriously and become gourmets. Gastronomy is masculine while gluttony is feminine.

A distinction that still persists today: in the collective imagination, women are often associated with sugar. This is a way of suggesting that she did not develop a palate and therefore did not work to connect intellect to taste.

However, throughout history you have found initiatives by women who had the same idea. What happened to them?

“Gourmet” is a word that, even today, only exists in the masculine form. But, carrying out my research, I actually realized that initially it was an adjective that only exists in the feminine! The “groumète” of the mid-14th century^And century, is a wine broker. It is impossible to know what happened to this word and this function, since in the 15th^And century, the word “gourmet” replaced that of groumète. It is the servant who brings the wines and tastes them. From the 18th^And century, he also becomes capable of tasting good food and commenting on it. I then asked myself if, by looking carefully, we could find the traces of certain gourmets! That is, women whose job was to taste and comment on foods and drinks.

I found traces of a moving woman, Juana Inès de la Cruz, who lived in a convent in Mexico at the end of the 17th^And century and spent his time between the kitchen and the library. In 1691 she realized that it was regrettable that all the accumulated knowledge and all the thoughts that made her appreciate the philosophical dimension of food preparation were not recorded in a book, or at least in a broadcast. So you write to an influential bishop telling him that you would like to give life to an art and a philosophy of good food and also consider this practice as a way to combat frivolities and sins of gluttony. In a word, gastronomy. Her request went unheard and her name was completely forgotten. Her culinary discoveries, like those of other sisters from Mexico or Spain, were published in cookbooks … signed by men.

Another part of your book focuses on the relationship with weight, marked by the paradoxical injunction to embody fat, while being fat and thin at the same time. What does this ambiguity reveal?

During my investigation I was confronted with a recurring prejudice which consists in making the diktat of thinness a recent and very geographically localized phenomenon. As if it was born with women’s magazines… Instead, based on the work of researchers, anthropologists, sociologists and philosophers, I discovered that it was exactly the opposite. Since ancient times, intellect has been on the side of thinness, while laziness and moral decay have been on the side of fat.

The norm of thinness is socially imposed on everyone, men and women, as a sign of moderation and social correctness. However, there is an injunction that concerns only women: fat ones. Women have to be thin and fat at the same time. Fat in some places: the chest, the buttocks… In some civilizations, this gives rise to a mixture of ritual force-feeding to become marriageable and massages to stay slim in life. In our society, this gives rise to the consumption of some toxic substances, such as what Jennifer Padjemi identifies in her book, selfie : Apetamine syrup, illegal in Europe, is popular everywhere because it helps reach Kim Kardashian’s body.

Simone de Beauvoir analyzes this injunction in a fascinating way: women are expected to leave traces of their natural passivity, a way of discreetly signaling that they offer themselves to the man. Their body should not emit any trace of activity, no active muscles should be detected. There is a need for social thinness and a discreet sign of fat that makes them almost helpless in the most eroticized parts of their body. The lower they are on the social ladder, the more visible these signs should be. Hence the myth of “ fat black woman » that justifies an ideology of the superior white race, as Sabina Strings shows in her work “ Fearing the black body “. Being thin and fat at the same time is therefore an impossible combination to be socially educated and at the same time offer yourself to men.

However, you write that thinness is one of the first feminist demands. How did this work against us?

As I said, thinness is an ancient norm. What is more recent for women, however, is the thinness without traces of fat, slender, boyish thinness, which appeared in the 1920s and 1930s. At the beginning of the first wave of feminism, women wanted to shed their corsets, corsets and countless slips to go to work. They want to make themselves comfortable, without revealing the excess of their flesh or their soft curves that are associated with their essentialization of the mother and sexual objects.

On the other hand, what is truly surprising and sometimes disappointing about the history of feminism is that it is littered with backlashes: what Susan Faludi calls “backlash.” This is a classic method to make women bitterly regret their attempt at emancipation. A recovery, by the market, of the tools of emancipation: “ Do you want to be slim? ok, it doesn’t matter, but then we will have to suffer, my dears! “. It was at that moment that all the eroticism of the thin woman appeared, which had not existed before. Mona Chollet further observed that the cultural model of thinness thrives in periods when women conquer new positions in the social and political world.

Throughout your work the issue of eating disorders emerges implicitly. Why this common thread?

My book begins and ends with CAW. This is because for me everything leads to this. I believe that this very particular history of women with food, the fact that they are led to spend much more time than men in the kitchen abstaining from eating and to maintain a secret, but officially impulsive, relationship with food… all of this leads them, in my opinion, at one time or another in their lives, to suffer or inflict on themselves a painful, guilty, sometimes obsessive and unhealthy relationship with food. A relationship that can lead to eating disorders.

Sociologists confirm that it is from the age of 3 that girls are encouraged to indulge in gluttony and are scolded. While boys, just as greedy and attracted to sugar as girls, are encouraged to open their culinary curiosity and discover more complex flavors, to refine their palate with cheese or mustard. It’s a part of femininity that girls learn very early. It’s a way to tell girls, through the first language of food, ” you will have to get frustrated “.