I have to tell you something

Many of you dear readers may know already, but I thought this particular news definitely warranted a blog post and some more detail! I have been accepted to present my thesis at a conference at Cornell this spring! The conference is called “The Language of Food: Exploring Representations of the Culinary in Culture” and it takes place in April. (I’m told the website will be updated with my name as one of the presenters at some point!) I will be presenting with three others as part of the Anthropology Panel, Food as Celebration and Spectacle.

My paper is called Chowing Down: How Actresses Use Food to Gain Attention and Lose Respect. If you’re interested, I’m including my 500-word abstract below.

Documented instances of public eating (DIPE) have proliferated in men’s magazines in the past decade. A DIPE occurs during an interview between a journalist (usually male) and an actress with a lot of sex appeal. Her publicist schedules an interview during a meal, hoping to limit the writer’s ability to ask prying questions and providing a built-in topic of conversation; Jeff Gordinier from the New York Times called it “a Hollywood filibuster.” Knowing full well that her order will make its way into the article, the sexy starlet chooses the sort of decadent comfort food bound to defy expectations. She waxes poetic about how much she loves mac and cheese and the journalist eats it up. But readers know better.

Actresses, like the rest of womankind, have a strong sense of duty to curb their appetites and readers often question whether the food has been “planted.” Indeed, it has: DIPE has persisted as a PR tactic for about a decade. Although it appears to be a welcome rejection of the prudishness which formerly cautioned women against eating in public, this dubious embrace of the female appetite offers only the illusion of female power, thinly disguised as liberation. Actresses who use DIPE may gain recognition and attention, but it will not earn them respect. That this utterly hollow salaciousness is seen as a de facto triumph over the traditional second-wave feminist project serves only to highlight the constant tensions between bodily discipline and femininity to which no woman, even an actress, is immune.

I intend to explore a number of factors within American culture that have led to a moment where DIPE can flourish, including:

- Visual media. The way we think about the intersection of food and femininity has changed, paving the way for DIPE to be meaningful to the average reader.
- Food porn. Americans have become accustomed to visually consuming fetishized images of food in the same way they would a centerfold pin-up.
- Celebrity chefs. Cooking shows were the precursor to DIPE.
- Hollywood and food. The embrace of appetite within a DIPE is nothing but a publicist’s fabrication.
- Comfort food. Celebrity DIPEs have resonated so effectively and thoroughly with audiences that average women have begun to work the system the other way, using the indulgence and authenticity of fried food as a catapult into the national spotlight.
- Softcore starlets. Written DIPEs, which do not leave much to the imagination to begin with, are often accompanied by photographs in a weird convergence of food porn and actual porn.
- Lipstick feminism. Actresses who consent to DIPE are heavily invested in the appeal of their physicality and use it to their advantage.

Food and femininity have always been uneasy bedfellows, and DIPE is the latest form of negotiation between the two. The problem is that actresses are on the wrong side of the table. Far more subtle than the corset and yet in many ways just as restrictive, DIPE is a reminder that women are still seen as objects to be looked instead of individuals.