This weekend I’m at a conference called Feminism and Food, courtesy of CSWIP— the Canadian Society of Women in Philosophy. It’s happening at the University of Guelph, where Samantha works, and she’s one of the organizers. Thanks, Sam (and all the others), for such a great conference!
The talks have been so fun and thought-provoking (in very good ways), that I wanted to share a few of the tidbits with y’all. Here we go:
Maybe you’ve been thinking for a while now, “I wonder– is sourdough actually sexist?” Or not. But Vanessa Lehan-Streisel has thought a lot about it. She looked at the resurgence of sourdough bread and the rise of celebrity male bread bakers. What’s the upshot of all this: she says that they’ve injected technical terms (like algorithm) and use of super-fancy and super-expensive appliances that ignore the long ( I mean really long) tradition of women bakers, baking sourdough and all sorts of other bread without shouting about it or going on social media, etc. She’s got a point here.
Am I a compost pile? Well, no, but… Shannon Boss showed us that food is not only about health, but also about dissolution. We may not come from compost, but to compost we shall go. This may not seem like a happy message, but it was refreshing to be reminded that we are natural organisms, subject to the forces of nature.
There’s more to say, but the conference is still going on, and I don’t want to miss a crumb.
