Background and Defintions

Despite a contemporary milieu that emphasises fluidities across gender boundaries and shifting roles, the 75 respondents in the study that informs this paper presented their food auto/biographies as a type of transformation narrative heavily influenced by the continued intersectionalities of gender and class. Respondents utilised ‘common vocabularies’ (Mills 1959) and conformed to cultural scripts of what might be considered appropriate middle class and highly gendered foodways when developing a taste for ‘good’ food. The focus of this paper centres on the notion of food ‘play’ rather than food ‘work’ as significant in the performance of a gendered cultural habitus, whereby men distanced themselves from notions of feminised domesticity and health discourses by resorting to both hegemonic masculinities and epicurean foodways. This raises questions with regards to cultural influences on everyday foodways, as well as notions of what it means to be a gourmet, epicure and/or food adventurer within a contemporary foodscape. Indeed, for the male respondents in this UK based study a commitment to epicurean foodways becomes a field for the performance of hegemonic masculinities with the ‘gourmet food adventurer’ emerging from this culinary field coded elite and male.