To housekeep, one had to plan ahead and carry items of motley nature around in the mind and at the same time preside, as mother had, at the table, just as if everything from the liver and bacon, to the succotash, to the French toast and strawberry jam, had not been matters of forethought and speculation.
Fannie Hurst, Imitation of Life
Life’s riches other rooms adorn. But in a kitchen home is born.
Epigram hanging in the kitchen of a lesbian family
Preparing a meal occurs within an elaborate set of social, economic, and cultural frameworks that determine when and with whom we eat, what and how much we eat, what we buy and where we go buy it, and when and with what tools and techniques we prepare a meal. [...] As sociologist Marjorie DeVault convincingly argues in Feeding the Family (1991), the work of preparing and sharing meals creates family. Many lesbigay families point to the continuous preparation of daily meals and/or the occasional preparation of elaborate meals as evidence of their status as families. The labor involved in planning and preparing meals enables family to happen in both heterosexual and in lesbigay households. However, both the extent and the character of feeding activities can vary dramatically from one household to the next and often reflects the influence of socioeconomic factors like social class, occupation, and gender, among others.
In this chapter I pursue two objectives in the investigation of feeding work in lesbigay families. First, I explore feeding work through analyzing its character and revealing its often hidden dimensions. This entails some discussion of how families conceive of and articulate the work of feeding. For instance, participants use a number of rhetorical strategies to portray the organization of feeding in their households. Many participants use two distinctions: cooking/cleaning and cooking/shopping. I will show how these distinctions function to create a sense of egalitarianism and to obfuscate rather than clarify the process of feeding. This inevitably leads to questions about the division of feeding work in lesbigay households. [...] Second, in this chapter I explore how socioeconomic differences among lesbigay households influence feeding activities, and vice-versa. Therein, just as feeding work can create family identity for participants, so too can feeding work create gender, ethnic, class, and sexual identities.
As DeVault (1991) so aptly describes in her study of feeding work in heterosexual families, the people who do feeding work often find it difficult to describe the task. Commonly held definitions and most sociological investigations of domestic labor often reduce feeding work to cooking, shopping, and cleaning up the kitchen—the most apparent expressions of feeding. But when interviewing and engaging in participant observation with people who perform these functions, it becomes clear that cooking and shopping refer to a wide range of dispersed activities that punctuate the days of those who feed. It includes things like knowledge of what family members like to eat, nutritional concerns, a sense of work and recreation schedules, a mental list of stock ingredients in the cupboard, a mental time line of how long fruits and vegetables will last, etc. Frequently, these activities go unnoticed because they often happen residually and unreflectively. For instance, the way that one comes to know about the character and qualities of food stuffs—through experimentation, through conversations with colleagues, through browsing in a cookbook at a bookstore, through reading the food section in the newspaper—these activities often appear as recreation or as an expression of personal interest and not as forms of work. Yet, to successfully feed a family, such activities must occur and consume the energy and time of those who do them. In order to illuminate the full character of feeding work in lesbigay families, I want to look behind the traditional typologies of cooking, shopping, and cleaning and reveal the dynamic and invisible character of much of the work involved in feeding these families.
Feeding actually consists of a number of distinct processes including planning, shopping, preparation, and management of meals. Planning presumes the possession of several forms of knowledge about food, about the household, about significant others, and about cultural rules and practices toward food. In most of the lesbigay families in this study, one person emerges as a fairly easily identified meal planner; hereafter I refer to such persons as planners. Planning for most families means thinking ahead, perhaps a day or two or even a week, but in many cases just a few hours before a meal. For those who decide what to eat on a day-to-day basis, they often decide and plan meals while at work. Matthew Corrigan, an office administrator, put it like this:
Usually we decide something at the last minute. Or sometimes we go out with someone. We rarely go out with just us two, but with others as well. If Greg is home in time and has an inspiration, he will make something, but the general pattern is for me to throw something together when I get home. I usually decide at work what to make.
A retail clerk, Scott McKendrick, reports: “We decide right before we eat. We go out to the store and buy enough brown rice for several days or a package of chicken breasts or broccoli. We shop every three days.” “We” actually refers to Scott’s partner, Gary Hosokawa, a thirty-six-year-old bookkeeper who works for a small hotel. Earlier in the interview, Scott reports that his partner cooks 75 percent of the time, and later in the interview he indicates that his partner stops at the store several days a week. In fact, Scott makes few planning decisions. His partner Gray makes most of them. [...] Many times the partner who pulls together meals on a daily basis does not consider what they do as planning. One computer engineer, Brad O’Neil, explains: “I hardly ever plan. It just happens at the last minute.” Further questioning reveals he often decides at work what to make and often stops at the store to buy missing ingredients. Like the other planners, Brad knows the foodstuffs available at home, he knows where to go to get what he needs, and he knows how to prepare the food. Mentally, he draws the connections between things at home, the things he needs, and a potential meal. He plans, through he fails to recognize his efforts as such.
In some instances, someone plans for a longer period of time, often a week. Those partners who plan by the week more readily recognize the planning they do. While some planners find the effort enriching and pleasant, many others express a certain amount of frustration with the process, particularly in deciding what to make. Randy Ambert, an airline flight attendant, expresses the frustration this way:
I find that he doesn’t give me any input. I rarely make things he doesn’t like, but he doesn’t tell me what he wants to have, I have to do that every single week. I am constantly searching for clues as to what he likes and doesn’t like. I don’t think he truly appreciates how much effort it takes.
Sucheng Kyutaro, an office manager for a real estate agency, explains:
I also find it hard to figure out what she likes to eat, I think. It’s a pain to get her to tell me what she will eat and then she becomes annoyed when I forget it the next time. I think about her every time I try to come up with some dinner items.
These comments illustrate one of the hidden forms of work involved in feeding: learning what others will and will not eat and learning to predict their responses. Hochschild (1983) uses the terms emotion work or emotion management to refer to this kind of empathetic activity, quite often performed by women, but as my research suggests, by many gay men as well. When thinking about domestic work, most people conjure up images of cleaning bathrooms, buying groceries and cooking meals. Emotion management involves the process of establishing empathy with another, interpreting behavior and conducting yourself in a way that “produces the proper state of mind in others” (Hochschild 1983, 7). Emotion management involves the management of feelings, both of your own and those of others. For example, it involves efforts to soothe feelings of anger in when someone “feels down.” Sucheng’s effort another or to enhance feelings of self-worth to “think about her partner every time” she plans a meal, in order to avoid producing “annoyance” in her partner, constitutes emotion work. Sucheng hope to create an emotional state of satisfaction and happiness in her partner through her feeding efforts.
Most lesbigay families, just like most heterosexual families, do not engage in the emotion work of feeding in an egalitarian way. For example, partners in lesbigay relationships do not share equal knowledge of the food tastes and preferences of each other. Queries about the food preference of partners reveal a highly differentiated pattern, where the planners possess extensive and detailed knowledge of their partner’s preference and food concerns, while their partners know comparatively little about the planner’s tastes. In response to a question about his partner’s food preference, Steven Beckett, a retired real estate agent, reports that “he will not eat ‘undercooked’ or what the rest of us call normally cooked chicken, if he finds any red near the bone he will throw it across the room. Milk has to be low fat. Pork has to be quite cooked. He likes things quite spiced. He doesn’t like peas or Brussels sprouts.” Steven’s partners, Anthony Manlapit, answers, “I think he likes a lot of things, I know he likes to eat out a lot.” In response to the same question, Robert Bachafen, a school librarian, responds, “Yes. I stay away from radishes, shellfish, and certain soups. It’s basically trail and error. He won’t touch barbecued meats. I have learned over the years what he will and will not eat.” His partner, Greg Sandwater, an architect, says, “I can’t think of anything. He is not too fussy.” Emily Fortune, a homemaker and mother of infant twins, as well as an accountant who works at home replies, “She doesn’t care for pork. She has a reaction to shrimp. She doesn’t like fish that much. Used to be that she wouldn’t eat chicken. She doesn’t like bell peppers. She doesn’t like milk.” Her partner, Alice Lauer, a rapid transit driver, says, “There aren’t too many things she doesn’t like.” A finance manager for a savings and loan company, Joan Kelsey, replies, “Liver, brussels sprouts, she doesn’t like things with white sauces. She is not as fond of junk food as I am.” Her partner, Kathy Atwood, an accountant, responds, “I can’t think of much of anything she doesn’t like.”
Steven, Robert, Alice, and Joan all plan meals and hold responsibility for the lion’s share of feeding work. The partners of these meal planners confidently assert that their partners tend to like most things. Not true. In interviews I asked explicit questions about food likes and dislikes and found that planners indeed hold food preferences though their partners often do not readily know them. The ease with which planners cite detailed accounts of their partner’s food likes and dislikes suggests that they use such knowledge with some frequency. Coming to know a partner’s food preferences takes work: questioning, listening, and remembering. Successful feeding depends on this effort. [...]
While the planners need to learn the food preferences of family members and continuously learn about food and its preparation from a variety of sources, they must also take into consideration a whole set of concerns about nutrition. Such concerns seem omnipresent in our society, through my research indicates some significant variation by both gender and age regarding this issue. Many of the planners work within fairly stringent guidelines regarding the nutritional content of the meals they prepare. [...] Many lesbian and gay-male (in particular) families fight over the nutritional content of food. These concerns cast a long shadow over the entire feeding process for some of the male planners. Joe McFarland, an attorney, states:
We constantly fight about it. I am more conscious of fat and calorie content and seem to have to remind Richard constantly about it. He prepares great meals, but I am trying desperately to stay in shape. He gets upset because sometimes I just won’t eat what he made or very much of it. I don’t see why it’s so hard for him to make low-fat stuff.
His partner, Richard Neibuhr, who does the feeding work, perceives it this way:
Yes. Well, we try to cut fat. We eat a lot less red meat. We eat fish and poultry and we always skin the poultry because that’s not too good for you. We eat a lot of rice and potatoes and avoid white cheese and butter. It all boils down to him trying to sustain his sexual attractiveness, I think. It would be easier for me to tell you things he will eat. He will not eat pork, no sausage. He eats one or two types of fish, he eats chicken and pasta. Anything other than that, it’s a battle royal to get him to eat. It’s too fat! He won’t eat Greek, Mexican, Chinese—forget it. He will eat Italian, but only with light marinara sauces, sea bass, sole, skinless chicken, and that’s about it. He is very picky and it all comes down to his effort to look beautiful. It’s a lot of work to come up with meals that meet his dietary standards and yet still taste good and don’t bore you to death.
Note the extent of Richard’s knowledge about his partner’s food preferences. Also note that Richard carries the burden of making sure the meals remain nutritionally sound.
Lesbian households also report conflicts over the nutritional quality of meals. Deborah James, a daycare worker, shares the following thoughts:
Yeah, she doesn’t want me to fry things because it makes such a mess and she has to clean it up. She would rather that I stir-fry and make more vegetables. She likes my cooking because it tastes good, but she would rather eat healthier than I would. I think my cooking sort of reminds her of her growing up. She partly likes that and she partly doesn’t because it reminds her of being poor and I think the food I make sometimes, she thinks she’s too good for it, that she should eat like rich people eat. I try to keep her happy, though.
Emily Fortune, a work-at-home accountant in her early thirties who recently became the mother of twins, maintains concern over both her partner’s nutrition and her newborn children’s nutrition. Emily, in response to a question about conflict over food states:
Yes, I am still nursing, so I watch out for what the babies are going to get. We are no longer vegetarians. We both were at one time, but I eat a lot of protein for the babies. I think Alice would prefer a more vegetarian diet that was better for her. I try to think up meals that are healthy for all of them, both Alice and the babies. It’s hard, though.
In most cases the meal planner becomes responsible for preparing meals that conform to dietary preferences and nutritional regimes.
In sum, planning meals, learning about foodstuffs and techniques, considering the preferences and emotions of significant others, and overseeing nutritional strategies frame the essential yet invisible precursor work to the actual daily process of preparing a meal. However, before the preparation begins, one must shop.
Shopping includes much more than the weekly trips to buy food products. DeVault (1991) recommends the use of the term provisioning to capture the character of the work involved in shopping. Provisioning assumes several forms of mental work that precede the actual purchase of food, including determining family members’ food preferences, dietary concerns, as well as culturally specific concerns about food. Further, provisioning depends upon the following additional activities: developing a standard stock of food, learning where to buy the “appropriate” food, monitoring current supplies, scheduling grocery trips, making purchases within particular financial constraints and building flexibility into the process. Each of these components appears in lesbigay households and most often fall to the planner to orchestrate and perform.
Quite often these dimensions of provisioning go unrecognized and get subsumed in the rhetorical strategies participants use to describe the division of feeding work. More than half of the lesbigay family members use the distinction cooking/shopping to describe the division of tasks in meal preparation. This distinction creates an egalitarian impression, as in the phrase “She cooks and I shop.” But the distinction conceals. In most cases the person with responsibility for cooking either did the actual shopping himself or herself or they prepared a list for the other person to use at the market. Responses to queries about who writes grocery lists illustrate this dynamic, as Carey Becker, a part-time radiologist, put it: “I write the list for major shopping for the most part, as well. She knows what brand to buy, so I don’t tell her that. But I am the one who knows what we need and I make the list up for her.” Daniel SenYung, a health educator, speaks of a similar pattern: “During the week when we are cooking, we write things on the list. He is more likely to do that, I guess, because he is cooking and will run out of stuff, so I get it at the store. He knows what we need.” Note the recurrence of the phrase “knows what we need.” In both instances the phrase refers to the possession of a stock knowledge of foodstuffs. Planners develop and possess an extensive mental list of standard ingredients used in their kitchens. In the research I asked to see the current grocery list, should one exist. I saw thirty-two such lists. In the wide majority of cases, just one person wrote the list or wrote more than three-quarters of the items on the list. In those relationships where participants make a distinction between shopping and cooking meals, lists become longer and more detailed. For instance, many planners specify brand names or write down terms like ripe avocado instead of just avocado. The cumulative effect of such detailed list writing greatly simplifies the work of shopping and undermines the seeming egalitarianism of the cooking/shopping distinction.
In most households, shopping includes a number of smaller trips to supplement throughout the week. In the wide majority of lesbigay families, one person makes these supplemental trips. In most cases, the person who bears responsibility for meal preparation does this type of shopping. They often stop at the store at lunch or, more often, on their way home from work. While many families initially indicate that they split cooking from shopping, in reality the person who cooks often shops throughout the week while the other partner makes “major” shopping trips, usually on weekends and often using a shopping list prepared by the planner at home. At first glance the intermittent shopping trips during the week appear ad hoc and supplemental in character. Yet for many lesbigay households, particularly in the lesbian and gay enclaves of San Francisco, these little trips constitute the essential core of feeding. Many planners shop at corner markets near their homes or places of work, frequently purchasing the central ingredients for the meal that evening—fresh meats and vegetables, breads, and pastas. In many respects the weekend shopping actually looks more supplemental. Again, the grocery lists prove instructive. They contain many more entries for items like cereals, granola bars, sugar, mustard, yogurt, and soda than for the central elements in evening meals: vegetables, fresh pasta, fish, chicken, bread, potatoes, corn, prepared sauces, and often milk.
The intermittent shopper often operates with a great degree of foresight. Alma Duarte, a bookkeeper for a small business, belies the ad hoc characterization of daily grocery trips:
Every couple of days, I go to the store. I do the in-between shopping. Every couple of days, I run down and pick up stuff we need or are running out of. I buy vegetables, fish, and bread. I buy the heavy items at Calla Market because she has a back problem, so I buy like soda and detergent and kitty litter, but she does the big shopping on weekends. I almost always go and buy fish on Monday afternoons at a fish market near where I work and then I stop at the produce market near home. And I have to go and get fresh vegetables every couple days over there.
Alma speaks of at least three destinations, and she obviously organizes her schedule to accommodate these different trips. One might think that this kind of shopping appears rather routine, after all, she describes it as “in between.” Note that she does not consider this effort major, rather her partner does “big” shopping. Yet each of Alma’s little shopping trips consists of a rather large number of choices about feeding. She must decide on what kind of fish and conceive of other items to serve with it. She decides when to go for vegetables and chooses among myriad varieties, making sure not to buy the same ones over and over yet also measuring the quality of the produce. Interestingly, she identifies her partner as the shopper, though she actually makes most of the feeding and provisioning decisions for her family. [...]
Another component of feeding work revolves around the efforts of planners to monitor the supply of foods and other household products. DeVault suggests the complexity of monitoring work:
Routines for provisioning evolve gradually out of decisions that are linked to the resources and characteristics of particular households and to features of the market.... Monitoring also provides a continual testing of typical practices. This testing occurs as shoppers keep track of changes on both sides of the relation: household needs and products available. (1991, 71)
Lesbigay family members, both planners and others, attest to clear patterns of specialization when it comes to who keeps tabs on both food products and other household products like cleaning supplies, toiletries, and items like dinner candles. Very few families reported splitting this effort up equally, and even those that did, did so gingerly. Susan Posner, an employment recruiter in the computer industry, recounts: “Neither one of us keeps track. It just kind of surfaces that we need something. We don’t have a list or anything. I guess whoever runs out of toilet paper first. And I guess I run out of toilet paper a lot. [Laughter] Okay, so maybe I do it.” Susan’s comments should give pause to students of domestic labor. Her comments reveal not only that she does the work of monitoring supplies, but also that she seems either unaware or perhaps to be attempting to deny that she does it. The planners, who do much of the monitoring, frequently speak of the dynamic character of the work. Tim Cisneros, a registered nurse, describes how he needed to change his routine in order to get the right deodorant for his partner:
I mostly shop at Diamond Heights Safeway, though now I go over to Tower Market as well, at least once a month. 1 started doing that because Paul is hyperallergic to most deodorants, and he needs to use one special kind, and Safeway stopped carrying it. I tried to get it at the drugstore next to Safeway, but they don’t carry it, either. So now, I go to Tower to get it. I buy other stuff while I’m there, so it’s not really a big deal.
Tim captures the dynamic quality of provisioning. As demands change in the household or products change in the market, he comes up with new strategies to maintain equilibrium. Among roughly half of the families reporting a shopping/ cooking division, more discussion of products occurs. Narvin Wong, a financial consultant in healthcare, comments:
We sometimes get our wires crossed. I buy what he puts on the list, and that’s almost always what we usually buy. I mean, I know what we need, but sometimes he changes his mind about what he needs and I don’t always remember him telling me. Like a few weeks ago, he put olive oil on the list, and 1 bought olive oil. He says he told me that he wanted to start using extra-virgin olive oil. Well, I didn’t hear that, and he yelled and steamed about it when he unpacked the groceries.
Narvin’s comments suggest that perhaps less of this kind of conflict takes place in households where one person performs both the actual shopping and the provisioning work behind the trips to the store. Further, Narvin’s partner, Lawrence Shoong, says that he often tries to go with Narvin to the store. Why?
Because it gives me a chance to see what’s out there. Narvin doesn’t look for new things. Even if he does, he doesn’t tell me about them. I like to know what’s in season and just to see what’s new. And inevitably, he forgets stuff. I know I should write it on the list, which is what he says, but when I go to the store, I can go up and down the rows and remember what we have and what we need.
Again, this points to the interdependent and dynamic character of feeding work. To do it successfully, given the way our society distributes foodstuffs and defines appropriate eating, the meal planner needs to stay in contact with the marketplace. Many planners do this through reading grocery flyers in the paper or in the mail, but many also try to stay in contact with the store itself. As Lawrence’s comments suggest, much of provisioning work takes place in one’s mind, the place where much of the hidden work of monitoring takes place.
Just as the work of monitoring the household and the marketplace come into view as highly dynamic processes, so too does the planner monitor the dynamic schedules of family members as a part of provisioning work. This means that many planners shop with the goal of providing a great deal of flexibility in meal options. For instance, many planners report selecting at least some dinner items that they can easily move to another night of the week should something come up. Sarah Lynch, a graphic artist who works in a studio at home, captures the dynamic circumstances under which she provisions meals:
I never have any idea when Andrea will get here. She may stay at the bank until 11:00 at night. Sometimes, she doesn’t know up until right before 5:00 whether she will be able to come home. So I still want us to eat together and I want her to get a decent meal, so I try to buy things that I can make quickly and that still taste good. She will call me from her car phone as soon as she is leaving the city. That gives me about an hour. I often will make something like a lasagna that I can then heat up when she calls, or I buy a lot of fresh pastas, in packages, you know the ones, and I will start that when she calls. I also try to buy a lot of snacklike items, healthy ones, but things like crackers and trail mix and dried fruit so that she can eat those things if she is really hungry and went without lunch or something, and so I can eat white I am waiting for her to get here.
Similarly, Matthew Corrigan, an office administrator, provisions meals to accommodate the schedule of his partner:
I sometimes find it hard to keep a handle on things. Greg is active in a number of voluntary things—our church and a hospice for PWAs—and he serves on a City task force on housing issues. I am never completely sure he will be here for the meals I plan. So I try to have a lot of food around that we can make quickly and easily, like soups, veggie burgers, and pastas. If it gets too tight, and it often does, we will eat out, or just he will eat out and then I eat something at home, and hopefully I have something here to make.
Both Matthew and Sarah provision their households in light of the need to build in flexibility around the work and social schedules of their partners and themselves. The effort they put into this kind of dynamic provisioning frequently goes unnoticed and often appears routine, but they clearly think about these scheduling concerns in the work of provisioning for their families.
In addition to the efforts planners make in monitoring schedules, supplies, and markets, many also report concerns about monitoring finances. Participants refer to financial concerns in deciding what to eat and where to shop. The cutting of coupons both illustrates financial concerns and demonstrates the de facto division of provisioning work in many lesbigay families. Rarely do all family members report cutting coupons. For the most part, one partner, the planner/provisioner, cuts coupons. Tim Reskin, a clerk in a law firm, describes his use of coupons:
Over time I have developed a sense of the brands that I know that we prefer. Sometimes I have coupons that I use. It’s not like I will use any coupon, but if there’s something that seems interesting or we don’t have an opinion about, I might use that to decide. I always go through the Sunday paper and cut out the usable coupons. Cost is a big criterion for us.
In addition to cutting coupons, the less affluent households more often report that they compare prices, watch for sales and buy large-portioned products at discount stores like Costco and Food for Less. Lower-income planners also report spending more time reading grocery advertisements and going to different stores to buy sale items with the purpose of saving money in mind.
The estimates provided by participants regarding food expenditures provide additional insight into the division and character of feeding work. Weekly grocery expenditures vary significantly for lesbigay families, ranging from thirty dollars a week in the less affluent households to over two hundred and fifty dollars a week in the wealthier ones. Not that family members always agree on the cost of groceries. Planners estimate spending roughly thirty dollars more per week on groceries than their partners estimate. The thirty-dollar figure functions both as the mean and the median among the one hundred and three adult participants.
This knowledge gap in food expenditures points to several interesting dynamics. First, it reflects planners’ knowledge of the cost of the many small trips to the store during the week. Second, it indicates planners’ greater attentiveness to the cost of food items. Finally, it often points to the expectation of family members that planners should monitor and limit the cost of food. Consider the following examples. Tim Reskin and Philip Norris live in a distant East Bay suburb in a modest apartment. While they both work in the city, they live in the suburbs to avoid the high cost of housing in the city. Phillip performs much of the work of feeding their family. He plans the meals and creates much of the grocery list. In explaining why Tim does the bigger shopping on weekends, they both speak about financial concerns. Tim puts it this way: “Money, that’s a major part of the reason why he doesn’t go to the store. For Tim, he doesn’t take price into consideration as much as he should. I use coupons and don’t get distracted by advertising gimmicks at the store. I am more conscious of money.” Philip sees things somewhat differently, but points to the issue of cost as well.
He shops. He feels he has more control at the store. He feels he’s a smarter shopper. I tend to look for high quality, whereas he tends to look for the best price. He does seem sharper. Well, he thinks he has a better handle on excessive spending. I don’t know, though. You know, he does limit things during the major shopping, but then I have to go out and get things during the week. I am very, very careful about watching the cost. But you know what? Partly I have to go out and get things because of his complaints. He says that I cook blandly, like an Englishman. But the fact is, I work with what he brings home, and if he won’t buy spices or sauces or whatever, in order to save money, then the food will taste bland. He denies that’s what happens, but it is.
Phillip actually bears a significant part of the responsibility for monitoring food costs. Note the phrase “I am very, very careful about watching the cost.” Philip’s comments illustrate the interdependent character of monitoring costs and planning meals, but further, he also must consider his partner’s satisfaction with the meals.
A strikingly similar example emerges within a lesbian household. Marilyn Kemp and Letty Bartky live in one of the lesbigay neighborhoods of San Francisco. They both work in lower-level administrative jobs and find themselves struggling financially. They talk about the high cost of housing and how to cut corners in order to stay living in San Francisco. Letty, who performs much of the feeding work in the family, comments on Marilyn’s approach to weekend shopping:
Marilyn likes to shop like a Mormon—you know, be prepared for six months. She buys these huge boxes of stuff. I think it’s silly. I am more into going two or three times a week. Also, I like to take time to make up my mind, while she just wants to get through the store as fast as possible. She bitches that I don’t make interesting things to eat, but what does she expect given our financial constraints and her shopping regimen.
Marilyn sees it differently: “We don’t disagree much at all about shopping. I do it because I am more cost-conscious than she is.’’
Both of the above families suggest that it is one thing to manage the cost of groceries while shopping, but another matter entirely to manage the cost of groceries in the broader context of feeding the family.
The actual physical work of preparing meals each day requires thorough analysis. In some instances, the physical preparation of the meal occasionally begins in the morning when meal planners take items from the freezer to defrost for the evening meal. Some planners report other early morning efforts such as marinating meats, vegetables, of tofu. Most planners begin the meal preparation shortly after arriving home from work. Many report emptying the dishwasher or putting away dry dishes from the rack as one of the first steps in getting ready to prepare the evening meal. This point to the ambiguity of the cooking/cleaning distinction offered by many participants. The majority of meal planners arrive home from work earlier than their partners, more than an hour earlier in most cases. Depending on the menu items, which vary widely, participant’s estimate that meal preparation takes approximately an hour. The preparation of the meal involves mastering a number of different tasks, including coordinating the completion time of different elements of the meal, managing unexpected exigencies like telephone calls or conversations with family members, coping with missing ingredients or short supplies, and engaging in all of the techniques of food preparation, from cutting vegetables to kneading pizza dough to deboning fish to barbecuing meats.
Many meal preparers find it difficult to capture the character of the process involved in creating meals. Even those who seem well versed in cooking find it difficult to characterize the process in its true fullness and complexity. Clyde Duesenberry, who prepares most of the meals in the house, comments:
We make pesto quite a bit. We have that with fried chicken or some sausage or whatever. We like breaded foods. We like Wienerschnitzel. We will have blue cheese on burgers. We roast chickens quite often. We watch cooking shows quite a bit. The story about Mike, he can do it if he wants to, he knows the basics of cooking. One time I got called out on a call on a Sunday evening and he took over and we never had chicken as good as he made it. He cooks the broccoli. He knows how to do that. It isn’t the recipe that makes a cook, it’s the mastery of techniques. I can’t even begin to cover all the territory of cooking you are asking about.
The meal preparer realizes the complexity of the work involved and struggles to put it into words. Usually their words belie the full extent of their effort as they struggle to express what they do. Another participant, Daniel Sen Yung, says:
I tend to steam things a lot. I use dressings. A lot of salads and stuff. I don’t know [said with exasperation ], it’s hard to describe, I just do it. Each time it seems like there are different things to do. I call someone and ask them, or I look at a cookbook, or I just experiment and hope for the best. I make some things over and over and each thing has its own routine.
The daily physical process of meal preparation takes on a highly dynamic and thoughtful quality. While some meals take on a routine quality in some households, for most the process appears much more vigorous and multifaceted. It requires the constant attention, the knowledge, and the physical labor of meal prepares.
In contrast to meal preparation, the cleanup of the evening meal appears much more routine, requiring less mental effort, less time, less knowledge, and less work. As previously indicated, many lesbigay households use a cooking/cleaning distinction to explain the organization and division of feeding work. However, in close to one-third of the sample, the person who prepares the meal also cleans up after the meal. The cleaning component deserves closer analysis. Those who clean up the kitchen estimate a median time of thirty minutes. They talk about clearing the dishes, loading the dishwasher, putting away leftover food, and wiping the counters and the stovetop. Some include taking out trash or wiping floors, but not most. Among the less affluent families, participants include washing and drying the dishes. As I briefly noted earlier, meal preparers often empty the dishwasher or put away dry dishes when they begin preparing the evening meal. The work of cleaning up is highly routinized in most lesbigay households, requiring little decision making and little emotional work. Barbara Cho, a shift supervisor for a hotel, notes that the cleanup actually allows her time to think and unwind from her day: “It’s not a big deal. I clean off the table. Sandy helps bring in the dishes. I load the dishwasher, wipe off the counter, and put stuff away. It’s a great time for me to think about things, I often reflect on my day or decide what I’m going to do that night. It helps me unwind.” Rarely do meal planners/preparers conceive of their feeding work in these terms. Most spoke of the importance of staying focused on meal preparation in order to avoid burning meats or overcooking vegetables, and of coordinating meal items so they reach completion at the same time.
Several meal preparers also note that they make some effort to limit the mess caused by meal preparation and actually do a lot of cleaning as they go. Sucheng Kyutaro, who prepares most meals eaten at home, notes:
She complains a lot if I make too much of a mess during cooking. So I kind of watch it as I go. I try to clean the major things as I cook. I will rinse out pans, like if I make spaghetti sauce, I will run all the remains from the vegetables down the garbage disposal and rinse out the sauce pan and I always wipe off the stove. She really doesn’t like cleaning that up at all.
Gary Hosokawa, a payroll supervisor who does much of the feeding work in his family, remarks: “Usually I cook and he cleans. Although I am really anal about keeping a clean kitchen, so I clean a lot while I am cooking. There is not that much for him to do.”
The preceding comments demonstrate the limited character of cleaning up after meals in many lesbigay households, and they further undermine the salience of the cooking/cleaning distinction employed by many participants to indicate the egalitarianism of their household arrangements.
Recent empirical and theoretical work on the sociology of gender conceives of the production or achievement of gender identity as resulting from routine and continuous engagement in certain kinds of work and activities socially defined as gendered (Berk 1985; Coltrane 1989; West and Zimmerman 1987). This perspective emerges from a school of thought in sociology that understands gender as a dynamic and purposeful accomplishment: something people produce in social interaction (Cahill 1989; Goffman 1977; Kessler and McKenna 1978). West and Zimmerman point to the significance of action, interaction, and display in the process of “doing gender”: “a person’s gender is not simply an aspect of what one is, but, more fundamentally, it is something that one does, and does recurrently, in interaction with others” (1987, 140). Gender is not the product of socialized roles in which individuals continually recast themselves. Rather, gender requires continual effort to reproduce in everyday life. Since in this society and many others gender constitutes an essential component or the system of social classification, “doing gender” results in keeping social relationships orderly, comprehensible, and stratified. Frequently, individuals possess an awareness of doing gender while deciding how to conduct themselves in daily life. How masculine should one appear while observing a sports event? How feminine should one appear in a television interview? Berk demonstrates how household tasks function as occasions for creating and sustaining gender identity (1985, 204). Coltrane (1989), in his study of fathers who become extensively involved in the work of childcare, shows how such men must manage the threats to gender identity that such work poses to them. To violate the gendered expectations of others often lends to stigma and to challenges to the gender identity of the violator. Coltrane found that men who care for (feed, clean, teach, hold) infants often face stigma from coworkers and biological relatives, and that oftentimes the men hide their caring activities from these people to avoid conflict and challenges to their masculine identity. Men performing domestic labor—or women who fail to—produce the potential for stigma, a matter of great significance for gay and lesbian couples, where the reality of household life clashes with cultural gender expectations.
Accordingly, managing the gendered identity of members of lesbigay families becomes a central dynamic in the portrayal of feeding work both within the family and to outsiders. In general, feeding work in the household constitutes women’s work, even when men engage in the work. That link of feeding with the production of womanly status persists and presents dilemmas for lesbigay families. Let me begin my analysis of this dynamic by pointing to a rather odd thing that happened in interviews with lesbigay family members. I interviewed family members separately to prevent participants from constructing seamless accounts of household activities. In so doing, inconsistencies occurred in the portrayal of domestic work, including feeding work. In six of the twenty-six male families, both claim that they last cooked dinner. In four of the twenty-six female couples, both claim that the other person last cooked dinner. How can one explain this? Were the participants simply confused? Why a persistent gendered pattern of confusion? Lesbian families do more often report sharing in the tasks of meal preparation than do gay-male families, so here the confusion may reflect the presence of both partners in the kitchen. Participant observation confirms such a pattern. For instance, in two of the four female households observed in depth, both women spent the majority of time during meal preparation together in the kitchen. I do not mean to imply that they share every task or divide meal preparation equally. Frequently, they engage in conversation and one person assists by getting things out the refrigerator, chopping celery, or pulling something out of the oven. Mostly, one person prepares and manages the meal while the other helps. The question remains, Why do men who did not prepare a meal claim to have done so, and why do women report that their partners who assisted actually prepared the meal?
The answer looks different for female and male households. In some lesbian couples the partner who performs much of the feeding work seems to also concern herself with preventing threats to the gender identity of her less domestically involved partner. This pattern seems most persistent among lesbian couples where one of the partners pursues a higher-paying, higher-status occupation. Consider the following examples. Cindy Pence and Ruth Cohen have been together for eleven years. Cindy works as a nurse, and she does much of the feeding work in the family. Ruth works as a healthcare executive. Ruth works extensive hours, and it often spills over into their family life, something Cindy dislikes. Ruth acknowledges that Cindy does much of the domestic work in their relationship, including the feeding work. Ruth says that she tries to help out when she can, and she tries to get home to help with dinner. They each claim that the other person cooked the last meal at home. During my interview with Ruth I asked about work and family conflicts, and how work might impinge on family life. Ruth comments:
| ruth: | Cindy’s great about my work. She does so much. I don’t think I could handle it all without her. She sort of covers for me, I guess and I feel guilty about it, but I also know that she appreciates how hard I work for us. |
| cc: | What do you mean, she covers up for you? |
| ruth: | I mean, she gives me credit for doing a lot of stuff at home that I don’t really do. I mean, I help her, but it’s not really my show. She does it and I really appreciate it. But I feel terrible about it. |
The same kind of feelings emerged in an interview with Dolores Bettenson and Arlene Wentworth. Both women work as attorneys for public entities, though Dolores’s job requires less overtime and allows for a more flexible schedule. Dolores reports working for wages forty hours per week, while Arlene reports working for wages around sixty hours per week, including frequent trips to the office on Saturdays and on Sunday evenings. Dolores handles much of the feeding work of the family, while the couple pays a housekeeper to do much of the house cleaning. Both Dolores and Arlene initially report that they split responsibility for cooking. Arlene, in response to a question about conflicts over meal preparation, says:
I think things are pretty fifty-fifty, we are pretty equal: I guess she does things more thoroughly than I do, and she complains about that, but she always gives me a lot of credit for the stuff I do. Sometimes, I think she gives me too much credit, though, and I feel guilty about it, because, as I said, she takes that kind of stuff more seriously than I do, I just don’t have as much time.
Both Ruth’s and Arlene’s comments reveal a pattern of the more domestically involved partner assigning credit for completing domestic work that the less domestically involved partner did not do. I suspect that this occurs in part to provide “cover” for women who spend less time doing domestic work, less time “doing gender.”
In a similar vein, the pattern among gay males appears the opposite, and more intensely so, in some respects. Engaging in routine feeding work violates gendered expectations for men. I emphasize routine because men can and do participate in ceremonial public cooking such as the family barbecue. Yet the reality of household life requires that someone do feeding work. In heterosexual family life, men are usually capable of avoiding feeding work, but in gay-male families, someone must feed. Only in a very few, quite affluent households did feeding work seem particularly diminished and replaced by eating most meals in the marketplace. Most gay-male, couples eat at home, and among many of them I detect a pattern of men colluding to protect the masculine status of the meal planner/preparer. The conflicted claims of who last prepared an evening meal illustrate this dynamic and also reveal the ambiguous feelings held by men who feed about their status and their work. Bill Regan and Rich Chesebro have been together for three years. Rich works at a large software company and Bill works as an artist. Bill often works at home and carries much of the responsibility for domestic work, including feeding work. Both men claim that they last prepared the evening meal. Other questions in the interview reveal that, in fact, Bill prepared the last meal. When I asked about the last time they invited people over for dinner, Bill replied that it was two days before the interview, on Saturday night. When asking about what he prepared, he responded: “Well, let us see, last night I made lasagna. Oh, and that night, Saturday, I broiled tuna.” It turns out that Bill made the last meal, though Rich claims that he did: Why should Rich make such a claim? Part of the answer lies in Rich’s concern, expressed several times, that Bill not become overly identified with domestic work. When asking Rich about who last went to the grocery store, Rich replies: “I think that Bill might have, but it is not that big of a deal really. He really likes his work as an artist and that’s where his true interest lies” (emphasis added). This response initially confused me. I ask about a trip to the store, and I receive an answer emphasizing Bill’s work as an artist. I let this response pass, but later in the interview, I ask Rich about who last invited someone over to dinner, and who typically does this. In a similar rhetorical move, Rich says: “Well, I suspect Bill might be the one to do that, but I don’t think it is that significant to him, really: His real love is his work as an artist, that’s where he puts most of his energy” (emphasis added). At this point in the interview I decide to pursue Rich’s intent in moving us from matters of domesticity to Bill’s status as an artist. I ask Rich why he brought up Bill’s work as an artist in the context of who most likely invites people to dinner. “Well, because I worry that people will get the wrong idea about Bill. I know that he does a lot of stuff around here, but he really wants to become an artist, and I don’t want people to think of him as a housewife or something. He has other interests.” As these comments disclose, Rich attempts here to manage the identity of his partner. This interpretation receives further confirmation on the basis of Rich’s answer to a question about how he would feel about his partner engaging in home-making full-time and working for wages only partly or not at all:
Well, I wouldn’t like it at all. I don’t see how that could be fair, for one person to contribute everything and the other to give little or nothing to the relationship. Plus, what about one’s self-respect? I don’t see how one could live with oneself by not doing something for a living. I would not be comfortable at all telling people that Bill is just a housewife. If he wanted to do his artwork and do more of the housework, that would be okay, I guess, but that’s kind of how we do it already.
While Rich attempts to shield Bill from identification with domestic work, both in order to protect Bill from the status of “a housewife or something” but also to confirm his own belief that domestic work holds little value, the reality remains that Bill does much of the domestic work, including feeding work. Doing feeding work ties Bill to a more feminine identity. Bill put it like this in response to a question about whether the roles of heterosexual society influence the character of his relationship with Rich:
I think that the functions all need to be handled. There is a certain amount of mothering that is required and whether that is done by a man or a woman does not matter. But mothering per se is an important function. And there is a certain amount of fathering having to do with setting goals and directions and creating focus. I guess people do think of me as more of the mother in our relationship, because I cook and invest a lot in our home, but that’s their problem. Sometimes I feel strange about it, but I like to do it and I like the family life that we have together.
Bill’s words capture the ambiguity of feelings about feeding work and other domestic work that I heard frequently in many lesbigay households. On the one hand, Bill recognizes the importance of such work (mothering) to creating a family life. On the other hand, he feels strange about his participation in domestic work. Bill’s partner worries about people identifying Bill with domestic work and emphasizes Bill’s identity as artist.
Another gay-male household illustrates a similar set of dynamics. Nolan Ruether and Joe Mosse have been together just under two decades. They live in an affluent suburban community outside the city. They both work in healthcare, though in very different settings and with quite different responsibilities. Nolan is a registered nurse and reports working forty hours per week. Joe works in a medical research lab and reports working closer to fifty hours per week. He also has a part-time job on the weekends. Nolan handles much of the domestic life of the family, including much of the feeding work. Both partners claim that they last cooked an evening meal. They actually eat separately more often than not, with Nolan eating a meal at home in the early evening that he cooks for himself and Joe either eating something on the run or eating something late when he arrives home. Joe indicates that he does the major shopping on weekends, though Nolan makes frequent trips to the market during the week and says that “I often pick up things that will be easy for him to prepare when he gets home from work, and I frequently will make something that he can simply warm up when he gets in.” Nolan actually cooked the last meal, while Joe warmed up the meal when he arrived home late. Throughout the interview Joe emphasizes the egalitarian character of their relationship and diminishes the amount and significance of domestic work in the household. When I ask about conflicts over meals or meal preparation, Joe responds, “Um, well, we hardly ever eat meals at all. There is no work to conflict about. I eat out and he tends after his own.” Nolan reports that they eat at home half the week, while they go out the other half. Nolan reports that they do not plan meals, though he says that they do communicate on the subject: “We don’t plan meals, really. We either are both at home and I ask him what he wants or I call him at work and then I just go to the store and buy it. We don’t keep a lot of food here, because I tend to run out to the store most every day.” Nolan does much of the feeding work. He engages in routine provisioning work for the family, and he plans many of the family’s social occasions that involve food. He also does most of the emotional labor related to food. Now consider Nolan’s responses to questions about his feelings toward traditional gender roles for men and women in American Society:
I certainly see the value in it, in ways I never did before I was in a relationship. There’s a lot of work to be done to keep a house nice and to make life pleasant. I get pretty tired sometimes, I don’t think Joe has any sense of it, really. He is off so much doing work, but he works so much by choice. You know, I think I said, we don’t really need the money, but he couldn’t imagine being around here doing this stuff.
Does he think that traditional gender roles influence the pattern of domestic life in your relationship?
Well, in the sense that I do everything and he does very little, yes, I think it resembles the traditional pattern. He would of course deny it and get angry if I pushed the topic, so I don’t bring it up, and I feel it’s kind of difficult to talk to anyone about it because, well, because they might think of me as a complaining housewife or something, and I don’t think most people can understand a man doing what I do. So when he says there isn’t that much to do around here, I just sort of let him believe what he wants. It isn’t worth the trouble.
Notice the ambiguity of feeling Nolan expresses about talking to others about his situation. Nolan’s restraint (emotion work) actually enables Joe to diminish the importance of the work that Nolan does to maintain family life. Joe’s approach to his household life closely resembles the pattern of need reduction detected by Hochschild (1989, 202) among some men in her study of heterosexual couples. Consider the following excerpts from our interview:
Throughout this exchange Joe not only diminishes the presence of domestic work through emphasizing how often he is gone but also expresses his concern that his partner not become overly identified with domestic work. Nolan’s own feelings of ambiguity about doing domestic work, and the threat it poses to his gender identity, actually keep him from talking about his circumstances.
One observes another example of the salience of gender to the portrayal of feeding work in dinner parties. Using Goffman’s conceptions of “frontstage” and “backstage” work, sociologist Randall Collins suggests that cooking meals for dinner parties constitutes a frontstage activity that “generally culminates with the housewife calling the family or guests to the table and presiding there to receive compliments on the results of her stage (or rather table) setting” (1992, 220). The backstage work, much more arduous and time intensive, consists of a wide array of different kinds of invisible work: planning, provisioning, and monitoring. The work is often invisible in the sense that these forms of work receive little public recognition during dinner parties. In most lesbigay families the responsibility for both the elaborateness and the exoticness of foods for dinner parties becomes the responsibility of the meal planner/preparer, and often this person takes front stage at the dinner party.
However, in ten of the lesbigay households, and in contrast to the normative pattern in heterosexual families described by Collins, the person who cooks for dinner parties often only engages in the frontstage work while the other partner performs much of the backstage or more hidden forms of work. These ten households share a common pattern. In the male families the person who performs routine feeding work and performs the backstage work for dinner parties also works for wages in somewhat female-identified occupations: two nurses, a primary education teacher, a legal secretary, a social worker, and an administrative assistant. The frontstage males work in male-identified occupations: two accountants, an engineer, an attorney, a physician, and a midlevel manager. In the female families exhibiting a split between frontstage and backstage feeding, frontstage women work in male-identified occupations: two attorneys, a higher-level manager, and a college professor. The occupations of the backstage females include two retail sales workers, a nurse, and an artist. Taking the front stage in such dinner parties may well function as a strategy on the part of these lesbigay couples to manage threats to the gender identity of the domestically engaged men or the less domestically engaged women.
Confirming this pattern in the words of participants proves somewhat elusive. None of the women who do backstage feeding work for dinner parties expressed dissatisfaction about this. And while several of the men complain that they do not receive credit for the backstage work they do in preparation for such dinners, they also seem reluctant to make much of a fuss about it. Tim Cisneros, who works as a nurse and does much of the routine feeding work, responds to a question about who last prepared a meal for dinner guests, and why, by saying, “Well, I guess you would have to say he did. Though, I am the one who did most of the prep work for it. He gets a lot of pleasure out of cooking fancy stuff for others, and while I think I should get some credit, I don’t make a big deal about it. I would feel kind of weird pointing it out, so I just let him take the credit. It’s easier that way.” Tim’s observations convey his awareness of an inconsistency between frontstage and backstage, and his assertion of the ease of maintaining that inconsistency makes it plausible to think that there is little to gain, and there may even be a cost, in disclosing the inconsistency.
As evidenced by the above cases, gender operates as a continuous concern for lesbigay families, but in ways more complex than many accounts of lesbigay family life indicate. The gender strategies deployed by the different participants suggest an abiding concern about maintaining traditional gender categories, and particularly of avoiding the stigma that comes with either failing to engage in domestic work for lesbian families or through engaging in domestic work for gay-male families. The portrayal of feeding work by lesbigay households conforms to these gender-related concerns, and partners tend to manage the identity of their respective partners.
Feeding work in lesbigay families both reflects and perpetuates social-class distinctions. Patterns of meal preparation and patterns of sociability forged through the sharing of meals across families reflect the presence of social-class distinctions among lesbigay families. These social-class distinctions seem quite apparent but, historically, sociologists have found it difficult to find such class differences among lesbigay people. Two decades ago, when sociologist Carol Warren conducted a study of gay life, she concluded:
It is clear that members tend to think of themselves, no matter what the abstract criteria, as members of an elite class.... since an elegant upper-middle-class lifestyle is one of the status hallmarks of the gay community, it is quite difficult to tell, and especially in the context of secrecy, what socioeconomic status people actually have. (1974, 85)
The families in this study do not lead secret lives: only five of the 103 adults interviewed completely hid their identities from coworkers, and only six hid their identities from biological relatives. It seems that as the lesbigay community becomes more visible, so too do differences among lesbigay people become more visible. Gender and racial distinctions pervade lesbigay life. Social-class distinctions also pervade lesbigay life and patterns of feeding often reflect and reproduce such distinctions.
The organization, preparation, and hosting of dinner parties plays a significant role in the production of class distinctions among lesbians and gays. Upper-middle-class lesbigay families report organizing and participating in dinner parties for friends and coworkers with much greater frequency than middleand working/service-class families, except for some ethnically identified families, to whom I will return shortly. In terms of household income, the top 25 percent of families report either holding or attending a dinner party at least two times per month. In the bottom 25 percent, families rarely report any such occasion.
These meals function to reproduce social-class alliances and identities. For example, these meals become occasions for professionals to identify potential clients, learn of potential job opportunities, learn of new technologies, or stay abreast of organizational politics. During election cycles, these dinner parties among the affluent can take on political significance. Many lesbian and gay politicians in the city of San Francisco use such occasions as fundraisers. The lesbigay politician attends the gathering and the campaign charges between $50 and $500 per person. Among the wealthier participants living in San Francisco proper and earning household incomes of over $80,000, nearly every household reports either attending or hosting such a meal. These dinner parties provide access to power and influence on policy, and they play a crucial role in the political order of San Francisco lesbigay politics.
In a wider sense, dinner parties contribute to the creation of social-class identities. As DeVault comments on the function of hosting dinner parties, “it also has significance in the mobilization of these individuals as actors in their class: it brings together ‘insiders’ to a dominant class, and marks their common interests” (1991, 207). Given DeVault’s observation, what does it mean to claim that these shared meals “mark their common interests”?
Beyond the more obvious career advantages and the sheer social enjoyment of such occasions, part of the answer lies in the symbolic meaning people attach to cuisine and the Style in which hosts present it. Collins conceives of the symbolic meanings people attach to such occasions as an example of “household status presentation” (1992, 219). In other words, the choice of cuisine and the style of serving constructs social-class identity for the participants. Further, dinner parties function as occasions for the display and sharing of “cultural capital” (Bourdieu 1984). Bourdieu conceives of cultural capital as knowledge and familiarity with socially valued forms of music, art, literature, fashion, and cuisine, in other words, a sense of “class” or “good taste.” Bourdieu distinguishes cultural capital from economic capital, therein arguing that some members of society may possess higher levels of cultural capital yet possess less wealth, and vice-versa. The household often functions as the site where cultural capital or good taste finds expression. Dinner parties often operate as a stage upon which the hosts display and call attention to various forms of cultural capital, including everything from works of art to home furnishings, from musical selections to displays of literature, from table settings to the food itself. The elaborate and the exotic quality of meals plays a central role in the upper-middle-class lesbigay dinner party. The higher-status participants often speak of specializing in a particular cuisine. Joe Mosse speaks of his interest in Indian cuisine:
We often have Indian food when guests come over. I started cooking Indian food as a hobby many years ago. We’ve collected lots of Indian cookbooks, and I do a lot of different dishes. People generally love it. It’s unusual and people remember that. You can get Indian food when you go out, especially in San Francisco, but how many people actually serve it at home?
Such dinner parties become elaborate both through the featuring of exotic menus and through the serving of a succession of courses throughout the meal: appetizers, soups, salads, main courses, coffee and tea, desserts, and after-dinner drinks. These dinner parties often feature higher-quality wines, and the higher-status participants often know something about the wine; this becomes part of the conversation of the evening. In sum, the dinner party serves as an opportunity for the creation and maintenance of class distinction.
Class differences impact the character and extent of everyday meals as well. More affluent families spend less time in preparing meals for everyday consumption than do the less affluent. A number of factors contribute to this. First, the more affluent eat out quite frequently. One in five lesbigay families report eating four or more meals per week in restaurants. Those who eat out more often earn higher incomes. Second, the more affluent use labor-saving devices like microwaves and food processors more frequently. Third, they often purchase prepared meals from upscale delis and fresh pasta shops. All of this purchasing feeding work in the marketplace enables more affluent couples to achieve a greater degree of egalitarianism in their relationships. These couples resemble the dual-career heterosexual couples studied by Hertz (1986). To the outside observer, and to the participants, affluent lesbigay families are more egalitarian in terms of feeding work, and they purchase that equality in the marketplace. As Hertz so eloquently argues:
On the surface, dual-career couples appear to be able to operate as a self-sufficient nuclear family. Nonetheless, they are dependent as a group and as individuals on a category of people external to the family. Couples view their ability to purchase this service as another indication of their self-sufficiency (or “making it”). Yet, appearances are deceptive.... What appears to be self-sufficiency for one category of workers relies on the existence of a category of less advantaged workers (p. 194).
Accordingly, scanning the lesbian and particularly the gay-male enclaves of San Francisco one discovers a preponderance of food service establishments offering relatively cheap and convenient meals: taquerias, Thai restaurants, pasta shops, hamburger joints, Chinese restaurants, and delis. Most of these establishments employ women, ethnic and racial minorities, and less educated, less affluent gay men. The low wages earned by these workers enable more affluent lesbigay families to purchase meals in the marketplace and to avoid conflicts over feeding work. Many affluent lesbigay families report deciding to simply eat out rather than face the hassle of planning, preparing, and cleaning up after meals. Less affluent families may not make that choice, and thus they spend much more time and effort in the production of routine meals.
While one’s social-class status influences whether one attends dinner parties with much frequency, those families with strong ethnic identifications do report more shared meals. Among these groups the sharing of food, and the ethnic character of that food, becomes an important expression of ethnic heritage and cultural identity. Gary Hosokowa, an Asian-American of Hawaiian descent, speaks of the centrality of his hula group to his social life and understands that group in familial terms. In response to a question about how he thinks about family, Gary replies:
It’s really strange, hard to explain. In Hawaiian culture, your hula group is family. In ancient times, the hula teacher would choose students to become hula dancers and they would live together and become family. They ate together, slept together. They were picked from their own family groups and became part of another family group. My hula group is my family, we eat together, we dance together. It is very deep, spiritual thing for me.
For Gary, the sharing of meals functions to create and sustain ethnic identity.
In like manner, Michael Herrera and Frederico Monterosa, a Latino couple together for three years who live with a young lesbian women, Jenny Dumont, consider themselves a family. They also speak of a larger family, consisting of other Latino and non-Latino friends, as well as Federico’s cousins. Michael and Frederico report recurrent dinner and brunch gatherings, often featuring Mexican foods. Michael remarks:
We like to make enchiladas a lot, and sometimes we have meat, like beef or something, but always with a Mexican soup for our family gatherings. We get together every couple of weeks. It’s very important to me. It’s one thing that I think a lot of my Anglo friends feel really envious about, we sort of have a family and many of them don’t.
When comparing the appeal of ethnically identified foods to the upper strata of the lesbigay community (mostly Euro-Americans) with the appeal of such foods to the Asian and Latino participants it becomes clear that the food symbolizes very different things for each group. For the affluent lesbigay families the food represents creativity and contributes to the entertaining atmosphere of the dinner party. It carries status due to its exoticness and the difficulty of its preparation.
In contrast, among Asian and Latino lesbigay participants, food expresses ethnic heritage and symbolizes ethnic solidarity, and sometimes resistance to cultural assimilation. Many Asian and Latino participants pride themselves not on the variety of cuisine but on the consistent replication of the same cuisine and even the same meals.
Feeding work plays a pivotal role in the construction of lesbigay families. The comments of meal planners/preparers suggest a conscious effort to create a sense of family through their feeding work. For instance, Kathy Atwood and Joan Kelsey, a lesbian couple in their mid-thirties and living in a sort of lesbian enclave in the Oakland neighborhood of Rockridge, both speak of sharing meals as constitutive of family. Kathy, talking about why she considers some of her close friends as family, says, “Well, we eat with them and talk to them frequently. I have known one of them for a very long time. They are people we could turn to in need. They are people who invite us over for dinner and people with whom we spend our fun times and because of that, I think of them as family.”
Other participants point to sharing meals, as well as jointly preparing the meals, as evidence of family. Fanny Gomez and Melinda Rodriguez have been together for nine years. Fanny does much of the feeding work for the family. Fanny tells of how she and a close friend, Jenny, whom she considers a part of the family, actually get together to prepare meals for holidays and birthdays.
I certainly think of Jenny as family. She is the partner of the couple friend that I mentioned earlier. She and I get together to plan meals and celebrations. It feels like family to me when we talk, go shop together, and then cook the meals. I mean, it’s like family when we eat the meal together, too, it’s just that preparing the meal, I guess, it reminds me of working with my mother in her kitchen.
For Fanny, the planning, provisioning, and preparation of the meal constitutes family. The feeding work of Fanny and Kathy links material and interpersonal needs together and results in the creation of family.
We have seen that feeding work within lesbigay families is neither inconsequential nor simple. Strangely, much conversation and academic analysis concerning feeding work reduces the complexity of the enterprise, minimizes its significance, and legitimates the view held by many participants that they don’t really do very much feeding work—a view held by those who do it as well as by those who don’t. In part we can explain this sentiment by remembering that those who feed often lack the vocabulary to articulate their efforts to others. Few people will tell others that they spent part of their day monitoring the contents of their refrigerator, but they do. Such work remains invisible. We must also understand that many participants diminish feeding because they don’t want to face the conflict that a thorough accounting, as I have just provided, might produce in their relationship. Moreover, given the potential for stigma that exists for the men who feed, and the women who don’t, it becomes even clearer why the work of feeding remains particularly hidden in lesbigay households.
Finally, concealing the labors of feeding reflects the cultural tendency to romanticize domestic activities as well as to romanticize the relationships such activities create. Spotlighting the labor involved tarnishes the romantic luster that people attach to domesticity. I can’t count how many times I have heard people who feed respond to compliments saying, “Oh, it was nothing really.” Perhaps this is just a matter of self-deprecation, but it might also suggest a cultural cover-up of the laborious character of such efforts. The dinner guests don’t really want to hear about the three different stores one went to in search of the ingredients, nor the process of planning and preparing the meal, nor the fight one had with one’s spouse about whom to invite or what to serve. A thorough investigation of the labors involved in feeding the family reveals that feeding is work. Recognizing feeding as work raises the impertinent question of why the effort goes uncompensated, a question that leads directly to issues of exploitation and inequality, issues ripe with the potential for social and family conflict.
Given the social precariousness of lesbian and gay relationships, mostly due to the lack of social, political, and economic resources, the tendency of the participants to avoid such conflicts is probably essential to their long-term survival. When some resources exist, as in the case of economic resources, assuaging such conflicts becomes easier. When ample economic resources exist, feeding becomes less arduous with affluent families turning to the marketplace for meals and preparing meals at home teaming with creativity, quality, symbolic meaning, and nutritional content. When lesbigay families lack economic resources, as is the case among many of the working/ service-class families, feeding looks different: routine, fatiguing, nutritionally compromised, and symbolically arid (in the sense that the capacity of feeding to produce a sense of family is compromised). Participants rarely conceive of eating ramen noodle soup on the couch as constitutive of their claim to family status, but they frequently conceive of eating a nutritionally complete meal at dining-room table as constitutive of such a claim.
* Originally published 1999
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