Between Fire and Flour: Rethinking Women’s Invisible Culinary Labor in Modernity Gender, Modernity, and the Politics of Culinary Work

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-583-6_25How to use a DOI?

Keywords

feminist critique; culinary labour; globalization; modernization; women’s roles; and invisible work

Abstract

While food is a cultural language, we often cannot see the labour of the women who prepare, preserve, and maintain it. This essay examines how globalisation and modernisation have affected women’s food roles, often reinforcing gender inequalities while generating diverse forms of resistance. Women have always been food workers, sharing recipes, maintaining seeds, and forming cultural structures. Food work was vital to community survival; yet rather than being recognised as such, it was considered a “domestic duty”. Women were not acknowledged for the social or economic value of their work in food production. Modernisation and technology have refocused questions about food and changed the characteristics of social work and financial viability. While new technologies of mechanisation and industrial food production offered women liberation from the drudgery of the domestic kitchen, they also aimed to eliminate embodied knowledge and commodify kitchen and food work. This inequality continues today; we undervalue women’s unpaid domestic cooking while praising and economically rewarding men’s professional cooking work. The processes of globalisation add to the dynamic complexities and pressures. The feminisation of wage labour adds to the burdens women face: women with wage jobs endure a “double shift” between paid employment and unpaid responsibility for domestic labour. The ongoing takeover of traditional food systems by global food companies, especially as they take indigenous traditions and knowledge from women, is wiping out ecological knowledge and making practices and lifestyles more uniform. Women have traditionally borne the burden of food production, which has increasingly been subsumed within the industrialised supply chains of the food economy, where profit is prioritised over sustainability. Women are also everywhere resisting and recasting these relations. Movements, from the grassroots of cooperatives to digital platforms, have mobilised efforts to reclaim space for women’s agency and identity, including reconceptualisation. The critiques of feminist care and political economy encourage the reconstitution of food and care work as cultural production rather than as domestic labour, ecological stewardship, or cultural/intellectual knowledge. This paper advocates a feminist reconceptualization of women’s culinary labour as integral to gender justice and sustainable food futures. It acknowledges and values this invisibility, which is necessary for equitable and resilient food systems worldwide.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Sakshi Mathur
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/06/30
TI  - Between Fire and Flour: Rethinking Women’s Invisible Culinary Labor in Modernity Gender, Modernity, and the Politics of Culinary Work
BT  - Proceedings of the International Conference on Emerging Food Studies: Intersections of Culture, Science and Sustainability (ICEFS 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 267
EP  - 275
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-583-6_25
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-583-6_25
ID  - Mathur2026
ER  -