Gendered political economies and the feminization of hunger: M.F.K. Fisher and the cold war culture wars

Abstract

Van Houten represents the centrality of the gendered, capitalized kitchen to national food politics and global austerity practices before and after World War II. Focusing on M.F.K. Fisher’s critique of the ways that state-sponsored rhetoric about global austerity and domestic consumption militarizes food and hunger as weapons, she argues that How to Cook a Wolf challenges how entanglements of the home, market, and state hold in tension a domestic economy of abundance and the uneven development of global food programs or hunger relief. Putting in tension austerity culture and feminist discourse, Van Houten argues that Fisher helps to develop new theorizations about domesticity, gender, and globalization that emerge between characterizations of the wartime housewife and the second-wave feminist.