Final version to appear in Gender in Management, Volume 36 issues 7/8, DOI 10.1108/GM-08-2020-0257
COVID-19 Foodwork, Race, Gender, Class and Food Justice: An Intersectional Feminist Analysis, Elaine Swan
Historically, “women have been doing the majority of the work of feeding families and feeding other people,” Brenton said. And that work is now more difficult, and sometimes more dangerous, than ever. (North, 2020).
This quotation from a blog post about women’s work stresses the significance and risk of women’s foodwork in the context of the Coronavirus pandemic (North, 2020). From racist memes about Chinese eating habits, to middle class social media images of sourdough baking, youtube cook-alongs, and zoom dinner parties, through to media coverage of food bank volunteers, food for nurses, and so-called panic food buying and stockpilers, and new reports about the so-called resilience of the global food system, the media underlines how the COVID-19 pandemic is ‘a study in food’ (Gatronomica, 2020). And as Bridget Burns and Emilia Reye insist, the pandemic is an ‘embodied crisis’ and one in which feminised labour across the world holds up the work of health, care, food and education sectors (Burns and Reye, 2020).
In this paper, I introduce the feminist concept of domestic foodwork to the discussions of the COVID-19 pandemic to draw out its racialised, gendered and classed hierarchies and inequalities. As I have written elsewhere, women’s foodwork has been neglected by organisation studies, even with emerging interest in food studies in recent conferences and special issues (Swan, forthcoming). It’s clear that the global pandemic reveals and accentuates existing social and health inequalities related to food access and food production and creates new food related vulnerabilities and moralities now and in the future (Barker and Russell, 2020; Fernando, 2020; Maye, 2020; Valley et al., 2020). The pandemic has deeply disturbed local and global systems of food production, consumption, and distribution, and is destroying the livelihoods of millions who produce, grow, harvest, cook, serve, and distribute foods, from farmworkers to street vendors to restaurateurs in the Global South and North (Gastronomica, 2020).
In their summary of the US context of the pandemic, Will Valley et al. (2020) outline racial and economic injustices related to the food system, from dangers to migrant and undocumented farmworkers; unsafe labour standards in meat packing; high-risk working conditions and low pay of food retail workers; and the increased use of emergency food systems. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, the COVID-19 pandemic will worsen global food insecurity for an extra 820 million people. Indeed, famines and malnutrition might kill more people in the Global South than the Coronavirus disease in the longer-term (Fernando, 2020).
As lockdown and the pandemic took hold worldwide, commentary on food production and consumption has surged but to date most of it erases women’s food labours. Indeed, the significance of gender, race and class rarely features in UK accounts. As of July 2020, in over 100 blogposts, reports and rapid responses by academics, food organisations and the media, explicit discussions on the gendered, racialised and classed relations of foodwork remain in single figures. Just as an instance, an important and impressive website resource at http://www.ccri.ac.uk/covid19food/which collates academic and activist resources on food, does not feature any accounts of women or race. The website helpfully highlights problems for the hospitality sector, the surge in online food retailing, food growing, changing eating habits and the escalation in demand for food banks but without any recourse to questions about race, gender or class.
In contrast, intersectional feminists insist on the significance of gender, class and race inequalities and labour during the pandemic broadly, and the specific conditions of quarantine, lockdown, remote working, school closures and social distancing. Women globally are performing the bulk of paid and unpaid socially reproductive labour – critical health, community and social care, taking up more burdens and multiple tasks, including looking after the sick, elderly, and children (McLaren et al., 2020; North, 2020; Thompson, 2020). Indeed, although women, and especially women of colour dominate health and social care, the bulk of health care is unpaid performed by women in the home (Matthewman and Huppatz, 2020: 5). As schools and childcare centres closed in various countries, working mothers have been trying to balance their paid work with intensified, arduous and sometime hazardous, caring responsibilities for children, sick family members, and elderly relatives (North, 2020; Power, 2020). Women are taking on new responsibilities, labours and roles without any alleviation of their existing responsibilities, or extra benefits or concerns for their well-being and established through gendered, raced and classed power relations of governing during the pandemic (McLaren et al., 2020).
Feminists argued that it became visible that women, especially women of colour in paid and domestic carework and key worker roles were keeping the system running (Burns and Reye, 2020; McLaren et al, 2020; Thompson, 2020). They underlined that this labour reflected the overrepresentation of women, including women of colour and migrant women, in jobs with a “high exposure” risk for COVID-19 (Thompson, 2020). The Women’s Budget group who have led feminist commentary on certain aspects of the pandemic in the UK provide a useful summary of key statistics:
Care work …has historically been seen as an extension of ‘women’s work.’ It has been undervalued, underpaid and increasingly takes the form of precarious working arrangements like zero-hours contracts as a result of cuts since 2010 and before. 24% of care workers are on zero-hours contracts and home carers are not paid for their journeys between houses. Migrant workers are also over-represented in care work with 1 in 5 carers being born outside the UK, 1 in 7 from outside the EU (https://wbg.org.uk/blog/it-is-women-especially-low-paid-bame-migrant-women-putting-their-lives-on-the-line-to-deliver-vital-care/
Such new media visibility on unpaid and paid care, ‘the COVID-19 crisis is becoming firmly established as above all a crisis of care’ (Chatzidakis et al., 2020, italics in original).
Some feminist commentary reference food labours, although often en passant. To start to address this gap, I introduce aspects of unpaid foodwork during the pandemic in the UK. Due to word count, I can’t discuss other types of foodwork which have been vital: paid foodwork in the home and paid and unpaid foodwork in the public sphere and the community. Although some COVID food scholarship refer to gender and race, not all are feminist or intersectional. As Alice Hovorka (2013) writes, a feminist framework understands gender and food as power laden realms that reproduce difference and inequality between men and women. An intersectional feminist perspective insists on the interrelations between gender, race, class, religion, and sexuality in relation to food, food practices and food systems and how these are structured by relations of power (Parker, 2020; Parker et al., 2019; Forson-Williams & Wilkerson, 2016; Ternikar, 2019).
COVID-19 foodwork
Feminists have coined terms such as ‘domestic labour,’ ‘emotional labour’, ‘wife work’, and ‘kin work’, to expand our understanding of what constitutes women’s work, and of relevance to this article, foodwork and feeding work. What women do within the home and community, even when unpaid, is still ‘work’: a form of productive activity like men’s waged labour (Duffy, 2007). Feminists insist this work is economically, socially and culturally under-valued – even derided – but absolutely indispensable to capitalism and the maintenance of everyday life (Swan, forthcoming; Perrier and Swan, 2019). At the same time. the social organisation of this work is seen to create women’s inequality, subordination, and exploitation (Duffy, 2007; Laslett & Brenner, 1989).
What’s missing in some feminist analysis, as critical race scholars stress, is the significance of racialised divisions and inequalities in domestic work and reproductive labour. The domestic sphere has been, and still is, a site of paid labour for women of colour, immigrant and poor women (Duffy, 2007; Holvino, 2010; Nakano Glenn, 1992). Feminists of colour insist that middle-class white women professional careers and community work have been enabled because of women of colour’s and migrant’s paid domestic labour, and the transference of middle-class women’s daily maintenance and care work to these women (Duffy, 2007; Holvino, 2010).
It’s these insights into the complexities of social reproductive labour that I bring to my introductory discussion of domestic foodwork. The pandemic, and its governing through lockdowns, reinforced and intensified women’s reproductive loads (McLaren et al., 2020). Research shows that the lockdown placed a massive burden on working mothers’ with a majority of women surveyed saying they did more cooking, cleaning, laundry, childcare and home schooling than their male partners (Cox, 2020). As a result, they were forced to ‘de-prioritize paid work more frequently than their male counterparts’ (Cox, 2020). Nazia Hussein and Saba Hussain (2020) point out that for migrant ethnic minority women with ageing parents abroad, there is an additional ‘burden of transnational care’.
Of course, domestic inequalities and burdens vary by class, race and migrant status: those who have better paid jobs have the space, housing and resources to support working and schooling from home. Many women working in food retail, nursing, transport, social and eldercare, and other aspects of the food sector, over-represented by women of colour and migrant workers, could not work from home, and also did extra unpaid labour as volunteers. Many of these women suffer from work poverty and low incomes due to working informally, part-time work and zero contracts and during the pandemic worked in conditions hazardous to their health and lives (McLaren, et al., 2020).
Unpaid domestic foodwork became an additional load for many women during lockdown. North American feminist food justice academics, Pat Allen and Carolyn Sachs stress that relations to food underpin women’s experiences of work, life and inequality. Foodwork is understood as gendered in that women are required to take responsibility for feeding work in the family. In spite of supposed shifts in equality, and men’s interest in cooking, women continue to do disproportionate amount of food work (Beagan, Chapman, D’Sylva, & Bassett, 2008; Koch, 2019). Women are so responsible for ‘the mental and manual labor of food provision—the most basic labor of care’ such that it ‘chains’ them to food (Allen and Sachs, 2007: 1). And as feminist stress, women have complex, embodied, material, economic and symbolic relationships to food (van Esterik, 1999; Allens and Sachs, 2007)
The term foodwork refers to the ‘physical, cognitive, interactional, and institutional labor in the processes of feeding individuals, families, and groups’ in the food system (Sobal, 2017: 127). The concept of domestic foodwork covers the planning, purchasing, preparation, cleaning up but also the health, emotional, cultural and domestic management of eating, and in households, often with a focus on children and their socialisation into manners, and even gendered behaviours (Meah, 2014; DeVault, 1991). Although sometimes pleasurable, and an important element in cultural reproduction, domestic foodwork is often exploitative, devalued and oppressive (DeVault, 1991; Meah, 2014).
Studies of foodwork are inspired by Marjorie Devault’s (1991) foundational study of mothers’ food labour – sometimes called maternal foodwork- in US heterosexual family households. One of the most significant findings of her research is the complex, time-intensive, relentless nature of the labour of feeding families, work that is often hidden, and yet embodied, emotional, cognitive and physical (Brenton, 2017; DeVault, 1991). It’s worth giving an example of maternal foodwork to show its multi-facetedness even before the difficulties of the COVID-19 context. Take food shopping for a family: this entails budgeting, meal planning, travelling to and from the shops, comparing prices, substituting ingredient, unpacking and sorting even before cooking begins. Shopping requires and intimate family knowledge of families’ food preferences, allergies, intolerances, special diets, health and dietary needs and desires, for a range of people from babies, toddlers, teenagers, older people, and people who are sick (McCabe & de Waal Malefyt, 2015). Shopping for food became highly problematic during lockdown for people on low incomes, with disabilities, shielding, or with very little time because of zero contract work. The middle classes found it much easier because of their various safety nets of income, savings, digital access and domestic space, and who could comfortably pay for home deliveries for food ordered online.
What’s clear is that women’s unpaid domestic foodwork has intensified in the COVID context with women feeling the brunt of extra and new responsibilities, including increased demands on cooking and feeding family members. Anna North (2020) argues that ‘while it’s too early for data on how families are feeding themselves during notes the lockdown and the pandemic is changing how families shop and eat, with school closures and sickness in the family increasing women’s cooking load and bringing additional complications. The demands of foodwork during the pandemic fell especially hard on low-income women, especially lone parents and racially minoritised women and asylum seekers. Foodwork practices and meanings are unevenly distributed by race, and class and the pandemic magnifies difficulties with food that many people were struggling with pre-COVID including affordability and access to food. The feminisation and racialisation of austerity cemented the pernicious negative impacts of COVID-19 on low income women. Scholars have detailed the failings of Britain’s welfare state pre-pandemic to prevent hunger and ensure good nutrition amongst economically vulnerable people which intensified under lockdown and since (Barker and Russell, 2019; Lambie-Mumford, 2019; Woods, interviewed Howell, 2020).
Repeated reports stress that racial inequalities of COVID-19 are extensive. Leading UK Black food activist Dee Woods argues that in cities, pre-COVID poverty, disability, food insecurity, health inequality, and poor housing disproportionately affected women of colour, all of which were exacerbated during lockdown and the ensuing pandemic (Wood interviewed Howell, 2020).Due to financial uncertainty, school closures and job losses, food insecurity, food bank use exploded and research suggests almost a fifth of UK homes with children went hungry and food insecurity quadrupled to 16% of the population during lockdown (Loopstra, 2020). The Food Standards Agency (2020) suggested that one in 10 people in the UK were forced to use food banks during lockdown. Food insecurity was caused largely by a short-term shortage of basic foods in the shops, an inability to access shops because of self–isolation, sudden school closures, furloughing, inadequate benefits and financial insecurity (Loopstra 2020; O’Connell and Brannen, 2020).
The upshot is that many women of colour, migrant women and white working-class women suffered from food poverty and food hunger during the pandemic in the UK. In addition, the economy’s dependence on precarious employment in sectors which shut down during lockdown created a new group of precariat experiencing food insecurity, including women working as key workers on zero hours contracts, disproportionately affecting women of colour (Barker and Russell, 2020). Not only are these women poorly paid but they lack financial safety nets and are more likely to be made redundant as a result of the pandemic. In a blogpost on food poverty, Rebecca O’Connell and Julie Brannen (2020) deconstruct the slogan of solidarity – “We’re all in this together” –to highlight that millions of households with children experienced coronavirus lockdowns dogged by food insecurity. Critically they stress that the longer-term health and opportunities for these children are dire.
Pre-COVID, austerity politics created food and foodwork inequalities with impoverished mothers on low wages and benefits finding it hard to feed their families. Many foodwork practices are focused on health, and under these conditions, women compromise their own nutritional and eating needs (Koch, 2019; O’Connell et al., 2019). Women experiencing poverty have to do extra labours to provision for their families, and/or children. They develop complex, detailed and extensive knowledges about budgets, brands, family preferences, special offers on food, minimising waste, shopping around and reducing transport costs (Beagan et al, 2018; Martin, 2018; O’Connell et al., 2019). In these ways, women’s knowledges often prevent hunger (Esterik, 1997). In their study in the UK, pre-COVID, O’Connell et al. (2019) outline how mothers go to food banks, shop around in different supermarkets and locations to find better value food, an expensive and time-consuming approach. They cannot afford to bulk buy and live hand to mouth, cooking from basic ingredients and bulking out meals with cheap carbohydrate foods. They seek to protect their children by cutting back on their own food intake. As O’Connell explains in a recent webinar, getting hold of food, thinking about what to feed everyone, shopping around, buying what children will eat is all very difficult especially when you are short of money and time. Brenda Parker writes how austerity amplifies and intensifies the exhaustion what she calls the ‘energy sucking’ work of travelling to food banks, churches and endless waiting at agencies and clinics (Parker, 2017 cited in Kern, 2020: 50). Again this kind of energy sucking labour will have amplified under lockdowns, social distancing and the pandemic.
But there are other dimensions to domestic foodwork. It is being transformed by intensified mothering ideologies around ‘eating right’: feeding children healthy, and now also eco-friendly food – what Barbara Parker (2020) calls eco-nutrionism – making women responsible for the planet’s health. These foodwork practices of doing good and eating right create new types of labour and inequalities, reinforcing heteronormative, gender, race and class hierarchies, all of which have deepened during the pandemic (Brenton 2017; Parker, 2020; Perrier and Swan, 2019). Mothers are expected to keep their children and the eco-systems healthy and safe, and to produce healthy citizens, incited to buy healthy, organic and local foods, even though what these mean, and the ethics of how they are produced is not so straightforward (Koch, 2019; Martin, 2018).
The stress, stigmatisation and burden of hegemonic food healthism and eco-nutritionism on women of colour and women on low budgets cannot be underestimated (Beagan et al; Koch, 2019; Jones, 2018; Parker, 2020). Foodworkers – processors, retailers, chefs, waitresses- themselves, often women of colour, pre-COVID often couldn’t afford to buy fresh locally sourced food, a position made worse by the pandemic (Koch, 2019). Austerity had already forced many people, especially lone mothers, refugees and asylum seekers and other minoritised groups into seeking food aid, often from food banks, with the shame they bring, together with poor nutritional, environmentally sustainable and cultural food options. And as Madeleine Power and colleagues (2020) have underlined, social distancing practices and anxieties in food banks, may augment feelings of stigmatisation.
What you cook and eat dominates ideal of good mothering and wider cultural capital. DeVault’s original scholarship showed that domestic foodwork was performative, enabling hegemonic ideals of femininity and good mothering to be enacted. Making food choices, and eating or resisting certain foods reproduce gendered, racialised and classed identities and subjectivities and classed hierarchies around ‘ethical eating’ (Cairns & Johnston, 2015; Parker, 2020; Parker et. al., 2019; Forson Williams & Wilkerson, 2014; Harper, 2010). Discourses about healthism and eco-nutritionism reproduce ‘harmful, racialised ideas about who can know how to eat the right foods, who is healthy, controlled and civilised’, all of which intensified during the pandemic, consolidating the figure of the ‘unhealthy Other’, and hierarchies of racialised and classed privilege. (Parker, 2020: 46; Flowers and Swan, 2020). Not having certain foods not only has brutal effects on women and children’s health and well-being but also affects their social and cultural inclusion (O’Connell et al., 2020). Food insecurity then is about disempowerment as well as the lack of food on the table (Mengesha, 2016: 26; Van Esterik, 1997).
Food is multifaceted and not just about health and nutrition but also cultural and emotional well-being and women’s identity and sense of self (Stelfox and Newbold, 2019; Van Esterik, 1997; Ternikar, 2019). Hence foodwork is central to cultural reproduction, and an expression of feminine solidarity, resistance and identity, a means through which women find meaning and power. In a groundbreaking study, Meredith Abarca (2006) explains how Mexican women use the kitchen and food to celebrate their skill, identity and resourcefulness and build relations and survival politics with other women. Cooking food ‘creates a locus for work, creativity and pleasure that transcend realms of human reproduction as shaped by the market, patriarchy and alienating labour’ (Lewis 2016: 6). Foodwork can enable highly valued cultural practices such as the preservation of traditions and collective ethnic identities, which furnish women with ‘culinary capital’, and spaces for racially minoritised women to build collective anti-racism (D’Sylva & Beagan, 2011; Nettles-Barcelón, Clark, Thorsson, Ternikar, 2019; Walker, & Williams-Forson, 2015).). But under COVID and austerity conditions, these skills and pleasures are replaced by feeling hungry, trying to make do, and feelings of shame and guilt, and deprived of the power and resources to influence key aspects of their families’ lives (Van Esterik, 1997)
Conclusion
My aim in this article is to outline the emerging its gendered, racialised and classed relations, hierarchies and politics of unpaid domestic foodwork during COVID-19 through an anti-racist feminist lens. It’s clear that many women in the UK have been forced to shoulder extra unpaid care labour, their burdens in unpaid domestic labour, community work and paid front line work escalating. Like women around the world, these labours have been imposed without consideration or the alleviation of their other responsibilities (McLaren et al, 2020).
My focus has been on unpaid domestic foodwork, a topic I argued has been under-researched by food academics and commentators. Feminists repeat the historic call for a revaluing and recognition of such work as labour and argue that women’s preparedness to pitch in shouldn’t be taken for granted (Elliot cited North, 2020). As I sketched out, foodwork underpins ideals about good mothering, eating right, notions of healthism and practices of cultural reproduction which become impossible for working class white and racially minoritised women in the context of food poverty, work poverty, lockdown and under continuing pandemic consequences. These are also the women doing the paid foodwork on farms, supermarkets, and in hospitals and care homes, and community foodwork in food banks and community kitchens.
As I write the pandemic is still with us. Everyone expects future waves. The negative racialised, classed and gendered effects will be felt for a very long time, including rises in gendered and racialised unemployment, poverty and precarity. Feminists caution that women’s care responsibilities, and new obligations under COVID, will worsen and their impact ‘endure well beyond the pandemic’ (McLaren et al., 2020). As we grapple with the best strategies to develop policies and practices, what’s important is that we recognise the significance of women’s paid and unpaid work, and feminist and activist commentary about this work and its inequalities. Gender, race and class have not been taken account of sufficiently in interpersonal, societal and policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic (McLaren et al., 2020). Moreover, feminist analyses have received relatively little attention from those formulating responses to the pandemic (Social Politics, 2020). A call for papers for the feminist journal Social Politics (2020) insists, ‘this is striking as measures to confront the crisis have relied heavily on an expanded role of care, of unpaid work and of families – all prominent areas in feminist thinking and activism’. Furthermore, women need to be involved in further crisis assessments, resource allocations, recovery responses and planning and their care labour acknowledged in policy and academic research (McLaren et al., 2020; Mlambo-Ngsuka and Ramos, 2020). As Helen McLaren and colleagues stress (2020), women have immediate practical and strategic needs, and the rise in mutual aid reveals a lack in government services which women should not have to fill.
Turning to food more specifically, food activists and academics call for the government to address food poverty properly and support a socially just and sustainable food system that moves beyond food charity. As Margo Barker and Jean Russell write, ‘The COVID-19 crisis has brought the shortcomings of UK food welfare policy, the central role of the voluntary sector, and the major dependence of the UK on philanthropy into sharp relief. Much of the government response was piecemeal and driven by pressure groups and charities. It sought populist plasters rather than address the deep causes of food insecurity through proper planning’ (2020: 868) Food charity and emergency aid is a ‘safety valve’ that not transformative of the inequalities, stigma, shame and unsustainability of the food system (Poppendieck, 1998). Women and children are likely to bear the brunt of the effects of food insecurity, as well as COVID-19-associated health system disruptions, with long-term social, cultural, and economic consequences for individuals and society (Power et al, 2020).
In this short article, I haven’t been able to address the inequalities and dangers experienced by food workers in paid domestic and public foodwork during the pandemic. Coronavirus poses an occupational health risk to food system workers including farmers/producers, grocery store workers, emergency food system staff and volunteers, all of whom have provided essential services that support food consumption and safeguard food access (Parks et al., 2020). Nor have I been able to discuss the link between the pandemic and industrialized agriculture, livestock production, deforestation, and capital’s relentless exploitation of nature, and feminist and critical race studies of these (Fernando, 2020).
What’s required next is an intersectional feminist analysis of actually existing foodwork practices during the pandemic. This needs to move away from noticing gender, to outlining an analysis of food and systemic systems and relations of power, gender, race and class (Hovorka, 2013; Parker, 2020). Future research can explore how women of colour, front line workers, paid foodworkers have been affected by foodwork responsibilities and obligations and the coping and innovation practices they have developed. Feminist studies must also examine how to support front-line food system workers to keep them safe and well (Parks et al., 2020).
Moreover, it’s not clear yet exactly how race, class and gender underpinned the need for, and the provision of community foodwork through emergency food aid, and food support. To combat the challenges of COVID-19, Oona Morrow and Barbara Parker (2020) argue we need to amplify anti-racist feminists’ experiments in food initiatives. They give examples such as cooperative and co-housing; worker cooperatives; community kitchens, fridges, and daycares; to imagining, and designing cities that facilitate care, commoning, and collectivity. In their call for a food justice approach to racial disparities during COVID-19 in a US context, Alison Hope Alkon, Sarah Bowen, Yuki Kato, and Kara Alexis Young (2020) stress that racial capitalism affects the production, distribution, and consumption of food, and structural racism and workplace the exploitation of people of colour and other minoritized groups, all of which impacts their food insecurity and vulnerability during the pandemic. They insist that food justice addressing the cultural whiteness of health promotion itself. North American food activist, LaDonna Redmond argued for ‘Food Justice 2.0,’ an approach in which people of colour and other minoritised groups who have faced food inequalities lead the food movement (Parks et al., 2020). Speaking of the UK, Dee Woods argues that the pandemic reveals just how ‘threadbare’ the UK’s food system is (Howell, 2020).
Rather than food reform then, we need to develop food justice which attends to gendered, classed and racialised power dynamics, identities and hierarchies embedded within the food system, food policies and food practices but also food activism, and significantly for those of us in academia, studies and research on food. As Alice Julier puts it, we need to see the construction of race and gender as a ‘defining feature of the production and consumption of food’ (2019: 20). Hopefully we can start to address COVID-19 food justice intersectionally before any future waves, and stop the emotional, embodied, economic, social and cultural harm that the pandemic wreaks indirectly and directly on women through burdens of unpaid carework, including the labours of domestic, frontline and community foodwork (Fortier, 2020).
References
Abarca, M. (2006). Voices in the Kitchen: views of food and the world from working-class Mexican and Mexican-American women. College Station: Texas and A&M University Press.References
Allen, P, and Sachs, C. (2007). Women and food chains: The gendered politics of food. International Journal of Sociology of Food and Agriculture 15(1): 1–23
Alkon, A. H., Bowen, S., Kato, Y., & Young, K. A. (2020). Unequally vulnerable: a food justice approach to racial disparities in COVID-19 cases. Agriculture and Human Values, 37:535–536
Barker, M., & Russell, J. (2020). Feeding the food insecure in Britain: learning from the 2020 COVID-19 crisis. Food Security, 1-6.
Beagan, B. L., Chapman, G. E., & Power, E. (2018). The visible and invisible occupations of food provisioning in low income families. Journal of Occupational Science, 25(1), 100-111.
Beagan, B., Chapman, G. E., D’Sylva, A., & Bassett, B. R. (2008). It’s just easier for me to do it’: Rationalizing the family division of foodwork. Sociology, 42(4), 653-671.
Brenton, J. (2017). The limits of intensive feeding: maternal foodwork at the intersections of race, class, and gender. Sociology of health & illness, 39(6), 863-877,
Burns, B. (2020) Feminist Solidarity for a Collective Response to COVID-19. Accessed at https://worldat1c.org/feminist-solidarity-for-a-collective-response-to-covid-19-1ce3df2f38ca
Cairns, K. and Johnston, J. (2015). Food and Femininity. New York: Bloomsbury.
Chatzidakis, A., Hakim, J., Littler, J., Rottenberg, C., & Segal, L. (2020). From carewashing to radical care: the discursive explosions of care during Covid-19. Feminist Media Studies, 20(6), 889-895.
Cox, J. (2020) New Research Shows Covid-19’s Impact On Gender Inequality And Mothers’ Mental Health viewed at https://www.forbes.com/sites/josiecox/2020/07/30/covid-19-gender-equality-mental-health-working-mothers-flexible-working/ August 10th 2020
D’Sylva, A., & Beagan, B. L. (2011). ‘Food is culture, but it’s also power’: the role of food in ethnic and gender identity construction among Goan Canadian women. Journal of Gender Studies, 20(3), 279-289.
DeVault, M. (1991) Feeding the family: the social organization of caring as gendered work, London: University of Chicago Press.
Duffy, M. (2007). Doing the dirty work: Gender, race, and reproductive labor in historical perspective. Gender & Society, 21(3), 313-336.
Fernando, J. L. (2020). The Virocene Epoch: the vulnerability nexus of viruses, capitalism and racism. Journal of Political Ecology, 27(1), 635-684.
Flowers, R., & Swan, E. (2012). Pedagogies of Doing Good: Problematisations, Authorities, Technologies and Teleologies in Food Activism. Australian Journal of Adult Learning, 52(3), 532-572.
Fortier, N. (2020). COVID-19, gender inequality, and the responsibility of the state. International Journal of Wellbeing, 10(3).
Gastronomica (2020) Food in the time of COVID-19: Call for Submissions https://gastronomica.org/2020/04/06/food-in-the-time-of-covid-19-call-for-submissions/
Glenn, Nakano E. (1992). From servitude to service work: Historical continuities in the racial division of paid reproductive labor. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 18.1 (1992): 1-43.
Hussain, N and Hussein, S. (2020) Migrant ethnic minority women in Academia accessed at http://www.transformingsociety.co.uk/2020/07/31/migrant-ethnic-minority-women-in-academia-during-the-twin-pandemics-of-covid-19-and-racism/
Holvino, E. (2010). Intersections: The simultaneity of race, gender and class in organization studies. Gender, Work & Organization, 17(3), 248-277.
Howell, M. (2020) How are local food relief organisations coping with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic? Viewed at https://thepigsite.com/articles/how-are-local-food-relief-organisations-coping-with-the-ongoing-covid-19-pandemic August 10th
Hovorka, A. (2013). The case for a feminist foodscapes framework: Lessons from research in urban Botswana. Development, 56(1), 123-128.
Julier, A., (2019) Critiquing Hegemony: Creating Food, Crafting Justice: Cultivating an Activist Feminist Studies in Parker, B., Brady, J., Power, E., & Belyea, S. (Eds.). (2019). Feminist Food Studies. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press.
Kern, L. (2020). Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World. London: Verso.
Koch, S. L. (2019). Gender and Food: A Critical Look at the Food System. London: Rowman & Littlefield.
Laslett, B., & Brenner, J. (1989). Gender and social reproduction: Historical perspectives. Annual review of sociology, 15(1), 381-404.
Lewis, D. (2016). Bodies, matter and feminist freedoms: Revisiting the politics of food. Agenda, 30(4), 6-16.
Loopstra, R. (2020). Vulnerability to food insecurity since the COVID-19 lockdown. Report downloaded from https://foodfoundation.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Report_COVID19FoodInsecurity-final.pdf May 10th 2020.
MacKendrick, N., & Pristavec, T. (2019). Between careful and crazy: the emotion work of feeding the family in an industrialized food system. Food, Culture & Society, 22(4), 446-463
McCabe, M., & de Waal Malefyt, T. (2015).) Creativity and cooking: Motherhood, agency and social change in everyday life. Journal of Consumer Culture, 15(1), 48-65.
McLaren, H. J., Wong, K. R., Nguyen, K. N., & Mahamadachchi, K. N. D. (2020). Covid-19 and Women’s Triple Burden: Vignettes from Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Vietnam and Australia. Social Sciences, 9(5), 87.
Martin, M. A. (2018). “Sometimes I feel like I’m counting crackers”: The household foodwork of low-income mothers, and how community food initiatives can support them. Canadian Food Studies/La Revue canadienne des études sur l’alimentation, 5(1), 113-132.
Maye, D. (2020) Covid-19 and sustainable food systems: building a shared learning resource http://www.ccri.ac.uk/covid19food/
Meah, A. (2014). Reconceptualizing power and gendered subjectivities in domestic cooking spaces. Progress in Human Geography, 38(5), 671-690.
Matthewman, S., & Huppatz, K. (2020). A sociology of Covid-19. Journal of Sociology, 1440783320939416.
Mengesha, E. H. (2016). Food security: What does gender have to do with it?. Agenda, 30(4), 25-35.
Morrow, O., & Parker, B. (2020). Care, commoning and collectivity: from grand domestic revolution to urban transformation. Urban Geography, 1-18.
O’Connell, R. and Brannen, J. (2020) We’re not ‘all in this together’: COVID-19 exposes stark realities of food insecurity, viewed at https://ucleuropeblog.com/2020/05/12/were-not-all-in-this-together-covid-19-exposes-stark-realities-of-food-insecurity/ August 10th.
O’Connell, R., Knight, A. and Brannen, J. (2019). Living Hand to mouth:Children and food in low income families. Child Poverty Action Group.
Mlambo-Ngsuka, P., and Ramos, G. (2020) Op-ed: Can we turn the tide on gender equality viewed at https://www.unwomen.org/en/news/stories/2020/4/op-ed-joint-turn-the-tide-on-gender-equality August 15th 2020
North, A. (2020) The “women’s work” of the pandemic viewed at
https://www.vox.com/2020/4/30/21238454/coronavirus-face-mask-cooking-women-covid-pandemic August 10th 2020.
Parker, B. (2020) Consuming health, negotiating risk, eating right: Exploring the limits of choice through a feminist intersectional lens. Journal of Critical Dietetics, Vol 5:1: 45-57.
Parker, B., Brady, J., Power, E., & Belyea, S. (Eds.). (2019). Feminist Food Studies: Intersectional Perspectives. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press.
Parks, C. A., Nugent, N. B., Fleischhacker, S. E., & Yaroch, A. L. (2020). Food system workers are the unexpected but under protected COVID heroes. The Journal of Nutrition.
Perrier, M. and Swan, E. (2019) Foodwork: Racialised, Gendered and Classed Labours viewed at https://futuresofwork.co.uk/2019/12/09/foodwork-racialised-gendered-and-class-labours/ December 10th 2020.
Poppendieck, J. (1998). Sweet Charity? Emergency Food and the End of Entitlement. Penguin Books: New York.
Power, K. (2020). The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the care burden of women and families. Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy, 16(1), 67-73.
Power, M. , Doherty, B., Pybus, K., Pickett, K. (2020). How covid-19 has exposed inequalities in the UK food system: The case of UK food and poverty. Emerald Open Res. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.35241/emeraldopenres.13539.1
Nettles-Barcelón, K. D., Clark, G., Thorsson, C., Walker, J. K., & Williams-Forson, P. (2015). Black women’s food work as critical space. Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies, 15(4), 34-49.
O’Connell, R. and Brannen, J. (2016) Food, Families and Work. New York: Bloomsbury.
Sobal, J. (2017). Men’s foodwork in food systems: Social representations of masculinities and cooking at home in Szabo, M., Koch, S., & Cox, R. (Eds.). (2017). Food, Masculinities, and Home: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. London Bloomsbury Publishing.
Social Politics (2020) COVID-19 and the Social Politics of Crises Special Issue, viewed at https://academic.oup.com/sp/pages/call-for-papers, August 10th 2020
Stelfox, K. B., & Newbold, K. B. (2019). Securing culturally appropriate food for refugee women in Canada: opportunities for research. In Bruce Newbold and Kathi Wilson (eds). A Research Agenda for Migration and Health. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing.
Swan, E. (forthcoming) Making a meal of it: Critical Race Feminist Studies of Food, Work and Organisation in Elisabeth Kelan, Helena Liu, Banu Özkazanç-Pan and Alison Pullen (eds) Routledge Handbook of Gender, Work and Organisation. London: Routledge.
Ternikar, F, (2019) Feeding the Muslim South Asian Immigrant Family: A Feminist Analysis of Culinary Consumption in Parker, B., Brady, J., Power, E., & Belyea, S. (Eds.). (2019). Feminist Food Studies: Intersectional Perspectives. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press.
Thompson, M. (2020) Why the Gendered Political Economy of COVID-19 Matters Viewed at https://braveneweurope.com/merisa-thompson-why-the-gendered-political-economy-of-covid-19-matters August 12th.
Valley, W., Anderson, M., Blackstone, N. T., Sterling, E., Betley, E., Akabas, S., & Spiller, K. (2020). Towards an equity competency model for sustainable food systems education programs. Elem Sci Anth, 8(1).
Van Esterik, P. (1999). Right to food; right to feed; right to be fed. The intersection of women’s rights and the right to food. Agriculture and Human Values, 16(2), 225-232.
Williams-Forson, P., & Wilkerson, A. (2011). Intersectionality and food studies. Food, Culture & Society, 14(1), 7-28.
Brighton and Sussex Universities Food Network 