“Eat Me Up”

Abstract

Hauck-Lawson's concept of food voice argues that what a person chooses to eat can make powerful statements about identity. In my dissertation fieldwork, a qualitative comparative case study of amateur male cooks, an urban firehouse and a competition barbecue team, I expected that the food voice would be powerful and prevalent. Since men are often identified as taciturn, I expected to draw heavily on their food voices in order to further analyze their communication. I found instead that in the case of the firefighters their food voice at first glance bore little resemblance to their spoken voice as it related to their experiences with food. Their food voices were not attempting to reinforce the spoken voices of the firefighters, but rather shouted over the spoken voices to express what the men were really saying, a food voice rhetoric of nurturing amidst a hyper-masculine spoken voice.