A few weeks back, my cousin sister and I planned an evening out to have some food together in Guwahati.  The restaurant was not even a kilometer from my place. But since we planned it as an evening outing, we were worried about getting back home safely. Although it is just a walking distance, we preferred to return by cab. So here we were, two women, reasonably educated, enjoying the privilege of eating out in restaurants and yet scared for our safety after dark. But such an experience is in no way unique to us. It is common for almost all women who venture out in public spaces, especially in the evenings, whether to eat, hang-out, work, or any other activity. The safety concern is like a shadow that follows women.

Phadke, Khan and Ranade (2011), in their work focusing on women’s access to public spaces in Mumbai, has analyzed the politics of the discourse on safety and gender, which should shift to the language of the right of pleasure-seeking by women in public spaces. They assert that even a cosmopolitan city like Mumbai cannot uphold the promises of globalization about democracy, equality, etc. Public spaces are still male-dominated, where women are only seen as ‘misfits’.[i] This analysis can be very well extended to the city space of Guwahati as well.

Nonetheless, despite such anxieties surrounding women and public spaces, so many eating out places advertise themselves with images of young, smart, glamorous women enjoying eating and dining out. Matters of safety and the constant sense of fear disappear in such images. It is this paradox that this essay reflects upon.

The city of Guwahati, like cities across the globe, is teeming with eating-out places. From street-side food stalls to the Hard-Rock café; from the ‘Assamese’ restaurants to the ‘international’ food joints – the city has it all. This trend has marked most cities across the globe and is often associated with what a neoliberal city ought to be. It has been argued that “Neoliberalism does not only land in cities or impact urban governance; cities are crucial cradles of neo-liberalization, provide fundamental material bases for this process, but also its contestation”. [ii] However, this essay’s focus is limited to understanding the gendered nature of food and public spaces. One, therefore, does not enter definitional debates on neoliberalism.

I contend that with each new brand in food coming in, we are moving towards forgetting the complex meanings of food in social life. The barrage of media images on food, the new eating out places, their personalized advertisements is the stuff of fantasies. Even as they create new consumption sites, these fantasies also invisibilise parts of our social realities, realities related to food and eating-out spaces, such as as – hunger, safety, exploitation, and layers of inequalities. Class and status are defined by the relationships between people as figured through material culture rather than by any absolute consumption measures. Consumption connects diners to those who catch, grow and prepare their foods and those who have the “taste” (Bourdieu)[iii] to appreciate them. Commodity chains connect producers, retailers, and consumers across vast geographical distances and numerous cultural and socioeconomic boundaries.[iv] In this context, I try to reflect upon the disjuncture in the imageries of ‘empowered’ women eating in public spaces. Can one contend that the market appropriates images of women’s bodies as a marketing strategy? Can one contend that such images at best only serve as gastro-porn or food-porn?

Feminist critic Rosalind Coward[v] in 1984 popularized the term ‘food-porn’. The evocation of such glossy imagery of food and food practices is common to American fast-food chains and traditional Assamese restaurants in Guwahati. More importantly, these imageries are often very successful in hiding the real toil, labor and inequality that real food practices entail in these spaces and beyond them. Before Coward (1984), Alexander Cockburn[vi], in the year 1977, coined the term gastro-porn in the review of a cookbook where he regards gastro-porn as images that heighten the excitement with a sense of unattainability. Further, the wider use of tantalizing food imagery has been studied by social scientists, often drawing parallels between “food porn” and non-food pornography.

McBride (2010), while broadly referring to the concept of food-porn, attributes the origin of the concept to Roland Barthes[vii]. She writes – “Although he did not specifically use the term, Roland Barthes discussed what is essentially food porn in his 1957 collection, Mythologies. Commenting on the food-related content in Elle magazine that offers a fantasy to those who cannot afford to cook such meals, he writes: “[C]ooking according to Elle is meant for the eye alone, since sight is a genteel sense” (McBride 2010: 38).[viii]

Barthes, I would argue that images of women eating in a neo-liberal patriarchal market space serve a particular interest as an extension of this view. It may be inaccurate to assume that women who go out or get to venture into public spaces, including posh eating-out spaces, are the epitome of women’s empowerment.

Firstly, all of these glossy pictures do not narrate the ‘journey’ of any women who eat in public spaces. The pictures’ glossiness hides the concerns related to the fear of harassment that is usual in our urban spaces. Secondly, since women are still regarded as food providers rather than consumers, these pictures are rather seen as an aberration except when it has to be used for advertisements. Thirdly, such images invisibilise women who are not potential consumers. Fourth they homogenize the ideas of ‘empowerment’, ‘equality’, ‘fun’, ‘enjoyment’, indicating that only a certain category of women are entitled to these definitions. Even for this particular category of women, realities of misogyny is camouflaged in these pictures. As Chaudhuri (2001) argues that, “…in the recasting of gender images in adverts, a simultaneous recreation of both a new consuming Indian “middle” class in a globalized economy and a reorientation of the salient issues taken up by the media.…these adverts implicitly but effectively eclipse the image of “another world” of Indian men and women – poor and battered, tribal and peasant, working-class and Dalit – from public discourse.”[ix]

Hence, there is an urgent need to move away from the glossy fantasies of ‘empowered’ urban women to realities that still haunts us without any cease.

[i] Phadke, Shilpa, Sameera Khan, and Shilpa Ranade.2011. Why loiter?: Women and risk on Mumbai streets. New Delhi: Penguin Books India.

[ii] Pinson, Gilles and Christelle Morel Journel. 2016. The Neoliberal City – Theory, Evidence, Debates. Territory, Politics, Governance. 4(2): 137-153.

[iii] Bourdieu, Pierre. (1979). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Harvard University Press.

[iv] Sammells, Clare A. and Edmund (Ned) Searles. 2016. Restaurants, fields, markets, and feasts: Food and culture in semi-public spaces. Food and Foodways. 24(3-4): 129-135.

[v] Coward, Rosalind. 1984. Female Desire. Paladin Books.

[vi] Cockburn, Alexander. 1977. Gastro-Porn. The New York Review.

[vii] Barthes, Roland. 1957. Mythologies. Les Lettres Nouvelles.

[viii] McBride, Anne E. 2010. Food Porn. Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture. 10(1): 38-46.

[ix] Chaudhuri, Maitrayee. 2001. Gender and advertisements: The rhetoric of globalisation. Women’s Studies International Forum. 24(3-4): 373-385.

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Pooja Kalita is a PhD scholar with the Department of Sociology, South Asian University (New Delhi).