“No sugared association is stronger than that between sweetness and femininity. Girls are made of sugar and spice and everything nice. Women are honey, sweetheart, cupcake, candy girl, honey-bunch--- or they're tarts. In the Bible, "The lips of an adulterous woman drip honey" (Proverbs 5:3). Meanwhile, black women have been "caramel," "brown sugar," "mocha latte," "chocolate," and "molasses,"--- both desired and diminished. Making sweet foods is considered women's work--- and eating them is too. Girls receive an Easy-Bake Oven; cake mixes are marketed exclusively to women; home bakers are overwhelmingly female. Candy and chocolate are heavily feminized that a Yorkie bar in the U.K.--- normal chocolate, massive chunks--- until recently stood out by marketing itself as "not for girls." It's not just in American and European food cultures that this holds true. I spoke to food writer and journalist Mayukh Sen about the gendering of foods within Bengali cuisine. "Sweetness is very much gendered female in Bengali cooking," he explained. "There's a word, mishti, that stands for both Bengali sweets and is also used to describe someone, usually a woman, who is 'sweet' (pleasant, youthful, and nonthreatening/demure)." In Japan, amato and karato refer to those who love sweets and those who prefer salty, savory, and spicy foods, respectively, and yet these labels loosely trace the dividing line between men and women. Jon D. Holtzman writes that a Kyoto-based confectioner--- by all accounts a man who loved his sweets--- assured him that he was more a karato kind of guy: "strong, energetic, and ambitious.” WomenSugarBlack And WhiteSweetnessFemininityPersonalitiesGendersFair Sex Book:The Best American Food Writing 2019 Source: The Best American Food Writing 2019
“Beyoncé spins her own bittersweet narratives into art. “I’ma rain, I’ma rain on this bitter love/Tell the sweet I’m new,” she sings on “Freedom.” As bell hooks writes of Beyoncé’s Lemonade in her essay “Moving Beyond Pain,” to be truly free, we must choose beyond simply surviving adversity, we must dare to create lives of sustained optimal well-being and joy. In that world, the making and drinking of lemonade will be a fresh and zestful delight, a real life mixture of the bitter and the sweet, and not a measure of our capacity to endure pain, but rather a celebration of our moving beyond pain.” If Will Cotton’s paintings—- resplendent with pure, idealized fantasy—- are the sweetness we lazily dream of, Walker’s A Subtlety is the sweetness we actually live: rearing up through centuries of hurt and exploitation, planting its feet in the good and the bad, the pleasure and the pain. It crystallizes across the surfaces of our imperfect lives, and makes us shine.” ArtSubtletyBeyonceSongs LyricsWhen Life Gives You LemonsBittersweetness Book:The Best American Food Writing 2019 Source: The Best American Food Writing 2019