Gender, Social Reproduction, and Feminist Approaches to Food Systems

Stevano, Sara

Abstract

The study of food systems through a gender lens highlights gender roles and relations in the production, processing, and consumption of food. The concept of “food system” has a long history, but its uses have increased significantly in recent decades, driven by the quest to change the food system, making it more sustainable, caring, and fair. Food systems are now understood in broad terms, informed by systems thinking and encompassing the conditions—agroecological, social, economic, and so forth—of food production, transformation, distribution, consumption, and waste. Efforts to define food systems explicitly have increased, but the concept is used in varied ways across disciplines and intellectual strands. The growing public and policy concern with food systems is also reflected in the creation of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems in 2015 and the announcement of the first UN Food Systems Summit in 2021. Multi- and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of food systems, from both natural and social sciences, abound. However, the literature that investigates gender relations in the food systems is often multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary, and it is largely located in the social sciences, including anthropology, development studies, economics, and sociology, among others. The main aim of such literature has been to analyze gender relations and inequality in various parts of the food system, from production to consumption. In doing so, this literature foregrounds care relations and reproductive work in the food system, placing the emphasis on forms of invisible and unpaid work carried out for food to be produced, processed, and consumed. Sociocultural relations that shape how people relate to food have also been considered from a gender perspective, highlighting the existence of disparities in nutrition and health outcomes on grounds of gender. Questions of ecology, sustainability, and alternatives to the capitalist organization of the world food system have also been examined through a feminist lens. Increasingly, intersectional approaches where gender relations are seen as being co-constituted with other relations of power—along the lines of class, race, and migration status, among others—appear in the feminist literature on food systems. Finally, the literature that seeks to achieve a more complete understanding of food systems from a feminist social reproduction perspective not only documents the existence of inequalities in the food system but also seeks to explain how inequalities are central to the functioning of the food system as we know it.

Citation

Stevano, S. (2025). Gender, Social Reproduction, and Feminist Approaches to Food Systems

• Other Type: Reference Work Contribution
• Acceptance Date: Feb 7, 2025
• Online Publication Date: May 27, 2025
• Publication Date: May 27, 2025
• Deposit Date: Jun 2, 2025
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• ISBN: 9780197764381
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780197764381-0044