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Dec. 14th, 2013 11:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsALSO I STILL HAVE THEORETICAL BOOKLOGGING POSTS TO CATCH UP ON BEFORE THEORETICALLY THE END OF THE YEAR. (This may or may not happen.) But here is one: Eat the City: A Tale of the Fishers, Foragers, Butchers, Farmers, Poultry Minders, Sugar Refiners, Cane Cutters, Beekeepers, Winemakers, and Brewers Who Built New York, by Robin Shulman.
This is a book about food production in the city -- each chapter focuses on a different kind of comestible (beer, beef, sugar, fish, etc.) and interweaves the history of how it was produced with someone who's dong it now. Some of it is about as annoyingly hipster as you'd expect, but some of it is super interesting! The chapter on community gardens, for example, was GREAT -- the guy that she's using as her focal point is an elderly gentleman in Harlem who started growing vegetables to give away as freebies for people who signed up with his illegal lottery operation, and eventually decided to just garden full-time. And there are about two sentences about a woman who basically decided to chase the drug dealers off her street by turning the creepy lot where they used to hang out into a community garden, and they kept trying to scare her into backing down and abandoning it and she just KEPT ON GARDENING REALLY AGGRESSIVELY, and, like, clearly two sentences about this woman were not enough, I want a whole short story! A novel!
I also loved that there was a whole half a chapter about the creation of the Manischewitz wine company, and this plucky Jewish guys who just kept cheerfully selling terrible sweet wine made from crappy Concord grapes and dealing with problems like slacker rabbis at the Manischewitz factory and their kids being like "ugh, Dad, do we really HAVE to drink the awful wine at home too?" and the fact that goyim have no idea how to pronounce Manischewitz, so they built an entire advertising campaign that just featured people saying "Manischewitz!" as many times as possible. That entire segment was strangely comforting to me.
(Sidenote: I actually really love sweet Manischewitz wine. I KNOW IT'S TERRIBLE AND I DON'T CARE.)
However . . . okay, so I had this weird experience with the book where I spent the first three chapters in the complete and total assumption that the author was a dude. Why? you may ask. Well, I answer, because 6/7 of the people that are interviewed and profiled extensively in the book are men, and also there is this really uncomfortable trend of depicting the (most young, white, and hipsterish of these) men as weirdly irresistible to women. Like, whenever there's a scene of them interacting with female customers, there's often a qualifier like "she says flirtatiously" or "she says, giggling" or "she says in a sultry voice," and . . . seriously?
The author also talks about an article in which the hipster butcher featured in the book talks about how becoming a butcher has made him look at women differently because he knows how to judge meat, and talks about it as if this is not inherently creepy AGH ACK ARGHSCKLADF.
So anyway, there's this weird objectification of women in parts of the book -- although I guess talking about how attractive all the men are is also a weird objectification of the men? I DON'T KNOW -- which made me jump to a conclusion which was incorrect, but now I feel . . . even weirder about it, in a way? I DON'T KNOW. This has been a PSA of Becca's Uncomfortable Feelings About Sexy Butchers and Beekeepers, I guess.
This is a book about food production in the city -- each chapter focuses on a different kind of comestible (beer, beef, sugar, fish, etc.) and interweaves the history of how it was produced with someone who's dong it now. Some of it is about as annoyingly hipster as you'd expect, but some of it is super interesting! The chapter on community gardens, for example, was GREAT -- the guy that she's using as her focal point is an elderly gentleman in Harlem who started growing vegetables to give away as freebies for people who signed up with his illegal lottery operation, and eventually decided to just garden full-time. And there are about two sentences about a woman who basically decided to chase the drug dealers off her street by turning the creepy lot where they used to hang out into a community garden, and they kept trying to scare her into backing down and abandoning it and she just KEPT ON GARDENING REALLY AGGRESSIVELY, and, like, clearly two sentences about this woman were not enough, I want a whole short story! A novel!
I also loved that there was a whole half a chapter about the creation of the Manischewitz wine company, and this plucky Jewish guys who just kept cheerfully selling terrible sweet wine made from crappy Concord grapes and dealing with problems like slacker rabbis at the Manischewitz factory and their kids being like "ugh, Dad, do we really HAVE to drink the awful wine at home too?" and the fact that goyim have no idea how to pronounce Manischewitz, so they built an entire advertising campaign that just featured people saying "Manischewitz!" as many times as possible. That entire segment was strangely comforting to me.
(Sidenote: I actually really love sweet Manischewitz wine. I KNOW IT'S TERRIBLE AND I DON'T CARE.)
However . . . okay, so I had this weird experience with the book where I spent the first three chapters in the complete and total assumption that the author was a dude. Why? you may ask. Well, I answer, because 6/7 of the people that are interviewed and profiled extensively in the book are men, and also there is this really uncomfortable trend of depicting the (most young, white, and hipsterish of these) men as weirdly irresistible to women. Like, whenever there's a scene of them interacting with female customers, there's often a qualifier like "she says flirtatiously" or "she says, giggling" or "she says in a sultry voice," and . . . seriously?
The author also talks about an article in which the hipster butcher featured in the book talks about how becoming a butcher has made him look at women differently because he knows how to judge meat, and talks about it as if this is not inherently creepy AGH ACK ARGHSCKLADF.
So anyway, there's this weird objectification of women in parts of the book -- although I guess talking about how attractive all the men are is also a weird objectification of the men? I DON'T KNOW -- which made me jump to a conclusion which was incorrect, but now I feel . . . even weirder about it, in a way? I DON'T KNOW. This has been a PSA of Becca's Uncomfortable Feelings About Sexy Butchers and Beekeepers, I guess.
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Date: 2013-12-15 05:52 am (UTC)Whut.
What.
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Date: 2013-12-15 07:48 pm (UTC)THANKS I'M REALLY HAPPY TO HEAR IT @___________@
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Date: 2013-12-15 06:36 am (UTC)The other stuff about the butcher and the objectification does seem kind of weird though :/
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Date: 2013-12-15 07:49 pm (UTC)It was just a few places but it made me so uncomfortable. :(
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Date: 2013-12-15 07:08 am (UTC)HOUAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAG
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Date: 2013-12-15 07:54 pm (UTC)