Eating the other: Food and cultural difference in the Australian women's weekly in the 1960s

This paper brings issues of gender and cultural difference together in analysing representations of food in a popular women's magazine during a period when the dominant culture's eating habits changed rapidly, in the 1960s. An examination of food advertising and cookery features in the Australian Women's Weekly brings into focus the domestic rather than the restaurant kitchen as a site of the turn to 'ethnic' foods. As a study of representations, it also highlights the variety of discourses constructing food and food-provision, the cultural values associated with certain foods through advertising, and the uses of food to mark social distinctions. In both respects - the focus on domesticity and the emphasis on discourse - this material enables questions about changing constructions of womanhood to be raised and articulated together with those of nation, ethnicity and class.