By Prof Elaine Salo

Women’s engagement with food has informed our gendered identities in ambiguous ways. Our primary roles ensuring food and nutritional security to households and communities provides us with a grounded sense of identity and of power anchored in reproductive labor. Terms of respect and endearment emanate from such work so that appellations such as Mama, Nomasizwe, and the like denote deep, shared respect. However such terms of endearment and respect do not extend to significant material power and confine women’s power to the limited zone of emotional affection and more cynically sentimentality.

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