How Food Relates to My Experience with Gender and Religion

            A prime example of this would be our family’s seven fishes dinner, but I’ve gone into as much detail as I can on this topic so instead I’m going to talk about our Sunday evening family dinners. My entire family is catholic and almost all of us active practice, especially my intermediate family. We are the family that shows up to mass every weekend and then continues to discuss our priest’s thoughts once we leave. So with that said, Sunday is the lord’s day for us and we almost always spend it together and at the very least, we eat dinner together. If we weren’t as devoted to our faith, then maybe we wouldn’t have this meal like we do every Sunday. However, for the foreseeable future, I don’t see this tradition changing and when I have kids one day, I will do my best to instill these beliefs so we can bond together over a meal like my family and I do.

            Within my family, there has never been any sort of gender inequality when it comes to preparing food. My dad and other men in the family cook just as much as my mom and the women do and the credit is shared equally with no arguments. Of course there is always joking back and forth about who “cooked it better,” but there is never any sort of harsh comments exchanged. It is a shame that this is a legitimate concern in some families and cultures.