Abstract
This article presents the outcomes of interview with a group of Japanese men to unveil how bodyweight control was connected to their embodied culinary and eating practices. Aged 24 years to 56 years, participants were from Tokyo and Osaka. Eight of the men identified themselves as “slim-muscular” and one as “beefy.” Nine of them have been called “chubby” and two have been requested to lose weight. Grounded in symbolic interactionism, biopedagogy, gender, and emotion are the three axes used to present the analysis. Participants produced their own version of biopedagogy largely relying on the vegetablization of cooking to cope with healthism and sizeism entrenched in Japanese society. Some cooking and eating practices were underpinned by a pathological relation with food, others represented embodied masculinized practices connected to a recreational viewpoint of food and cooking. Cooking and eating delicious food represented an embodied “happy male self” and the meaning of “what makes life worth living.”
This article reports data from a larger research project on obesity and overweight in Japan. Here, the aim is to throw some critical light on the embodied cooking practices of a group of Japanese men grappling with bodyweight control. In 2000, the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (MHLW) implemented Healthy Japan 21, a plan, which chiefly underpins the official narrative concerning bodyweight control. One of its objectives is the prevention of metabolic syndrome—official term for obesity and overweight-related conditions (MHLW, 2010b). An individual is diagnosed as suffering from metabolic syndrome (metabo) if his or her waist circumference is ⩾85 cm and ⩾90 cm, respectively; his or her body mass index (BMI; weight divided by squared height) is ⩾ 25; and when he or she presents at least two or three of the following symptoms: “blood lipid, blood pressure and blood glucose” (MHLW, 2010a).
Metabo policies have turned the body and subjectivity of middle-aged, Japanese men into a public health concern. In 2008, officials underscore sedentarism be a leading cause of metabo among middle-aged men (MHLW, 2010a). In 2016—the most recent year for which data are available—aged between 20 years and 60 years, 32.4% of men are obese (MHLW, 2017). Men aged between 30 years and 60 years “tend to consume excessive amounts of fat,” and thus in need of “food and nutrition education,” which is graphically expressed in the “Japanese Food Guide Spinning Top” that classifies various foods, suggests servings per day, and includes a little man running at the top to remind that “physical health relies not only on a sensible diet, but also on physical activities” (Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, 2015, pp. 1, 7). The Spinning Top epitomizes indeed a form of biopedagogy: “a range of . . . instructions on bios: how to live, how to eat, how much to eat, how to move, how much to move . . . [or] . . . a pedagogy of bios” to achieve bodyweight control (Harwood, 2009, p. 15).
Cultural Scripts and the Gendered Self of Japanese Men
The subjectivity of Japanese men has been culturally scripted within a system of binaries that locate masculine and feminine in a string of opposites where “masculinity is, in effect . . . not-femininity” (Connell, 1995, p. 70). One of these binaries entangles the portrayals of the “professional-housewife” (Goldstein-Gidoni, 2012) and salaryman—the quintessential personification of Japanese “hegemonic masculinity” (Connell, 1995). Local and international academic and media reports have largely constructed an image of gendered Japanese society based on this binary, and thus expressions such as the “‘salaryman’ model of middle-class masculinity” to refer to prevailing gender relations in Japan abound (Connell, Hearn, & Kimmel, 2005, p. 6). Within this binary, the self of Japanese men has been scripted as “a main breadwinner” and culinary expressed in the saying: “men should not enter the kitchen” (Yuen, 2014, p. 172), which mostly implies that men are at higher “risk” of developing metabo, if they do not count on a professional-housewife who cooks and provides a “balanced and healthy diet” for them. A stereotypical salaryman is thus a disease ridden-subjectivity as indicated by his “headaches from hangovers and a weakened liver from drinking too much, hemorrhoids and stiff shoulders from sitting at his desk for too long, stomach ulcers from irregular diet and stress” (Dasgupta, 2013, p. 2, emphasis added).
Activists and scholars have nonetheless contested this binarism. By emphasizing fluidity and plurality, the use of concepts such as femininities has served to explore the female self “in terms of [differences arising from] class, occupations, generations and regions” (Okano, 2009, p. 4). Similarly, academics have investigated “the diversity of identities and experiences that may be found among men in contemporary Japan” (Roberson & Suzuki, 2003, p. 2), to buttress the viewpoint that “men” should not be seen as a homogeneous category (McLelland & Dasgupta, 2005, p. 5). “[T]here is no single masculinity but multiple masculinities” (Hidaka, 2010, p. 1, emphasis added), as evinced in “men’s lives and experiences” themselves (Dasgupta, 2013, p. 6) and in the “contemporary modes of masculinity [that] in Japan, perhaps more radically than elsewhere in the postindustrial world, have diversified and shifted away from the most straightforward examples of modern hegemonic masculinity” (Frühstück & Walthall, 2011, p. 10, emphasis added). Paraphrasing Plummer (1995), current trends seemingly indicate that Japan has moved from “a narrative of polarised” gender to a democratically “abolished gender.”
Embodied eating and cooking practices appear instrumental in understanding existing gender dynamics among young men and women under the “new” binary: the “carnivorous girl” versus “grass-eating or herbivorous boy.” Framed by “the sexual politics of meat” where meat consumption is supposed to “animalize women” (Adams, 2010, p. 4), carnivorous girls represent embodied eating and cooking practices pertaining to a form of “masculinized” female subjectivity. Carnivorous girls distance themselves from the “eating healthy” and cooking “nutritious food” embodied practices of the professional-housewife, who are to feminize the self. Conversely, herbivorous boys embody “vegetarianism [or a male self] that transgresses masculinity. . . [and mostly signifies] wimpy or even gay” subjectivities (Sobal, 2005, p. 141). Herbivorous boys do not “smoke, drink or maintain the slovenly rooms associated with bachelors” (Bardsley, 2011, p. 133). These boys disassociate themselves from the salaryman scripting and embody a form of “feminized” masculinity scripted in eating and culinary practices comprising a preference for vegetables rather than red meat, and a deliberate attempt to lead a “healthy life,” which includes the consumption of dietary supplements as well (Wada, 2010).
Contemporary tendencies that make it apparent “evolving” culinary practices of the male self could be found in media reports describing newly designed kitchen counters that are “slightly taller than average so that men can easily use it” (Fukushi, 2018). Also, the life experiences of “stay-at-home dad” (Shukawa, 2016), “childrearing men” (Ishii-Kuntz, 2013), and “boys cooking” (Kokubun & Kurihara, 2018) might attest to the alleged food and culinary “developments” of the male self. Yuen (2014) in her textual analysis of websites, cookery books, and television programs featuring the subjectivities of men putting together their own lunch box highlights the emergence of new “ideals” of masculinity in contemporary Japan. Nevertheless, her analysis does not allow for a reading of actual embodied cooking practices or “how influential those cookery instructions are on the daily routines of young Japanese men” (Yuen, 2014, p. 226).
Against this background: How does interpersonal scripting permit the participants in the study to filter cultural scripts to produce embodied culinary and eating practices in relation to bodyweight control? How does intrapsychic scripting permit the participants in the study to filter cultural and interpersonal scripting to produce their own embodied culinary and eating practices in the context of bodyweight control?
Methods and Participants
Following Jackson and Scott (2010), the concept of the self and subjectivity are used synonymously in the present article. “Subjectivity is produced, negotiated and reshaped via discourse and practice” (Lupton, 1998, p. 26). Subjectivity expresses the different layers of the self that are not a tally of identities or a specific form of identity. The self means continuity, but not invariability (Jackson, 2007); it is “coherently and harmoniously” produced, but immersed in contradiction and inconsistency.
The theorizing in this article is informed by symbolic interactionism to generate knowledge “culturally and historically situated” (Shapiro, 2005, p. 3). The culinary and eating practices of the participants in the study are thus read through three interrelated, yet, different dimensions of scripting: the intrapsychic, the interpersonal, and the cultural (Gagnon, 2004). The cultural encompasses a general scenario or master narrative revolving around culinary and eating practices that entail “food rituals and meanings in the formation and experience of human embodiment and subjectivity” (Lupton, 1996, p. 2). The interpersonal involves shared social conventions that permit interaction between two or more actors and helps them partially (re)write structural and cultural scripts (Simon, 1996). Through intrapsychic scripting, an actor could filter interpersonal and cultural scripts via an internal conversation with the self that entails answering: What kind of I am I? What kind of I do I want to be? (Simon, 1996).
Embodied culinary and eating practices refer to the phenomenology of preparing food and largely imply an individual considering, talking about, and making sense of lived embodying experiences, which are socioculturally and historically localized. Practices need to be understood as a circumscribed and contextualized ability of the self to avoid “voluntarist connotations” (McNay, 2000, p. 9). Embodied culinary and eating practices support scripting that involves people’s minds, muscles, and skeletons where “ideological social structures are inscribed” (Shapiro, 2005, p. 23). This is thus a “non-deterministic” perspective that “allows for fluidity and agency, without assuming that we are free to do anything we please or to apply any number of an infinite array of meanings to” embodied cooking practices (Jackson & Scott, 2010, p. 157).
Participants in the study include 18 Japanese men aged between 24 years and 56 years, from Tokyo and Osaka. Four of them were postgraduate or undergraduate students, 11 company workers and three self-employed. Eight had a university degree, three held a 3-year junior college diploma, and three completed senior high school. One was married and the rest single. Nobody was a blue-collar worker and the students did part-time jobs to supplement their monthly stipends. Nonetheless information on wages was not provided. One and eight of the men identified themselves as “beefy” and “slim-muscular,” respectively; the former aiming at “powerful-looking body (sizeably muscular but lacking definition),” the latter at developing “athletically muscular/toned bodies (moderately muscular and typically fairly lean)” (Monaghan, 1999, p. 276). Nine of the men have been called “chubby” and two were classified at risk of developing metabo; thus, medically requested to lose weight. Medical records were unavailable to the researcher, however. All of the men acknowledged that they cooked on regular basis.
Data supporting this article stemmed from 36 individual, semistructure, in-depth interviews conducted in Japanese. This was not a random sample; any Japanese man willing to discuss “bodyweight concerns” was accepted in the study. Participants were acquired through snowball sampling and personal networks. In attaining verbal informed consent, informants learned about the study’s objectives and methods, and were guaranteed that data would be used only for academic purposes and confidentiality would prevail when presenting the study’s outcomes. Pseudonyms are, therefore, used in this article and any information leading to participants’ personal identification deleted.
Participants were interviewed twice for about 60 min each and upon their agreement, every encounter was fully recorded. Topics, which were not predetermined, but introduced when appropriate to facilitate progression of conversation and rapport, covered bodyweight control, cooking, dieting, ethnicity, and eating habits. Interviews occurred in the morning, afternoon, or early evening, in isolated areas at participants’ workplace and/or quiet areas of coffee shops where the interviewees felt comfortable and their privacy was protected. The interviewer paid for beverages and food consumed at the coffee shops, also each participant received an inducement of 1,000 JPY (Japanese yen). This, however, did not compromise the right to terminate participation at any time and/or to leave unanswered questions that could cause uneasiness. A non-Japanese, male researcher in his late 40s conducted the interviews.
Transcribing the interviews was the first step in the process of analysis. Every spoken word with hesitations, interruptions, and pauses was wrote down, but not quantified. Ethnographic field notes along with the transcripts were employed to propose a number of tentative concepts to examine data. Assisted by the coding software Ethnograph, a map of systemic networks (Bliss, Monk, & Ogborn, 1983) was produced to affix codes and subsidiary codes to the transcripts. In assuring that the networks were a valid heuristic method for data analysis, an interactive process of induction and deduction was utilized. This article includes verbatim interview excerpts to facilitate comparative analysis. Excerpts have been edited only to avoid repetition or altered to convey fully their meaning; in the event ellipses are used. Transcripts of interview, however, were not seen as “portrays of reality,” instead, following Plummer (1995), they were seen as pieces of the participants’ life histories that facilitated a reading of their contextualized and localized embodied culinary and eating practices. Through the conversations, these men largely showed their capacity to turn their subjectivity into object and subject, and to place the self vis-à-vis the other.
Results
Biopedagogy
Some of the participant’s embodied cooking practices mirrored biopedagogical strategies to become a muscular self. The conversations with the slim-muscular men and beefy man largely portrayed intrapsychic scripting connected to an apprehension to cooking food with limited amount of saturated fats and carbohydrates, which mostly push them toward “a pathological relationship with food [to attain] an appropriate body size” (Lupton, 1996, p. 11, emphasis added). Despite being a daily challenge, some of these men put in an effort to “prepare” food that would allow them control “body fat.” For the slim-muscular men, embodied cooking practices would help them slim down to attain muscle definition and a well-formed “six-pack abs.” The beefy man was equally concerned about cooking practices that would result in a muscular subjectivity. He looked for high-protein food to increase volume and muscle size, however. Meat consumption was an integral element in the biopedagogical guidance of these men, but the slim-muscular men included fat-burning supplements in their diets, while the beefy man consumed protein supplements. Although these men willing to develop a muscular self claimed to follow a “balanced diet,” their cooking practices were not necessarily oriented by the Spinning Top. Similar to the participants in Watson’s (2002) study, these men created alternative standards to validate what healthy cooking meant that could not be contained within “rather narrow medical or health educator’s concepts” (p. 69). Kitada-san—aged 27 years, company worker, university degree holder, single, slim-muscular—commented on the biopedagogy underneath his cooking practices.
. . . one of the most important things to build muscle is to control the food you eat. Of course, exercise is very important too, but if you don’t mind your diet everything is useless. . .
How do you control the food you eat?
. . . the best way is to cook your own food. It’s getting more and more difficult for me to find the time to cook, though.
Why is that so?
. . . coz I’m a company worker. But still I do my best to balance my diet and eat healthy.
What do you eat?
Hmm. . . simple stuff. . . grill meat, less processed food, more nuts and seeds, more protein and less fat. . . rice. . .
What kind of meat is that?
Red meat basically, which is the best source of protein, but I look for lean meat. Also, I take fat-burning supplements to get rid of excess body fat. I’m really into keeping my six-pack neat. . .
What about veggies and fruits?
That has been a bit of problem. I can’t go to the supermarket every day and I can’t store them for a very long time, but I do my best to eat salad sometimes to keep a healthy diet. . .
How do you know your diet is healthy?
I guess it’s a bit of common sense. I try and see what suits me better. Training buddies suggest to me stuff too. But, I think it’s a matter of discovering what helps me reduce fat and gain muscle definition. . .
Have you spoken to a dietitian about this?
No, not really. . .
The will to embody a healthy subjectivity ruled in principle the cooking practices of some participants in the study. The analysis showed how “healthism” has entered the rhetoric of health matters for men, which stemmed mostly from mass media and government campaigns to prevent metabo and “lifestyle diseases” in general. The availability of food and beverages that are meant to help burn body fat and control cholesterol levels included under the category of “food for specified health uses” also reinforced healthism (MHLW, 2018). Cultural and interpersonal scripting thus implied that men should be seriously preoccupied about personal health and achieving well-being “primarily through the modification of life styles, with or without therapeutic help” (Crawford, 1980, p. 368). Healthism entails a “mode of social control [. . . that makes it] [s]ocial existence . . . increasingly circumscribed by the medical naming of that spirit” (Crawford, 1980, pp. 369-370); however, the conversations with some of the informants indicated that the self is not completely adrift, powerless, and/or unable to control its own “destiny.” The “vegetablization of cooking”—the assumption that by adding some vegetables, a dish becomes healthier—assisted some of the participants to deal with healthism by creating a subjective version of healthy food. Vegetablization entailed a pragmatic approach to grapple with the burden of everyday cooking, healthism, and the stigma associated with eating processed and prepared “unhealthy” food. Vegetablization, thus, implied a commonsensical viewpoint to classify healthy and unhealthy cooking, which did not necessarily reflected official and medical guidance. The conversation with Namba-san—aged 39 years, company worker, university degree holder, single, chubby—showed how cooking practices would render into an embodied healthy subjectivity.
. . . though I do my best, honestly, I can’t cook every day. For someone like me who is single, lives alone and is a full-time worker, it is almost impossible to get groceries and cook every day. I look for the easiest and fastest option always. . .
If you don’t have time, why do you want to cook?
hmm. . . . I want to be healthier. People keep saying that I’m chubby. They laugh at my tummy, they make jokes and call me metabo. They assume that I’m sick. Somewhat, I decided to cook more so I could be healthier. . .
What do you actually cook?
Hmm . . . on weekends sometimes . . . if I’m not too tired, I prepare omelettes, pasta, fried rice . . . sometimes dumplings or hot pots. Usually, I just get a lunch box at the convenience store. I keep always some frozen stuff in the fridge that can be warm up in the microwave. . .
Is that healthy cooking?
I do try to add some veggies, some lettuce or tomato . . . broccoli. . . . I look for lunch boxes that have some veggies, too. Sometimes I get a small salad, especially when I get some fried stuff like croquettes or pork cutlet. . .
Why especially?
Well . . . everybody knows that food in lunch boxes, fried and frozen stuff is not that good. It’s easy to cook but a bit unhealthy . . . hmm. . . . To be healthy I have also some more options, tea that helps me burn fat, multivitamin veggie juices. . .
Have you ever talked about this to a dietitian, for instance?
No, not really . . . but somewhat I try to cook and eat healthy. Eating some veggies helps.
An intriguing phenomenon among the elder participants became apparent as some of their embodied cooking practices would aim to prolong their sexual lives. Foodstuffs were for some of these men a vehicle for enhancing sexual potency, and thus their cooking was linked to their sexual self and “sexualized food.” The narrative of sexualized food mostly implied “[w]hat to eat, how to eat, and how to make eating a passport into a . . . virile” subjectivity (Roy, 2014, p. 255). Garlic that has never been used as a flavoring ingredient in “ethicized and traditional” Japanese cuisine, but largely associated with Korean dishes, has turned into a main component of the sexualized cooking these men proposed. This appeared in tandem with current cultural scripting of garlic—a “tasting” bulb—that is sold as an ingredient to help enhance male’s stamina. Informants talking about practitioners of the “Japanese version of traditional Chinese medicine (kampo)” who prescribe garlic as a remedy to “improve” virility-reinforced cultural scripts underneath the pungent flavoring. Other foodstuff included in the list of sexualized cooking for these men entailed the consumption of “pork and beef offal,” which although medically contraindicated in men grappling with metabo due to the supposed high concentration of fat and “bad” cholesterol—LDL cholesterol (low-density lipoprotein)—was meant to be a great recourse to men interested in increasing stamina. Fumino-san—aged 55 years, company worker, completed junior college, single, classified as metabo—conveyed the significance of sexualized food to their embodied cooking practices.
Yes, I like cooking. It’s not really that do it every day, but whenever I have some free time I cook. . .
What do you cook?
. . . anything that goes well with garlic. Meat with garlic is a good combination. It doesn’t take too much time to cook, just fry garlic and add some meat. Fried rice with garlic is also a good combination.
Why garlic?
. . . garlic is very good for your health, especially for men like me. Garlic is good to get stamina.
What is that?
. . . energy in general. . . I think that it helps to increase sexual stamina in particular. . .
Is that true?
. . . I think so. Go and see in the supermarket, you will see how garlic is sold. A kampo doctor recommended garlic to me too. Hmm . . . offal in general improves stamina too, more and more guys see in offal sexual stamina. It’s not that good for me though. . .
Why?
. . . coz I’m a bit metabo and I need to skip food that has too much fat and high cholesterol. A nurse who is checking my diet asked me to avoid offal as much as possible.
Do you cook offal too?
. . . sometimes. . . but I mainly eat it out. At Japanese pubs it’s not unusual to find it. There’re places that specialize in offal, actually. You can see long queues of guys waiting to be served. They look for stamina, I guess. . .
Do women look for stamina too?
Hmm. . . I don’t think so. It’s more likely that guys look for it. Hmm. . . women might look for food rich in collagen, I guess.
These exchanges about men’s preferences for sexualized food veered the topic of conversation and served to unveil how the gendered self was entangled with the participants’ embodied cooking practices.
Gender
Largely against academics and activists holding that the self is “decentred, fluid or fractured,” the insights of some of the participants implied that the Japanese male self might actually remain a rather “essential unitary, fixed, rational” entity (Jackson & Scott, 2010, p. 123). This was particularly true when looking at their embodied culinary practices from a gender gaze. The interviews indicated that variations in the performance of men and women in the kitchen might have a “biological origin [. . . and mostly respond to a] dichotomy” (Connell, 2009, p. 9). Such insights elicited cultural scripts underneath current Japanese TV programs that limit women’s performance to “amateurish,” private cooking and the embodiment of home cooking and desserts, while men mostly embody “professional” cooking embedded in “sophisticated or elaborated. . . meals served. . . out in the public sphere” (Holden, 2013, p. 125). In no way would the dexterities of the participants in the study qualify for professional cooking; the skills of some of them, however, would represent interpersonal scripts involving “masculinized” practices centered on “male rituals of hospitality” and “hypermasculine” displays of food preparation occurring often outdoors in “settings beyond the kitchen” and involving fire and grilled meat (Sobal, 2005, p. 144). Nishi-san—aged 53 years, company worker, completed junior college, married, chubby—raised the subject of masculinized practices when he was asked whether he felt that he and his wife had similar attitudes toward cooking.
. . . hmm. . . comparatively, I think I’m one of those guys who cooks at home.
Comparatively?
. . . yes, most of my colleagues don’t cook at all. Working for a company barely leaves me time to cook or do anything at home. My wife does some part-time jobs, but she’s a full-time housewife. I don’t really need to cook. Things might be different if my wife were a full-time worker. Hmm. . . something makes me think that even if she were a full-time worker, she’d be still responsible for cooking at home.
What makes you think so?
Guys in general don’t know how to cook. If the guy is married, I think the wife cooks. . . hmm. . . see, a friend of mine runs a restaurant, he’s a good cook but he doesn’t cook at home. He says that he’s tired and since his wife is a full-time housewife, he doesn’t have to cook. Maybe guys who live alone cook. . .
I see, so when do you cook then?
Hmm. . . when I have some spare time. . . hmm. . . when we have a special guest. Last time, there was this guy from the gym, a very close friend of mine, I wanted to treat him. I actually baked some savoury pancakes. My wife helped me a bit, though.
What was that bit?
She chopped and got ready the ingredients for me to bake. When we go for barbeques and stuff, I’m the one in charge, though. . .
Are you?
Yes, it’s not unusual that guys do the barbeque.
What about tidying up and cleaning the kitchen?
. . . hmm. . . that, I don’t do at all. . .
Why not?
. . . my wife doesn’t like how I do the dishes. She prefers to do it. . .
Similar to the research of Stapleton and Keenan (2009) with families in the United Kingdom, the life experiences of some of the interviewees indicated interpersonal interactions where balanced and nutritional diets seemed closely connected to a female subjectivity and the “feminization of care” because “the provision of ‘proper’ household meals [. . . is a] quintessential element of women’s cooking” (Szabo, 2014, p. 13). An open intention to cook a balanced diet was almost completely absent from the participants’ biopedagogy. Nonetheless, some of the interviewees invested time and energy to polish their cooking skills, which would result in meals comprising an assortment of different types of ingredients intentionally selected to provide the appropriate amount of nutrients in each meal. The conversations evoked the image of the professional-housewife because “mothers in particular are held increasingly accountable for the health-related consequences associated with family feeding” (Stapleton & Keenan, 2009, p. 35). Some of the men in the study were the main caretaker of an aging parent and thus were very keen on cooking wholesome and “proper” food to maintain a healthy subjectivity. An intriguing contradiction become apparent, however, when these men realized that although home cooking might aim to keep their parents healthy, their own eating habits could be rather unhealthy as evinced in their “belly size” and people calling them “fatty.” Dainichi-san—aged 55 years, company worker, completed junior college, single, chubby—elaborated on the meals that he had to prepare for his aging mother.
. . . well, though I’m very busy, I have to find some time to cook for my mother. . .
Do you cook for your mother?
Yes, I do. My father passed away a couple of years ago and I have to take care of her. At the very beginning, it was challenging, my mom took always care of us and I didn’t know how to cook at all, but she’s getting old and her body frail. She needs to eat good food and a balanced diet. . .
What do you cook for her?
. . . I’ve looked for information about how to cook nutritious food for an old person. I’ve asked my aunts coz they’re housewives like my mother was. Little by little, I’ve learned how to balance her diet, so she eats the right amount of food. The real and most difficult part is to go to the super market on weekdays, also to organize my cooking in a way that it doesn’t interfere with my job schedules is difficult. Right now, I cook a couple of times a week and I’m learning how to keep cooked food longer, so I don’t have to cook every day. I feel like I’m improving little by little. . . I know now how to cook veggies to have them with their nutrients retained, do you know what I mean? Yes, I think so. . . . . . there’s something funny, though.
What is that?
The stuff my mother eats is rather good, but I can’t do it for myself. . .
What do you mean?
. . . hmm. . . look at my tummy. Friends and relatives sometimes make jokes, they call me metabo or chubby [giggling]. . . It partly is because I prefer to eat fatty stuff and a lot of carbo. . .
What is that?
. . . my cravings for deep fried stuff and noodles are stronger than me. I can’t resist the temptation whenever I can, I pamper myself [giggling].
Another gendered aspect of the embodied cooking practices of these men revolved around “clear” differences between men and women eating patterns that would place them within a gender binary or a form of “categorical thinking. . . based on biological essentialism” that oriented their cooking correspondingly (Connell, 2012, p. 1676). This elicited cultural scripts of a polarized gender society largely contradicting journalists and academics who insist on the existence of fluidity and plurality in the construction of the male self. The viewpoints of some of the participants were in line with cultural scripting of names and sources of foods that largely contribute to the gendering of cooking (Nilsen, 1995). In the conversations, some of the participants highlighted that embodied cooking was a “constant reminder of the genderedness of comestibles” (Sobal, 2005, p. 137): Men tend to prefer savory food, whereas women have most likely a sweet tooth and thus select ingredients and cook accordingly. Nakano-san—aged 49 years, company worker, university degree holder, single, classified as metabo—underscored men’s “natural” preference for savory food.
. . . well, cooking is difficult, but I just need to find the ingredients that suits me better. . .
What ingredients are that?
. . . in general, men like more savory and spicy stuff.
Is that true?
. . . hmm. . . yes, at least for me and most of my friends. TV programmes usually present women looking for sweets and stuff, there’re maybe guys who like sweets. . . in general, sweets are for women. At coffeeshops too, more women than men eat cakes and stuff. Maybe some guys dating his girlfriend eat desserts, but I don’t think that a guy goes alone to a cakeshop or something. Just like a woman going alone to a bar is still rare, a guy going alone for drinks is not uncommon, though. . .
Do you like sweets and cakes?
. . . of course, I do. It’s not that guys don’t like sweets at all, but I don’t think they bake cakes and stuff. . . I’ve never seen guys cooking desserts at home.
So, what do you cook?
. . . anything spicy, piquant. I can’t imagine myself cooking sweets. I don’t have time and I’m not good at cooking. I usually fry some stuff, boiled things. . . I mostly improvised something with the stuff I got in the fridge. To make things easier, I tend to buy frozen stuff that I can put in the microwave. Yeah. . . these days I use the microwave more. It’s maybe a common thing for people in the neighbourhood. . .
What is that?
. . . I think my neighbors use the microwave a lot like me. Where I live there’re no supermarkets actually. Convenience stores are everywhere, though. There’re some of these kind of discount stores where you can buy frozen food. . . my neighbors like me don’t cook that much, I guess. . .
Why did you want to cook in the first place?
. . . coz the results of my health check-up. I’m a bit metabo and need to eat healthier. Whenever I can, I cook. Sometimes I cook for my buddies too, when they come to my place for a home party. . .
Talking about spicy food and gatherings to cook for friends exposed some aspects of the emotions and feelings underpinning the preparation of food.
Emotion
Food, eating, and cooking involves social processes entangling “subjectivity, emotion, memory and acculturation” (Lupton, 1996, p. 3). The intrapsychic scripting of some of the men in the study translated into cooking practices conducive to the embodiment of “happiness,” even if that distanced them from cultural scripts of Japanese traditional food, which “is relatively low-calorie and allows the easy intake of different nutrients in a well-balanced manner [. . . and] means eating cooked rice with side dishes, soup and pickles” (Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, 2013, pp. 3-4, emphasis added). “Happy cooking” largely suggested a recreational relationship with food that in the literature has been dubbed leisurely “‘masculine’ self-oriented cooking” (Neuman, Gottzén, & Fjellström, 2017, p. 151), where “delicious” food became the benchmark for masculinized cooking. Delicious food renders emotionally laden and for some of the participants implied to “de-ethnize” their subjectivity by including in their cooking repertoire a number of dishes or ingredients from South and Southeast Asia, as well as Latin America that are usually referred to as “ethnic food.” Tonimachi-san—aged 24 years, student, single, chubby—described the feelings embedded in eating ethnic food.
. . . I’m not saying that I don’t like Japanese food . . . sometimes it can be kind of boring, though. . .
Really?
Yes, for a change, I sometimes cook some ethnic food. . .
What is that?
hmm. . . some Indian curry, some Thai salads with noodles and stuff. Hmm. . . I use a lot of coriander. Some Japanese don’t like it, but it’s very tasty. I sometimes play with my fried rice by adding some of these Mexican salsas. It completely changes the taste, it’s like eating ethnic food. It’s nice and tasty. . . I don’t mean to generalize, but think that men cook delicious food in general.
Delicious food?
. . . I have the impression that women are more into food that helps them lose weight. Women kind of cook thinking of healthy food and balanced diets, men are more into eating delicious food, I reckon . . .
What is delicious food?
. . . hmm. . . depends on the guy of course. Something makes me think that guys in general like more spicy food. They like fried stuff. I don’t think that men want to spend too much time cooking either. Men cook something simple and delicious, at least that is the case of my father too. . .
What does he cook?
It’s not that he cooks always, but when he does, it’s delicious. My mum doesn’t like it though. . . she says it’s very oily. I kind of like it though. . .
Is it really very oily?
. . . hmm. . . not quite sure but it’s delicious. . .
Official documents depict metabo as a largely masculinized health matter. Nonetheless the Spinning Top does not emphasize the eating habits that need to be modified to generate a healthy male self. The mass media, however, has produced “specific” guidance for men willing to diet and lose weight, where the consumption of alcoholic beverages is stressed as a major contributing factor to obesity and overweight among Japanese men (Fujii, 2013). The biopedagogical key point appears to be the creation of normalized and healthy practices for a male subjectivity that combine alcohol consumption with food. A “proper” calculation of the number of calories consumed serves to include drinking alcoholic beverages in the daily diet (Fujii, 2013). This entails a “positive framing of alcohol and its consumption through numerous media forms and the gendering of alcohol consumption” (Christensen, 2015, p. xiii). Some men in the study prepared dishes that could be paired with alcoholic drinks to enhance food flavors and transform cooking into a memorable event. Drinking while cooking would convert food preparation into an entertaining practice, and a preferred way to enjoy delicious food implies interpersonal interactions with friends who appreciate the combination of eating while drinking alcohol. The concoction of homosociality, drinking alcohol, and eating your own-cooked food thus portrayed another element of the emotionality embedded in cooking practices that contribute to an embodied “happy” male subjectivity. Kishino-san—aged 35 years, company worker, university degree holder, single, chubby—conveyed his experiences cooking for his friends.
. . . I don’t think that I’m a good cook, but I do my best to enjoy it. I really don’t cook every day. . . I rather do it when I’m in the mood.
What mood is that?
. . . mostly when I feel like drinking with my buddies. I recently have discovered how nice is to call some friends and throw a home party kind of. Drinking at home is cheaper and we can eat the food we like. It’s not really elaborated cooking, though. It’s just simple but tasty stuff that we like. . .
What do you cook?
. . . hmm. . . I mostly fry something or cook curry rice. I don’t have the time to boil, steam or simmer. . . Tofu, meat, sometimes fish are the main ingredients.
What about veggies and fruits?
. . . no fruits really, but we fry some veggies too. When my buddies come early, we start to drink whilst cooking. If the cook is a bit pissed up, food somewhat gets tastier [giggling]. . .
Is drinking so important?
Hmm. . . yeah, for guys I think it is. Cooking and drinking makes food nicer. I kind of cook something that goes well with beer, wine or sake.
Do you cook for your family too?
Hmm. . . no, not really. I’m single. If I go back to my parents’ place my mum usually cooks. Cooking for me is cooking for my friends to enjoy, I guess.
Where did you learn how to cook?
. . . . looking at my mum. . . not really that she has taught me. It’s more like common sense. I try and see how things work. To me cooking is like being in a laboratory, sometimes the result is not that good but still it is eatable. I’m not a professional cook but my food is tasty and cool, at least that is what my friends say [giggling]. . .
A third element in the accounts of cooking practices, which would engender the embodiment of happiness among some of the men in the study circulated around the understanding of ikigai or “what makes life worth living” (Mathews, 2003, p. 109). Some of these men felt entrapped by still prevalent cultural scripts in relation to “the centrality of work in defining” the self of Japanese men (Dasgupta, 2009, p. 85). Containment entangled with cooking and eating delectable food served some of the participants to grapple with daily routines, tedium, and the monotonous life deep rooted in the circumstances of a white-collar worker. “Insipid dishes” reminded them the “unexciting” balanced food served at company canteens and the deeply encroached healthism in Japanese society that renders their “corpulent” embodied subjectivity the other. Indulging in high-caloric food while binge drinking with friends gave them a sense of praiseworthy life. Cooking their own food allowed some of these men “immediate physical expression of emotions . . . [and] satisfy bodily desires without restraint or regard for others,” except for their male friends whose opinions and company while eating and drinking brought about a complete sense of what makes life worth living (Shilling, 2012, p. 162). Embodied cooking practices and emotionality appeared, therefore, ontologically connected to homosocial interpersonal scripting for some of the participants in the study. Daikoku-san—aged 56 years, company worker, university degree holder, single, chubby—elaborated on the significance of finding some time to cook for his friends.
. . . looking back, I can tell you that cooking has changed my life somewhat. Working for a company little by little becomes tedious. Every day is the same. I have kind of became like a working machine. A life that moves around job is kind of dull. Eating nice food brings about some ikigai. . .
What is that?
. . . hmm. . . kind of finding the meaning of life. In Japan everything seems to be set: go to school, find a job, marry, have kids. Worse is that Japanese people are meant to be slim and healthy. . .
What do you mean?
You can’t have the body you like. Everyone seems to worry, they always pick on you. Someone chubby like me faces mockery and criticism always. People keep recommending stuff to lose weight. Look at tv commercials, there’s a lot of stuff to stay healthy, to control cholesterol, to lose weight. You don’t really have a chance to be yourself. Drinking is the only way to survive for some guys. I’m not really into drinking. It’s kind of boring. Drinking and eating nice food is cool. . . eating the food that you cooked is best, though. . .
Where did you learn how to cook?
. . . hmm. . . learn? Nah. . . I haven’t learned anywhere. It’s more like trying. The point is cooking something that you and your buddies enjoy. Some stuff that can go well together with some drinks. Yeah, drinking and eating with buddies helps us to disconnect, to forget about harsh routines, to forget about the tough life of working for a company . . .
What do you usually cook?
I don’t have a fixed menu. Something that is appealing, yeah. . . I don’t want to worry about getting fat, about calories, cholesterol and stuff. . . as long as it’s delicious, who cares? I kind of want to relax by cooking, eating and drinking with my buddies. . .
Conclusion
The appearance of lifestyle-related diseases including metabo have rendered the embodied self of middle-aged, Japanese men a social, medical, and individual concern. Common sense, mass media, and behaviorist interventions intimate “an alleged decline in home cooking, and a corresponding increase in individualised eating habits [that have had an . . . ] impact [. . . ] upon public health” (Gatley, Caraher, & Lang, 2014, p. 71). Having men cooking their own food would serve, therefore, to improve their quality of life in general, and boost their abilities to “rationalize and exert a high degree of control over its emotions, to monitor its actions and those of others, and to internalize finely demarcated rules regarding appropriate behaviour” in relation to food intake (Shilling, 2012, p. 162).
This article explored the social processes underpinning the embodied cooking practices of a group of Japanese men who expressed a “degree of concern” about bodyweight control. In exploring the phenomenology of preparing food, symbolic interactionism was instrumental as it allowed a reading of the participants’ embodied subjectivities at three dissimilar, but interconnected dimensions of scripting. The analysis of the cultural dimension showed how cooking Japanese food has been socioculturally and historically constructed as an archetype of healthy and well-balanced diet; consequently, a stereotypical Japanese subjectivity is supposedly fit and slim. Nonetheless, sedentariness and detraditionalization of food have chiefly resulted in growing obesity and overweight rates, which are to be tackled by biopedagogical strategies expressed in the Spinning Top.
The analysis of the intrapsychic dimension underpinning the cooking practices indicated the significance of “lay concepts of health” (Watson, 2002, p. 66). The participants in the study ingeniously produced their own version of “healthy cooking,” which appeared largely disconnected from what a balanced diet means in official biopedagogy. Some of the men championed a meat-based cooking “with reference to fitness rather than health” (Gough, 2007, p. 327) to sustain a muscular project of the self that resulted in a pathological relationship with food, and challenged the viewpoint that “men rarely worry about their body shape in relation to diet” (Lupton, 1996, p. 110). In coping with sizeism and healthism entrenched in Japanese society, some of the informants championed cooking practices that would result in a healthy male self. Nonetheless, similar to Szabo (2012, p. 635), everyday food preparation was a “real” time-pressure constraint and thus the vegetablization of cooking entailed a pragmatic strategy to allow the consumption of “unhealthy food,” economical use of time and the continuation of daily culinary practices. Garlic and offal—although medically contraindicated—were included in the cooking repertoire for their “symbolic value as a resource that enabled” some of the participants “to maintain a project of the” sexual male self, which was in tandem with the cultural and commercial understandings of Japanese men’s stamina (Shilling, 2005, p. 150). Cooking their own food was intrapsychically significant for some of the participants willing to find “what makes life worth living” and embodying a happy male self.
The cooking practices of these men seen from the interpersonal dimension of scripting largely unveiled the prevalence of polarized gender and embodied “traditional” masculinized practices that implied a recreational link to food and cooking: “leisurely cooking” (Neuman et al., 2017, p. 151). Food preparation implied a selection of ingredients for a delicious meal that appeared mostly detached from the scripts of traditional Japanese food and low-calorie healthy food intake. Such recreational feature of food and cooking appeared connected to the ingestion of alcoholic beverages. This involved a masculinized dietary aspect chiefly neglected in official biopedagogy for men grappling with bodyweight control, but incorporated in mass media reports directed to Japanese men willing to balance their diet. The conversations with the participants showed how alcohol consumption has become an embodied and normalized practice ontologically connected to homosocial interpersonal relationships embedded in masculinized rituals of hospitality. Although the gendered “public drinking scene, particularly in urban Japan. . . [that] entails parties of men who drink together” (Hendry, 1977, p. 182) was vividly mirrored in the transcripts of interview, the script of “men must drink and get drunk with other men” was not quite so (Christensen, 2015, p. 12). The aim of some of the participants’ embodied cooking practices that combined alcohol consumption was not to make someone inebriated, but to include beverages that could be paired with delicious food to be enjoyed in the company of other men: a “source of great pleasure and contentment” (Lupton, 1996, p. 3). Drinking and eating one’s own-cooked food largely functioned as the “male-bonding talk and/or talk around alcohol-related activities” that Gough and Edwards (1998, p. 409) has found in their study with men in the United Kingdom.
The hegemony of masculinized cooking in opposition to the feminized “care-oriented foodwork (meal planning, grocery shopping, cooking and cleaning up after meals)” was insufficient to explaining the embodied culinary practices of the men in the study (Neuman et al., 2017, p. 151). The conversations with some of the participants conveyed contradictions in their accounts as they have become the main caregiver of an aging parent who required a balanced diet. Although their cooking was to provide “a nutritional health and preferences of loved ones and the provision of ‘proper’ household meals” (Szabo, 2014), their own eating habits remained rather “unhealthy” as they mostly ate oily and high-caloric food.
Most of the men located their embodied culinary practices in a stream of opposites, which included delicious/mostly unhealthy food at one extreme and bland/healthy food at the other. Future research needs to explore the effects of recreational embodied cooking practices on bodyweight control with different cohorts of Japanese men at diverse settings. The effects of a pathological relationship with food and cooking on bodyweight control among Japanese men has to be the subject of future research too. The outcomes of interview with the participants in the study did not permit to establish a connection between social class and embodied cooking practices, which needs to be further investigated. Given current demographic dynamics of Japanese society becoming an aged-childless society, the impact of becoming a main caretaker on eating and cooking patterns of Japanese men must be researched too. Finally, the influence of marital status and sexual preferences on cooking and eating embodied practices requires further investigation.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was funded by a Tier-1 grant.