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Juana Inés de la Cruz ironically asks, “What else could we know as women but kitchen philosophies?”5 Her words reflect the frustration that she feels with a society that suppresses women’s voices and their intellectual capabilities.Ironically, three centuries later, men still expected to find women in the kitchen, as Argentine writer Marta Lynch recollects in the following conversation she had with a fellow professor:
Women’s relationship to food can also be a conflicted one. Even though the kitchen has afforded women a personal space (albeit limited) in which to gather with other women and dare to be inquisitive, food (its principal tangible product) easily becomes their enemy. Women’s antagonistic relationship with that which nourishes humanity might result in eating or digestive disorders, perhaps as a reaction to what oppresses them. We don’t know how or why some people develop eating disorders while others do not. However, it makes sense that, as women have been historically closer to the kitchen than men have, they would be more likely to be afflicted with eating disorders than men.
Indeed, as far back as medieval times, Catholic nuns in Europe engaged in severe fasting to construct an inner spiritual life—a practice that was later continued by Latin American nuns. For many of them, communion replaced food and eating.7 It is as if women, in order to occupy a larger spiritual space, had to repudiate their actual physicality. Later in nineteenth-century