From: Dietary practices and gender dynamics: understanding the role of women
Themes | Major ideas | Description | Authors |
---|---|---|---|
Food choice | Important factors | Psychological, cultural, genetic, and biological factors are also significant. Dietary habits are influenced by the norms, values, and beliefs of the communities. | |
Food security | Availability, accessibility, quality, and stability are the four dimension of food security. | ||
Dietary shifts | Societal norms and beliefs are the critical factors at the macro level. Geopolitics and economics are also responsible for the shift in dietary patterns. | ||
Power dynamics | At the micro level, i.e., at the household level, gender-defined roles are critical from seed selection and preservation, threshing, cleaning and harvesting of crops, maintaining livestock, and planting vegetables in kitchen gardens household level. | ||
Gender | Discrimination | Girls and women are very often discriminated due to prevailing customary beliefs that are more inclined toward male members in a family. Gender is an essential factor in traditional society for making the choice of food. | |
Contradictions | Very often, cultural norms prevail over medical norms due to customary beliefs and misbeliefs. | ||
Pregnancy | For a certain period of time, pregnant women are told to avoid certain kinds of food and vegetables. Most of the time, the cultural norms are against modern practices. | ||
Difference in beliefs | The consumption of alcoholic beverages has a special place in Sikkim, unlike other parts of India. | ||
Inequality | Nutritional insecurity, especially at the time of food scarcity. Women face discrimination because of prevailing gendered defined roles and cultural construct. | ||
Role of institutions | Institutions like family and marriage favorable to the male member of a community. | ||
Gender-based food | For example, black soybean. Due to the beliefs that it is inferior in quality, hence served to females for some time. | ||
Loss of traditional knowledge | Women suffer the most due to the loss of indigenous and traditional knowledge of dietary habits. | ||
Traditional food | The customary dietary habits and foods are significant. | ||
Taboos in fishing | In Southern parts of India, fishing by women is not considered good. | [51] |