Peggy Orenstein wrote “The Femivore’s Delemma” for the New York (NY) Times Sunday Magazine of March 14, 2010. A “femivore” is a feminist farmer—and not someone who eats feminists (following from other terms such as “carnivore” and “herbivore”). The article was much-discussed, but the term “femivore” wasn’t to everyone’s liking.
 
     
New York (NY) Times
The Femivore’s Dilemma
By PEGGY ORENSTEIN
Published: March 11, 2010
(...)
Femivorism is grounded in the very principles of self-sufficiency, autonomy and personal fulfillment that drove women into the work force in the first place. Given how conscious (not to say obsessive) everyone has become about the source of their food — who these days can’t wax poetic about compost? — it also confers instant legitimacy. Rather than embodying the limits of one movement, femivores expand those of another: feeding their families clean, flavorful food; reducing their carbon footprints; producing sustainably instead of consuming rampantly. What could be more vital, more gratifying, more morally defensible?
 
There is even an economic argument for choosing a literal nest egg over a figurative one. Conventional feminist wisdom held that two incomes were necessary to provide a family’s basic needs — not to mention to guard against job loss, catastrophic illness, divorce or the death of a spouse. Femivores suggest that knowing how to feed and clothe yourself regardless of circumstance, to turn paucity into plenty, is an equal — possibly greater — safety net. After all, who is better equipped to weather this economy, the high-earning woman who loses her job or the frugal homemaker who can count her chickens?
 
When Mom Gets Bored…
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Femivore? What, am I eating Feminists?
 
Language Log
-vore extended
March 14, 2010 @ 6:07 am · Filed by Mark Liberman under Language and culture
A carnivore eats meat; an herbivore eats grass; an insectivore eats insects; an omnivore eats everything; a locavore eats locally-produced food. But the latest -vore coinage, femivore, doesn’t refer to someone who eats feminists, but rather to, well, something different.
 
Random Information (March 16, 2010)
Poultry is a Feminist Issue? [Casaubon’s Book]
First of all, may I ask which New York Times editor was responsible for permitting the coinage “femivore” to pass into language. Talk about illiterate (linguistically a “femivore” would be someone who ate women) and uneuphonious - yes, yes, I get that you want to get a Michael Pollan reference in there somehow, but come on… any writer worth her salt could do better than that.
 
Now to the meat of the thing - the essay, which profiles Shannon Hayes’s book Radical Homemakers attempts to argue that focusing on food has given women a new set of choices.
 
Her.menuetics (Christianity Today blog for women)
March 16, 2010
‘Femivores’ and the Food Ethics Movement
The trend toward locally grown, naturally raised food is giving some women more fulfilling lives than the workplace ever did.
Lisa Graham McMinn
If a daily trip to the vegetable patch to harvest vegetables and to the chicken coop to gather eggs means a woman is a femivore, then so be it, though I think the term is rather silly. Historically speaking, folks who did those things were just called “farmers,” at least if they sold their produce or eggs. Otherwise, they were called “gardeners who kept chickens.”