Abstract

This article aims to study food practices as a place where gender identification processes take place, especially among men. More precisely, it intends to study how men who, during adulthood, rethink their relationship with food in order to accomplish a «healthy life project» find in this reflexivity on food practices a privileged space to negotiate the meanings of their masculinities. The theme of gender has already been used, even largely, in the existing sociological literature to question the asymmetries between sexes in the practices of food preparation and consumption. In this sense, a particular attention has been focused on the subordinate position of women. On the contrary, less attention has been paid to men. Based on results from an empirical research carried out in France and Italy on the eating habits of adult men living in the regions of the Grand-Est and Tuscany, this article proposes a sociological approach to food practices in order to study how they meet with different normative orders: health norms, age norms, aesthetics norms. The goal is to reveal the impact of these normative orders on the constructions of masculinity.