Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates how post-war British egg consumption shaped gender roles within the domestic sphere. It explores key moments of change in public understanding of eggs, revealing how marketing and public health messaging enforced and reshaped women's roles in maintaining a healthy household.

Paper long abstract:

This paper investigates how post-war British egg consumption shaped gender roles within the domestic sphere. It will look at three significant inflection points in the history of egg consumption in post-war Britain: the intensification of egg production in the 1950s and 1960s, public health messaging linking dietary cholesterol with coronary heart disease in the 1960s and 1970s, and the Salmonella in eggs crisis of the late 1980s. Each of these events marked a transition in everyday understandings of eggs and marked a point of conflict between the consumer and ‘experts’ regarding what was appropriate, healthful, and safe food.

The figure of the ‘housewife’ was often the target of marketing and health messaging in this period and women bore the responsibility of ensuring a healthy household by shopping sensibly and deploying safe cooking practices. Through analysing the representation of women in public health messaging and marketing – and the points of conflict between the producers of this content and its recipients – this paper will provide new insights into the gendered aspects of the interaction between health and food. It will argue that gender roles in in the domestic space were constructed and enforced in public health messaging and marketing with the burden of responsibility often falling on women. Through this, the paper will reveal the need to account for and mitigate the gendered presentation of responsibility when translating necessary changes in the food system to the everyday domestic sphere.