Gender on the Plate: Culinary Discourses in the Malayalam Movie Salt and Pepper

Abstract

Questions of gender have become central to contemporary cultural debates, and the kitchen is one of the most charged spaces where these debates quietly unfold. This paper turns to culinary discourses to understand how gender identities and roles are cooked, served, and sometimes resisted in everyday life. Focusing on the Malayalam film Salt N’ Pepper (2011), the study explores how food, cooking practices, and shared meals become sites where gendered expectations are both reinforced and contested. Drawing on insights from feminist theorists such as Judith Butler and Simone de Beauvoir, the paper examines how culinary narratives shape and reflect ideas of masculinity, femininity, intimacy, and care, without limiting the discussion to a single gendered experience. Rather than treating food merely as a backdrop, the analysis reads recipes, kitchen scenes, and eating rituals as texts that disclose emotional labour, loneliness, desire, and companionship. The research combines a close reading of the film with existing scholarly work on gender and food, bringing together cinematic analysis and gender studies to trace how culinary discourse functions as a language of power, tenderness, and negotiation. By foregrounding the everyday act of cooking as a meaningful cultural practice, the paper argues for a shift in how fixed gender roles in culinary spaces are understood. Ultimately, the study proposes that films like Salt N’ Pepper can open up more inclusive and nuanced ways of seeing gender through the shared, very human experiences of hunger, taste, and the communal table.