It is often assumed that culinary influence has been 'top down' -that is, that haute cuisine and professional cooking by male chefs has influenced popular cooking, especially once literacy became commonplace, and particularly with the publication of cookery books directed at the middle-class 'housewife'. Whilst it is certainly true that professional cooking has influenced domestic cooking as a 'trickle-down' effect, there is an area of serious neglect or oversight -namely, the denial or ignoring of the culinary influence in the other direction, that is, the influence of female domestic cooking on haute cuisine.

For millennia throughout the world women have been the preparers, cooks and conservers of food, as well as the primary gatherers of wild edible plants and growers of much of the plants eaten by their families and communities. Indeed, it is likely that women as food-gatherers developed early agriculture, deliberately cultivating wild grains that they had gathered from the hills since 'time immemorial' in the Fertile Crescent (Fernand Braudel 2002, 40). Reports from early European settlers in Australia described how Aboriginal women in their role as food-gatherers did exactly this: "From their woven dilly bags (they) sprinkled seed food over the ground with repeated applications of water to make them grow" (cited in Pascoe 2014, 30).Because indigenous, rural and peasant women have had to depend on what was locally available, and in their role as food preparers and cooks for their families, they have, over many millennia, developed ways of preparing, preserving and detoxifying plants to make them safe, nutritious and palatable. This has involved ingenuity, keen observation and memory, the knowledge and skills involved in this taking at least one-third of a lifetime to learn (Howard 2003a). The constraints of having to make use of what is locally available has resulted in a reciprocal relationship between food preparation and local biodiversity, both of which women have traditionally been the custodians. Women have grown, harvested and gathered local plants, both wild and cultivated, devising countless ways

Women's Food Matters"This groundbreaking interdisciplinary feminist study offers a new perspective on how, and why, women's food matters throughout history and in our contemporary world. As one of the first studies to combine a focus on food production, processing and cooking, on food cultures and food systems, Swinbank puts women's knowledge and creativity at center stage in the reproduction and transformation of culture and agriculture. Women's Food Matters provides a theoretically rich contribution that is jargon-free, making it an appropriate choice for classes at any level, as well as for the general reader. Destined to 'stir the pot' of contemporary food studies.

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