The Gender Politics of Meat

Chapter 5 focuses on Julie Powell’s second memoir, Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession (2009). While Powell is most well known for her blog and subsequent book, Julie and Julia, Cleaving has been given less attention even though it is, arguably, the more interesting of the two. The book chronicles Powell’s extramarital affair, her separation from her husband, and her attempts to heal herself through an apprenticeship to a family-owned butcher in the Catskills. In Cleaving, Powell attempts to deconstruct not only her earlier memoir but the genre of the “foodie romance.” Cleaving responds to these texts by detailing the dissolution of a marriage (not the fairytale romance) simultaneous with Powell’s learning the very grisly art of butchering. Powell adopts the tools of the butcher and carves out a narrative in opposition to the foodie romances that have come before it.