E. Vivian Leigh offers insight into tensions many women face between cultural expectations to cook as a service to others, while eating to achieve or maintain thinness – a social phenomenon that she terms the “Betty Crocker/Barbie complex.”

Leigh engages with a feminist theoretical lens for textual, rhetorical, and critical discourse analysis of both cooking shows and popular culture that influence ideologies of “proper womanhood” to advise the need for alternatives to commonly accepted gendered expectations attached to food. This book provides suggestions to destabilize toxic gendered expectations attached to food. Leigh also discusses how Feminist Food Studies in Rhetoric and Composition classrooms can advocate change toward subverting grand narratives that reinforce the tensions of the complex.

Ultimately, this book stresses that understanding the rhetoric of women's relationships with food can aid in re-examining the limitations of exclusively diagnosing and treating eating disorders as a mental illness by identifying and understanding them as potential byproducts of toxic grand narratives surrounding food consumption and societal pressures of thinness.