"You're a man, but you're good at cooking?"

One of Japan's great cultural fortresses is food, and not just how food is prepared or consumed, but what it embodies. Ashkenazi and Jacob's depiction of foodie culture in their wonderful text The Essence of Japanese Cuisine gets at the heart of the country's power structures and how they're reflected in food.

Sweetness and Lightning does talk about that foodie culture to some extent. Panels of Kouhei and Kotori taking pictures of their food pepper some of the chapters. The voice actors and actresses use the term food terrorism (飯テロ) to describe the practice of eating and showing pictures. But if it's just that, why doesn't Sweetness and Lightning feel more like just another foodie text? What differentiates it, if at all?

I think it's the parental bond. Though we have a growth of foodie text (going so far back as Oishinbo), the relationships within them are oftentimes running in parallel to the pursuit of culinary excellence or adventure. Sweetness and Lightning is focused on emphasizing aspects of the real to get its messages across. The anime's spaces depict real places in Tokyo. These are actual locations, so the narratives are meant to exist in physical spaces. But what about the action? 

What meaning is there in the act of cooking?

In the process of trying to figure out what the foods meant, what food terrorism / food porn meant, I found out that there's a large and growing literature on what cooking meant to the Japanese. The act of cooking - pronounced in Japan but also worldwide - was useful as a marker of understanding shifts in being 'manly'. The rhetoric of manliness reflected changes in male and female positions. "I'm a catch!" is one example. Being a man who cooks suggests that cooking isn't an essential element to manliness, but rather a 'benefit'. Hidden in language are these expectations that are incredibly interesting.

And it pops up often enough in Sweetness and Lightning that I can't ignore it. Gido Amagakure came from a background in Yaoi and Boys Love manga. She's good at crafting narratives with light, airy, soft atmospheres that disarm you. However, in those atmospheres are oftentimes stories of shifting identities and belonging. When we look at Boys Love analysis (Levi comes to mind), they are roundabout challenges of traditional masculinities. I think Sweetness and Lightning is doing something similar, not only because that's what's happening in Japan, but because Amagakure is familiar with that.