Tuesday Night Is Nut Loaf: Women's Music-Festival Foods

As the title suggests, this essay is a humorous but appreciative look at the cuisine of lesbian/feminist music festivals, which since 1974 have ranged from one-day events to two-week campouts in almost all of the fifty American states. Fans of the women's music movement—which long before Lilith Fair had introduced artists as diverse as Holly Near, Toshi Reagon, Melissa Etheridge, and the Indigo Girls—enjoy several days of concerts and receive meals with their festival packages. These usually vegetarian repasts are an entire subculture of humor and socializing around “lesbian food” of a certain era. How is food important, politically, to this feisty community? How do workers prepare meals for up to 8,000 shirtless women in the woods, in all kinds of weather? And in this very informed, radical community, is the traditional women's work of cooking and cleaning truly respected—or, ironically, taken for granted?