YOrkie bars, Nestlé has always told us, are "not for girls". They need to be snapped out of their wrappers and chewed into bite-sized pieces by manly men, men with stubble, men with muscles that bulge like bellies. However, flakes are for ladies. Sexy, in lipstick and bath, crumbling with a feminine bite before closing their eyes in pleasure.
Eating is a complicated matter. And one was more tangled up in the idea that some foods are masculine (hamburgers, steak) while others (yogurt, quiche) are exclusively for girls. Were these ideas about gendered eating originally generated just for ad campaigns, or could the clichés point to a deeper truth? Do men and women need different diets? How much of our view of what constitutes "female nutrition" stems from how we were raised, and how much is tied to something genetic? If men are made of meat, are women made of cupcakes?
Grant Achatz, molecular gastronome and winner ofJames Beard Foundation's award for Best Chef in the US in 2008 sniffs at the idea of gendered dining. "What is a masculine presentation? Is it a giant piece of fried meat? What makes the connotation masculine - caveman?" he says. "Dig down by time periods or age, geographic location, ethnicity and urban versus rural, and you'll find a divide in cooking knowledge and perhaps skill. But that has more to do with society's control over gender in general than genetic makeup from people."
While many of us agree with Achatz in theory, we also tend to stick to our gendered diets in Britain these days. In theObservercanteen, a brightly lit tunnel of moans and chips, I linger at the serving hatches and watch what we eat. Of the 20 guests who prefer the steak and mushroom pie to the vegetable quiche, 18 are men. Of the 10 people who linger at the dessert bar — today's option is a congealed fruit pie warming orange under a heat lamp — seven are women.
I admit the science isn't 100% foolproof, but my observations suggest that women don't eat pie when given the choice, and men don't eat pudding. Why? In 1982, Bruce Feirstein published the bestseller "Guide to Everything Truly Masculine".Real men don't eat quiche. "Think about it," he wrote, "Could John Wayne ever put Normandy, Iwo Jima, Korea, the Gulf of Tonkin, and the entire Wild West on a diet of quiche and salad?"
I ask a man at the register what kept him from going for the quiche today, and he pauses and taps his chin to indicate thoughtfulness. "I need meat," he concludes. "And I like cake." And why don't you eat dessert? "Pudding is a little, how shall I put it? A little..." And then he waves his hands like a dying bird and purses his lips beautifully. Gravy goes everywhere.
When Yorkie relaunched in 2002, Nestlé's marketing director explained his decision to increase the drive for men. "We felt we had to address the British man and reclaim some of the things in his life, starting with his chocolate," said Andrew Harrison. “Most men today feel that the world around them is changing and that it has become less and less politically correct to have something that is only for men. People used to recognize that men needed places to, in a simple sense, to be men. Yorkie believes this is an important part of men's happiness and starts the recovery process by making a specific chocolate just for men."
Because chocolate has traditionally been invented mainly for children, but secretly also for women. When we're not sensually chewing on a flake, enjoying some feminine "me-time," we're in love in our pajamas and pouring chocolate ice cream into our shared mouths. We are chocoholics! We crave cocoa, just as others crave glue. Is this a scientific truth? In the 1990s, Linda Bartoshuk, a professor at Yale University, came up with a bitterness test. She classified the American population into super tasters, intermediate tasters, and non-tasters.
Supertasters, she said, live in a "neon world" of taste; non-tasters in a "pastel world". She found that a much higher proportion of women were super tasters and more responsive to bitterness than men. If women taste a bitterness that men lack, does it follow that women actually have a "sweet tooth"? Anecdotal evidence suggests that women like chocolate more than men - in April, a study found that a third of women daydream about chocolate, compared to just 11% of men. Some researchers say this is because chocolate releases dopamine (a chemical that peaks during org*sm) in the female brain. It has even been suggested that when women eat chocolate, it affects the activity of the amygdala, a part of the brain that regulates sexual desire.
Psychologists see it more simply, explaining that the attraction of chocolate to women in its status is a forbidden pleasure for dieters. The chocolate industry is dominated by brands aimed at women. Jill McCall, brand manager at Cadbury, carefully points out the difference between the indulgent, feminine bars (Flake, Galaxy) and the masculine "hunger bars" (Boost, Snickers), which are nutty and huge, filling you up rather than for a girlish "treat", creating markets within markets. Last month, Mars launched Twix Fino, with a third less calories than the old-fashioned Twix.
Bep Sandhu, from Mars, told the trade journalThe salesman"The lighter version will increase the brand's appeal to female professionals looking for a lighter snack." Along with the new Galaxy Bubbles, another chocolate market for women seems to be booming: the slimming bar. “The role of marketers is to understand motivations, needs and wants so that we are always on top of changing consumer needs,” said Elizabeth Davies, Head of Communications at Nestlé, where they are responsible for marketing both Kit Kat Chunky (Male) and Kit Kat Senses (ladyish). “If there is a clear gender gap and the increasing business opportunity can be justified without compromising the core brand, then brands will continue to take the initiative.”
Chocolate is one of the things most associated withwith a female diet, but it is not until we think of salty foods that we can separate advertising from food. Director of the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center, David Katz, believes that our gendered diet can be explained by evolution. Like cavemen, he suggests, men were hunters, dependent on protein to build muscle and saw meat as a reward, while women were foragers of fruits and vegetables. "Men and women have differences in physiology," he says, "which may have to do with [early] access to different foods." Different access to food in prehistoric times, he says, led to gendered eating patterns today.
Yvonne Bishop-Weston is a Harley Street nutritionist who agrees that men are attracted to fat, meat and protein, but says it's not an "evolutionary need - it's because of socialization. Boys are encouraged from a very young age to having big appetites It seems that it's possible that there are fat receptors in the brain so that everyone craves it, and because of our larger hormonal cascade, women actually crave it more.
Bishop-Weston sees fewer differences between men and women in how people eat, more in how they think about their diet. “Women have more of an emotional attachment to food — because of media pressure, they blame carbs and saturated fat and often feel responsible for eating healthy in ways that men don't,” she says. "Interestingly, though, I see a trend toward 'effort' that spans and unites the genders. People are becoming more receptive to things that take longer. People are seeking an identity with their food. People are buying bread makers! As everyone's life is when we get more stressed , we feel worse and we need more nutrients. So both men and women become afraid to eat well."
Another food trend steeped in gender is the so-called "cupcake revolution." While the "fekage," as we called these palm-sized party snacks, evokes images of angry four-year-olds shoving Smarties up their noses, the "cupcake" evokes fragrant visions of a 1950s pre-feminist housewife baking for pleasure. In addition to their appearance onSex and the city, where they were fetishized to within an inch of their soon-to-be-obsolete little lives, cupcakes also became fashionable in the UK last year, with one fan (who, dressed as her alter ego Cherry Bakewell, throws cupcake parties) describing them as a "true symbol of femininity and a camp symbol of a bygone era". Here's the baked and tongue-in-cheek response, cupcake aficionados say, to post-feminist culture. CorrespondingEsquireThe magazine's Eat Like a Man blog celebrates "foods men love and ... ways men eat," embracing the idea of gendered eating as a way to mark their masculinity in grilled meats.
If the pastel-colored cupcake is the modern symbol of female eating, then the Pot Noodle Doner Kebab may well be the contemporary symbol of masculinity - its creator Unilever describes it as "the ultimate man-food snack". It has it all - simple meat content and quick gratification, presented in a compact yet masculine glossy black container.
Jamie Robertson, a gay television producer, says sexuality has little to do with diet, "although the gay stereotype is often seen as tamer than the straight man. Personally, I don't think most gay people are more comfortable in a kitchen than their straight friends, but i would like to think that on average our diets are a bit more adventurous and varied, opting for Waitrose tuna Niçoise over Tesco chicken pasta salad, we are more 'experimental' by nature, curious to see what they eat on the other side of the fence - after all, that's what brought us into this gay circus in the first place.
"It's important to remember that marketing is not a conspiracy," says Dr. David Bell, author ofConsuming geographies: we are where we eat, and Associate Professor of Critical Human Geography at the University of Leeds. "When advertising works successfully, it either confirms the stories we already believe — think the OXO family — or it shakes us so that we know the story has been subverted."
We're talking about the current Lurpak ad, in which a man is baking. But instead of cupcakes, he bakes a pie with steak and ale, and he messes it up and kneads the dough with fleshy hands. "It's about gender, and it's about giving men a license to cook and affirming that if you do it this way, it won't undermine your masculinity."
Dr. Bell, whose work on food consumption focuses on how we use food to figure out who we are, makes this very clear: "'Nature' isn't natural. It's cultural. It's a story we tell to help us help us understand the world, and that has a strong appeal in our post-Darwinian, secular culture. We need ways to explain the world and who we are, and nature gives us that through science." Tastes change over time, he says, partly because of the availability of food, and partly because of the "tastemakers" of the day, the people who guide the rest of us by ideas of class, culture, and indeed gender. the historical period, the diets that men and women choose, tell us a story about gender at the time, for example, the idea that men need more calories than women, or can drink more alcohol: "These are cultural stories about gender. Partly to do with the gendered division of labor, partly with the construction of the gendered body."
And these stories also change and adapt over time. He rejects current ideas about what men and women eat, but says he is suspicious of the way they are explained. "We can explain different gender-related eating habits and tastes through an evolutionary history of what men and women do 'naturally' and like 'naturally'," he says, where every choice we make leads back to the need to disperse the species. , like Yale's. . David Katz suggested. Man is the hunter, so the breadwinner, the carnivore, the fire maker, the king of the grill. The woman is the vegetable gatherer, the salad eater, the caretaker, the housewife , the cupcake maker.” And of course we rely on some gendered notions here, but when we look for causes, this evolutionary history is all we're aiming for.Six, like nature itself, is not 'natural', it is something we 'do'. And we do it all the time, which means we do it when we eat. We get to know our tastes, and part of that learning is gendered."
Women aren't prone to sweeter tastes, or men to sour tastes, Bell says — the fact that we think they are is part of our cultural history. "The story we tell to understand the world and our place in it. We live in a culture-rich time and are very good at categorizing food, including one for 'food that people like me eat'." So men don't eat steak because they are men, men eat steak to show they are men. Women aren't hardwired to crave dessert — we've learned that women crave dessert, so we follow with our mouths open. "It's reassuring," says Bell, "it's reassuring when we understand things."
