It was because of spring. The severe winter cold had been great for one thing only. The justification of French fries. Oh, and red wine. Now, the warming temperatures demanded something light and green. Besides, there was our health to think about.
“It’ll be good,” I told my husband when he asked what we were having for dinner.
He offered me a solemn look from across our kitchen. Sweet, but solemn. The sort of look your child gives you when you tell him that the first day of school will be terrific, really, a chance to meet new kids and a nice teacher. My husband is the one who usually cooks, not because I can’t or don’t like to, but because he finds it relaxing at the end of a day. It had become our routine.
“My experience with quinoa is not happy,” he reminded me gently.
I had made a quinoa salad for him once before. “I am British,” he had explained meekly. “My digestive system is fond of potatoes.”
“There isn’t that much of it. Half a cup,” I assured him. “Mostly green stuff. Kale. Some chickpeas.”
Chickpeas. Geez. I cringed a bit. It suggests to your guy that you’re going to treat him to the culinary equivalent of a chick flick – The Notebook perhaps. Proteinpea would be a better name – more gender-neutral. I looked at him to gauge his reaction.
The rise of an eyebrow, that’s it, as he sipped his beer and communed with his smartphone.
I didn’t dare tell him the name of the recipe. The Goddess Bowl.
It was from a bestselling cookbook, Oh She Glows, by Angela Liddon, who lives in Oakville, Ont. Needless to say, there’s no boy vibe to its content or design. The recipes are vegan for one thing. And it’s filled with girl foods: dishes with nuts, berries and almond milk; salads; “meatloaf” made with lentils, apples, carrots and walnuts. Hey, He Grills could be the name of a male-targeted cookbook if we’re going to go down this gender-stereotype road. There would be rib-eye steaks, sirloin steaks and thick beef burgers.
Yes, the world was once divided into women in aprons and men in suits (and children who never talked back), but that feels like life on another planet. We’re a long way past strict perceptions of gender roles and expectations. What’s with the leftovers?
Recently – to much consumer outcry – Stonemill Bakehouse, a Canadian bakery based in Toronto, introduced gender-based “Wellbeing” bread loaves in grocery stores such as Loblaws, Sobeys and No Frills. The “girl” bread was milder, lighter-textured and made with hemp and quinoa and fortified with vitamin D and calcium. The bag was accented with pink. The “boy” bread – in a brown-accented bag – was marketed as heartier with barley and rye, more protein and fibre. The company has since withdrawn the packaging.
In fact, the idea of his and her food products has become a trend in recent years. In 2013, a Greek yogurt called Powerful Yogurt was launched to appeal to men. The packaging is black with a stylized graphic of a bull on the label. The company and manufacturer in Florida, Powerful Men LLC, describe the yogurt (or “brogurt” as some call it) as protein-packed, and in earlier marketing materials – which have since been removed – they claimed that a zinc mineral helped male fertility. A few years ago, Cadbury in Britain introduced a new chocolate bar, Crispello, marketed to women as a dainty treat at a mere 165 calories. Bethenny Frankel, the reality-TV star who first came to fame on The Real Housewives of New York City, launched her Skinnygirl cocktail brand in 2009, which has since been acquired by Beam Inc. and expanded its lineup of alcoholic drinks. She has also created Skinnygirl protein bars, chocolate “nutrition” bars and popcorn.
The reason? Research clearly shows that gendered ideas about foods are deeply ingrained in the way individuals think about what is appropriate for a man or a woman to eat. Some of the food-marketing campaigns set out to counteract gendered ideas. Yogurt, for example, is considered girlie.
Interestingly, some of the research findings are reflections of what one academic called “perilous masculinity.”
Take out your knife and fork, my friends. This is meaty stuff.
In a research project at the University of British Columbia, “Meats, Morals and Masculinity,” researchers investigated people’s perceptions of omnivores and vegetarians. Participants were asked to rate someone’s personality based on a small amount of information, including their activities, gender, weight, height and diet. Controlling for perceived healthiness of diets, the research showed that both vegetarian and omnivorous participants found vegetarians to be more virtuous and moral, but men who are vegetarian were perceived as significantly less masculine than their omnivore counterparts. (The perception of a woman’s feminity was not affected by her choice to eat meat or not.)
“The idea is that masculinity is much more vulnerable than femininity,” Matthew Ruby, a cultural psychologist and one of the authors of the study, said in a telephone interview. “In North America, manhood is earned through social displays. … It is much harder to attain and easier to lose. It is socially, rather than biologically, determined.”
Studies show that men are far more inclined than women to practise what’s known as “gender identity maintenance.” Just as the 1982 bestseller said, real men don’t eat quiche. Or rather, they don’t dare, not in a social situation.
The need to convey a strong gender identity is part of what feeds the “omnivore’s dilemma,” a term coined by Paul Rozin, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. It refers to the moral and emotional pitfalls brought on by the human’s ability to eat anything. We get to choose what we eat, in other words, and therefore, food has the power to telegraph messages about who we are. In a paper, “Is Meat Male?,” published in the Journal of Consumer Research in 2012, Rozin and three other professors at other American universities examined cultural and gender associations with meat.
They asked people to free-associate about the maleness or femaleness of a range of foods. Turns out, medium-rare steaks, hamburger and beef chili are found to be most male. Sushi, chocolate, chicken salad and peaches are most female.
Some of their findings were counterintuitive. For example, they hypothesized that foods from female animals – milk and eggs – would be symbolically linked to femaleness. But that was not the case. And they also discovered that the cooking or the processing of foods tended to make something more feminine. Chicken salad was more female than broiled chicken, for instance.
Other researchers have pointed out the association between eating meat and sex, reflected in the word carnality, which is derived from the Latin word for meat or flesh. In Food for Thought: Purity and Vegetarianism, Julia Twigg, a sociologist, wrote that “blood in meat is associated with virility, strength, aggression, power.” In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, numerous books recommended a vegetarian diet for boys as a way to limit masturbation, she noted. She argued that meat was an expression of the patriarchy as it was the men who hunted wild beasts and tamed or dominated nature, which was seen as more feminine. In evolutionary history, it was the women who gathered leaves and berries.
Meat also signifies prestige and wealth. “In European countries, meat was traditionally for the wealthy, for kings and lords,” says Marilyn Morgan, a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Boston, who teaches a course called “Gender, Food and Culture in American History” at Harvard Summer School. “When waves of immigrants came to North America from Western Europe in the 1880s through to the 1920s, often to escape famines, they were almost universally struck by the availability of food, especially meat, which held strong cultural significance.” Advertising campaigns through the years have underscored these associations or tried to counteract them.
The meat-male-power trifecta is so much a part of the collective consciousness that medical advice to limit red meat often gets ignored. It’s why manufacturers of veggie burgers put fake grill marks on their products. And it’s also why business magazines publish counterintuitive stories about the rise of the power vegans. American business magnate, Steve Wynn, investor Mort Zuckerman, Ford executive chairman, Bill Ford, former president Bill Clinton and Twitter co-founder, Biz Stone are all vegans. So is Mike Tyson, the boxer who once bit Evander Holyfield’s ear.
When I read about people eating certain foods to uphold aspects of their identity for others’ consumption, I always feel a little disappointed. Women might eat meat on a first date, for example, to show that they’re not finicky eaters. Or they might eat light foods to appear dainty. Really? I think. Do we constantly have to worry how others are defining us? If it’s not what you eat then it’s what you drive or where you live. It’s exhausting to keep up such a carefully managed front. If I want to eat chocolate, I’m going to opt for a honking great bar, not some dainty thing to make me feel better. And I’m certainly not going to rely on a choice of food to explain to someone what I’m like or what I think. I would use my mouth to speak out loud.
Still, awareness of our subconscious associations with food and gender identity can help change habits. Turning back to the gender experiment of my domestic laboratory, I’m happy to report that the Goddess Bowl was well received. I even found the courage to tell him the name.
“Just let me know if I’m starting to glow in a way you fancy,” he teased.
The next night, it was his turn to set the menu.
“What are we having?” I asked.
“Meat, of course,” he said without raising his head as he concentrated on chopping something. “I’m a man.”