When I lived in Cleveland, my then-girlfriend loved a regional Middle Eastern restaurant chain, Aladdin’s. Whenever we ate there, I noticed that the majority of diners were female. About 25% of the occupied tables could have male-female couples, while the other 75% either had women by themselves or with other women.
You’re a man, and you love Middle Eastern food, yadda yadda yadda. Whatever. Based on my observations, at least in the Cleveland area Middle Eastern food is chick food. Maybe it’s no coincidence that about 75% of the items on the menu incorporated yogurt in some way.
At the many natural food supermarkets in the Austin area (Whole Foods, Central Market, Sprouts, etc), the gender breakdown in shoppers seems to be 60% to 65% female, 35% to 40% male. There’s not as many of the stereotypical “earth mother” or hippie types one would expect; they seem to stick to the co-ops and old-school “nothing but bulk grain and vitamins” health food stores. There do seem to be a lot of what I call “sporty chicks”; slim, athletic, always wearing shorts, and with straight hair pulled through the back of a a baseball cap.
I think there are differences in the tastes of men and women (men are more likely to like spicy food, in my experience), but I think it also has a lot to do with image. Women are going to be more interested in foods that have an image of slimness, gentleness, and creamy pleasurableness. Men are going to be into foods that have an image of toughness and thickness.
Rice cake, does that sound tough? No. Does it sound slim and gentle? Yes.
Edit: by “tastes” I mean the sorts of actual taste sensations preferred.
That reminds me of Mary Tyler Moore - all the hard drinking newsmen (including Mary) went to the bar after work and all had manly drinks like scotch on the rocks. Except Ted - he ordered a girly drink with a little umbrella in it!
Jane and Michael Stern wrote an historical cookbook called Square Meals - food through the decades from the 30’s through the 60’s. The 30’s emphasized “ladies lunchrooms food” - cute little muffins and creamed chicken on toast. The 50’s of course was when men cooked manly steaks on the BBQ.
We go out to eat and Mr. Sali favors restaurants that serve fries/burgers covered with bacon and yellow cheese, Guiness as a beverage. I would like seafood, white wine as a beverage. I usually just get a nice piece of steak.
I remember a while back, on ABC Family (or Family Channel, or Fox Family, or whatever is was called then) had a Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen sitcom on it. Anyway, one of their conversations was how one of them only wanted what she considered ‘cute food’ packed in her lunch. The only thing I can remember mentioned as being ‘cute’ was grapes. Weird.
Me too. Apparently, I simply like food. Regarding the OP, I never thought of rice cakes as “chick food.” I’ve always thought of it as “people who don’t like food” food. Yogurt is total chick food, though. Can’t stand it.
I can’t stand rice cakes, not even the flavored kind. Styrofoam is the right description for them. Nasty stuff. My husband on the other hand likes them and will buy them when he feels like dieting. He’s tried getting me to eat them, but I’m smarter than that. I think this quirk of his can be directly related to his wrestling days in high school. Wrestlers will eat anything if you tell them it will either help them lose weight or build muscle.
I’m also not a big fan of ice cream. I’ll eat it when it’s served and enjoy it but I don’t go out of my way to hunt it down or eat it when I’m depressed. That’s what cookies and chocolate are for.
I always think of cute little appetizers, like cheese and garnish on little toast slices, as girly and messy foods, like BBQ ribs, as man food.
I’d agree with this. I think it’s related to how women are generally perceived as more health-conscious (going to checkups more, reading health-related articles) and men are considered more risk-taking (fast cars, no doctors). So if it’s good for you, we think it’s for chicks; if it’s exciting, we think it’s for dudes.
Also, women are generally smaller (and thus eat less) than men, so of course lower-calorie items would be more appealing.
I had lunch with a (female) colleague the other day who contemptuously referred to the salad she had ordered as “rabbit food”. It’s the first time I’ve heard a woman use that phrase (except when referring to actual rabbit food).
It was also kind of cute that she ordered a cajun beef salad simply in order to eat the bits of cajun beef in it.
I will eat flavored rice cakes for ages, though I won’t get them because they’re never <=$2/lb. I’ll eat yoghurt, but it tends to leave an unpleasant film on the rest of my mouth. I also love salads, though I never order them in restaurants because I can never get everything I want and nothing I don’t. Hell, when I get a sub, there is more vegetable mass there than meat and cheese combined.
The 50s were a prosperous time, and also a time when men threw their cultural weight around in the home like never before. They’d made the world safe for democracy and lived on C-rations while doing it, so it was their turn.
The 30s were a time when nobody got enough to eat. Even if you could afford to lay on the groaning board, it wasn’t in style. Home economists were newly powerful and wielding the whip hand, usually in cahootz with processed food marketers.
The 30s were also something of a low point for manliness in the 20th century…
I used to work for Quaker. When they insisted that consumers only wanted fat-free rice cakes, they were pretty nasty (I likened them to discs cut out of styrofoam ceiling tiles)…but, once they decided that they could get away with putting a little bit of fat in some of the flavors, those wound up being pretty tasty.
I eat yogurt almost every day and really love the greek style. I don’t care for most supermarket brands though-too sweet. I also love rare beef and sashimi. But rice cakes are only suitable for insulation. Truthfully I’ll eat just about anything.
(I’m a she by the way.)
This thread reminded me of an afternoon a few years ago. Some family members and I went out to dinner with a cousin we had only recently met. I ordered some sort of dolled-up chicken affair, my siblings (a sister and two brothers) all ordered similar things, frou frou dishes with fancy sauces and tiny vegetables. Our cousin, an 89 year old woman with electric blue boots, ordered a steak and black coffee.
I have no use for rice cakes unless I run out of packaging peanuts when I need to ship something.
Yogurt? Different story. It needs to be whole milk and it needs to not have a bunch of nasty sweetstuff in it like vanilla flavoring or blueberry gooey syrup shit or whatever: just the yogurt, plain and not fatfree. Hard to beat Stonyfield Farms although there’s another brand… Brown Cow? … that also makes a quite nice whole milk yogurt.
Yep, it seems to me that anything seen as hearty or ‘bad’ is seen as masculine, health food or anything low-fat or low calorie is seen as feminine. With the exception of gendered sweet foods which are portrayed as a sexual temptation.
I’m not getting the yoghurt hate in this thread. I love all kinds of yoghurt and like the favored sweet ones as dessert. On the other hand, I am a girl…
When I started reading manga (Japanese comic books), it took me a while to get used to the idea that all sweet foods are gendered female and “manly” men won’t ever want to eat cake, pastry, cookies, candy, chocolate or even sugar in their coffee. The first time or two I came across this I thought it was some sort of joke or an idiosyncrasy of the author, but I’ve seen it so many times in so many books that I have to accept it as a real piece of popular Japanese thought. (Doubt that it’s actually true for the average Japanese man, though. Who doesn’t like any sweet stuff?)
