INTRO
Is this chocolate bar male or female?
What about this steak?
Would you refer to this carton of milk as sir or ma'am?
Is this a lady?
This isn’t some cute, whimsical exercise.
It’s actually an oversimplified version of a real life study that examines a persistent
stereotype -- that meat eating is inherently manly
Burger King ad: I’m a man, hear me roar, in numbers too big to ignore.
And I’m too hungry to settle for chick food.
[followed by aggro manly clips, lions tearing meat]
ROZIN: I wrote a paper with colleagues a few years ago called ‘is meat male’ [pdf]
That’s Paul Rozin.
He researches the psychology behind food choice.
ROZIN: What does it mean when food has male connotations?
His team assessed other foods too.
ROZIN: But only for mammaled muscle.
For example a pancreas or a liver was not seen as more male.
Nor was chicken it was just mammaled muscle.
You know, hamburger, steak, lambchops those kinds of things.
ROZIN: So what we found was that indeed that was true but only for mammal muscle meat.
So that a pancreas or a liver were not seen as more male - nor was chicken.
So hamburger, steak, lamb chops, those kinds of things.
[graphics montage]
It’s hard to test and prove metaphorical associations like this.
Rozin’s paper was actually a compilation of 6 separate studies.
In one test, participants were asked to rate foods as male or female on a scale of 0-10.
In another, they free associated.
Then there was the implicit bias associations which tested reaction times.
The idea here is that you pair things faster when they feel true to you.
The rest of the studies examined food preference, gendered words in other languages and indirect
associations.
Nutritionist David Katz has an idea of how these associations arose
KATZ: What we like more often than not has direct links to survival and evolutionary
biology
The argument goes: Men were hunters and women were foragers.
Men needed more meat to build muscle and chase down animals.
A preference for meat gave them an evolutionary advantage.
To Rozin, the biology argument is overstated.
ROZIN: I don’t think it’s biological //
Hey Mom!
The meatloaf!
We want the meatloaf
ROZIN: it’s traditional, we’re just carrying this heritage of tens of thousands of years
of human evolution.
Cultural evolution mostly.
Meat is generally the preferred food of humans.
And males sort of own it in a way.
But don’t get Katz wrong - he’s on board with the cultural argument.
To him, it’s a matter of which came first.
KATZ: All culture originates with biology.
Researchers generally accept that food preference diverged when work became specialized, and
diverged further once farming was invented.
KATZ: Most of the evidence suggests that there was something of a division of labor
This caused humans to be more efficient.
With that also came a cultural division of gender.
Before this happened, it’s possible we were more similar to our more egalitarian primate
and early human cousins, who were all adept hunters.
As to whether biology informed culture, or the other way around:
KATZ: Nobody knows for sure, these are untestable hypotheses.
However, we can test perceptions and consumption today.
Manly meat imagery won’t disappear anytime soon, but overall meat consumption is down
in the US and vegetarianism is rising.
KATZ: We can be big and strong eating plant foods as well, you don’t need to look much
further than a horse or gorilla to see that.
Unsurprisingly, Rozin’s team found that the most feminine foods were salad and chocolate.
The salad connection could be tied to dieting or foraging
While the chocolate link seems rooted in culture.
As an aside, some believe women’s hormones cause them to crave chocolate, but worldwide
studies don’t back this up.
Whether any of these metaphorical links || are cultural inventions, evolutionary hijinks
or a bit of both--
KATZ: It’s not difficult to find arguments that make sense, and I don’t know that we
can do better than that
Our conversation was mostly about the past, but Katz mentioned one point about the future
so often, that I felt compelled to include it.
KATZ: there are all sorts of reasons why we as a species, men and women alike, like meat,
want meat, but that it’s too damn bad in a world of almost 8 billion homo sapiens.
The environmental costs of eating meat are extremely high.
And that’s fine when there are a few million homo sapiens scattered across the planet,
but it’s not the stone age.