Word of Mouth blogFoodThe 'gay diet'
If 'man food' is meat and 'girl food' is salad, what's 'gay food'?Simon Doonan has just written a new book called Gay Men Don't Get Fat. Doonan is less famous here than he is in the States: he's a Reading-born, highly successful window dresser for Barneys, a style columnist for the New York Post and elsewhere, and is married to the designer Jonathan Adler. His title alludes, of course, to the mid-noughties bestseller French Women Don't Get Fat, which did more to raise awareness of the French paradox among the general public than any book before it. Doonan's text is more of an arch and witty discourse on aspects of gay and straight life, written in a gossipy, frivolous and ultimately rather lovable style.
"Straight foods are basic and uncontrived," he writes. "Gay foods are fiddly and foofy ... Sushi may well be the gayest food on earth. The design of the average ikura gunkan maki or hirame nigiri is, if you look at it objectively, really quite extraordinary. Sushi chefs are basically taking sloppy bits of fish and magically reworking them into exquisite bonbons. How gay, right? ... While sushi is swishy, Mexican food is unbelievably macho. As delicious as a burrito is, it is basically just a cross between a turd and a penis."
The stereotyping is well written and pretty funny, if a touch crass. But like all stereotypes, it may contain some truth. Reading that section, I was reminded of the moment Sacha Baron Cohen's Bruno character meets pastor Quinn from Little Rock, Arkansas, who counts praying away the gay among his compassionate duties. Bruno asks whether, once cured, he'll still be able to have brunch or "eat very, very chocolatey stuff all the time". Quinn bewilderingly tells him that such excess must be forbidden "if in fact you are doing it because that's part of a homosexual lifestyle".
Like Bruno, Doonan essentially equates gay food with girly food, and straight with blokey. (This is, of course, an indelicate and old-fashioned simplification of gayness, but bear with him.) TV adverts for food consistently feminise or masculinise specific products. Women coo from office windows while a builder removes his shirt to drink Diet Coke. Coke Zero is most definitely aimed at the lads. Activia "improves digestive transit" in bloated girly tummies. Things reach their nadir in this only semi-ironic Burger King commercial. "I'll admit I've tried quiche," confesses our hero, but "I'm way too hungry to settle for chick food": instead he eats a burger the size of a discus.
Those advertisers know their market. If some men did not derive a kind of manly self-affirmation from eating meat, or some women feel that nibbling on a piece of chocolate is a sinful indulgence, such tropes would never have arisen. When chefs and restaurateurs put salads and steaks on their menus, they expect more women to order the former and men the latter, and on the whole, the customers comply.
Many people predictably leap towards evolution to find the basis for these differences. Yale University's David Katz told Salon that "Men and women have differences in physiology which might have to do with access to different kinds of food." That is, cavemen once ate the meat from the hunt while the cavewomen made do with plants and berries. Or something. All such theories are sketchy, inchoate and highly speculative, and they aren't helped by the fact that men and women have broadly similar nutritional requirements even if men do need more calories.
Others say these differences are established in childhood. Many adults encourage boys to eat well and heartily, without necessarily urging girls to do the same. This can undoubtedly lead to complexes and psychological difficulties around food in later life, and may help to influence the fact that the go-to comfort foods for many men are often homely things like mashed potato, pasta and steak, while women are more drawn to cakes, chocolate and biscuits. Men and women are also said to treat food differently when under stress: women eat more, while men often avoid food altogether.
Doonan has an interesting riff on high-end food, which he defines as inherently gay. When he appeared as a judge on Iron Chef, "I [had] never seen so many tangerine emulsions and champagne gelées in my life". While "gourmandizing in the South of France," he once ordered sardines. "When the dish arrived, my gay nerves just about snapped. The plate was triangular (gay) and the raw (!) sardines were cut into narrow, perfectly rectangular strips (so gay) and arranged into an abstract basket-weaving pattern (Liberace gay) ... Only a straight chef could have taken a nice, wholesome, hetero sardine and transformed it into something so explosively gay."
He prefers to eat "a healthy combo of both the gay and straight food groups". And, taking him on those terms, I'd agree. Gay- or straight- or girl- or guy- food: whether or not there is any truth in the labels, a mixture of all is a good idea: one should eat the fruit of all the trees in the garden of the world, as Oscar Wilde put it. Where do you stand on gendered foods? Is there any value in such distinctions, or is it all sexist nonsense best abandoned?
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