Addiction Commonality

Alcohol, Opiates, Fat and Sugar are all Addictive Substances: this blog is about that "addiction sameness".

Butter Pig Family

* A butter sculpture of a sow and her piglets

Wednesday, January 11, 2012

The Gay Diet

The gay diet | Life and style | guardian.co.uk:


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 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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