Burgers Are For Boys and Salads Are For Girls
Your lunch is packaged with gender-based assumptions.
There are countless commercials and advertisements of lithe, happy women giggling while eating salad or floating a skewered tomato to their mouths. Meanwhile, their male counterparts are often seen tackling a juicy burger or gnawing on a sauce-smothered chicken wing. The stereotypical gender differences in food choices even carry over to the cookbook industry: an Esquire editor published a tome entitled Eat Like a Man, which promises to fuel everything from “poker night feeds, and game-day couch camping.”
But it doesn’t end there. According to a new study in Social Psychology, the meal you purchase or bring to work every day could be an inherently gendered choice. Researchers from the University of Manitoba investigated eaters’ reactions to gendered differences in food packaging. They found that healthy options are often seen as more feminine, while unhealthy options are frequently perceived as masculine.
The study results
In the first part of the study, researchers asked 93 adults to divide certain foods into gendered categories based on how they were prepared. When presented with baked and fried chicken, for instance, both male and female participants classified baked chicken—the clearly healthier option—as feminine and fried chicken as masculine.
In the second part of the study, participants were randomly assigned to six groups and given blueberry muffins with different packaging. Some muffins were packaged in wrappers with an image of a ballerina and the word “health” written on them. Other wrappers featured the word “mega” and a picture of men playing football. Still others were given gender-neutral packaging with no writing and a nondescript image of a field. Finally, for the last two groups, researchers swapped the images and wording on certain wrappers to defy conventional gender stereotypes, placing the word “health” alongside the football image and the word “mega” alongside the ballerina.
As expected, these wrappers were the most confusing for participants. “With packaging, we expect healthy eating to be associated with femininity,” Luke Zhu, the study’s lead researcher, told TIME. “But what if healthy food is packaged in masculine packaging? That’s an expectation violation.”
If the study’s results are any indication, disrupting our expectations can actually influence our taste buds. Participants reported that the muffins with the “mixed-up” wrappers actually tasted worse than the others—even though they were the same food. The participants were also inclined to pay less for food with this type of packaging.
“Gender stereotypes, once activated, can have a profound influence on our behavior,” Zhu told me. Whether or not we’re aware of it, we seem to prefer food packaging that adheres to clearly delineated gender divides.
My own experiment
To test this out in real life, I asked a few friends and co-workers to share what they were eating on a given day at the office. Here are some photos of what the men had for lunch:
And here are some photos from the women:
As it turns out, the results were pretty mixed. Neither gender seemed to be making significantly healthier choices, and my male friends and co-workers were just as fond of a salad or rice bowl as the women, who weren’t hesitant to enjoy a sub or a plate of pasta, either.
Of course, most of this food was homemade, so I decided to take a look at a few of the packaged items my friends and colleagues were eating as well. Here are some examples of what the women ate:
And here’s a photo of what one of my male friends ate:
Interestingly enough, the pita sandwich purchased by my female editor has the words “healthy eating” scrawled across the wrapper in bold green letters. The Dove dark chocolate also features a little message that caters to a female audience, encouraging the consumer to indulge herself and “make the first move.” In contrast, my male friend’s breakfast burrito is emblazoned with the word “supreme”in capital letters—quite similar to the word “mega” used in the study.
These are fitting examples of the kinds of gender-targeted packaging referred to in the study. Even among a small network of friends and colleagues, this effect seems to surface.
Given a larger sample size, Zhu thinks I would have seen a tendency for women to make healthier choices than their male colleagues. But the study’s results, he says, cannot be attributed to “the nature of the food or the packaging of the food” alone. It’s “the combination of these two” that has the greatest impact on our attitudes and preferences.
At the end of the day, some men may prefer the taste of “Skinny Pop” popcorn and some women may love beef jerky. But that doesn’t change the fact that, as Zhu says, “our evaluation of food isn’t always about the food itself.”
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