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-Oscar Wilde		 Brilliant at Breakfast title banner "The liberal soul shall be made fat, and he that watereth, shall be watered also himself."
-- Proverbs 11:25
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Friday, August 10, 2007

I'm surprised I missed this one
Posted by Jill | 7:54 AM
Back in 1983, when Mr. Brilliant and I were dating, I had just taken sixteen weeks to lose only thirteen pounds on something called the Cambridge Diet (which alas, still exists. This was essentially three glasses of chocolate milk made with this Product of Satan -- and nothing else, for 330 calories a day. And I still lost less than a pound a week.

Now, I'm one of those "grazers" -- people who need to eat smaller meals throughout the day. When I was a kid, and we'd do something like go to the World's Fair, my parents had to feed me every two hours or I'd get cranky. So imagine how I was on Cambridge Diet, with a new boyfriend that I'd meet in the city and we'd go out for dinner. It's a miracle, and to his eternal credit, that Mr. B. even stayed around, for watching me scatter food I was afraid to eat around the plate and cry in a public restaurant was not a pretty sight.

And of course twenty years later, my metabolism is STILL completely screwed up from this. And ironically, Cambridge is not all that qualitatively different from the nutty diet my gynecologist wanted me to try. The only difference is that HER nutty diet uses accupressure beads, which supposedly trick you into thinking you're not really, really effing hungry.

Women's eating habits have been fodder for everything from comedians to researchers. Even Eddie Murphy, who is hardly known for being women-friendly, said this in his stand-up film Raw:

If I ever get married, I got to marry somebody with personality.

For instance, I hate those quiet, salad-eating bitches, those real quiet ones, you know.

The kind of women, you take them out to dinner, you say: "Hey, what you wanna eat?"

They go, "I'll just have a salad."

And you hear their stomach going: "I don't know why my stomach is making that noise."

Because you're hungry, bitch. "Why don't you have something to eat?"

"No, no, no. I'm fine, I'm fine. I'll just have a salad."


In the late 1980's, three researchers found that college women eat less when trying to appear feminine. And worse, that both the women and the men rated women who eat less as being just plain nicer:

Video. Four meals were chosen based on the results of a pilot study in which 33 college students rated nine meals on a 7-point Likert scale from (1) very masculine to (7) very feminine: Meal 1 - a small "feminine" meal, consisting of a small salad (lettuce and tomato presented in a 5-inch diameter bowl) and a glass of seltzer (M = 6.4, SD = 0.67); a large "feminine" meal, consisting of a large Greek salad (lettuce, tomatoes, olives, cheese, eggs, presented on an 8-inch diameter plate) and diet soda M = 4.7, SD = 1.10); a small "masculine" meal, consisting of a half-size meatball sandwich (approximately 6 inches in length presented on an 8-inch diameter plate) with 6 mozzarella sticks and a large Coke (M = 2.9, SD = 0.83)h and a large "masculine" meal, consisting of a full-size meatball hoagie (approximately 1 ft. in length, cut in half, and presented on an 8-inch diameter plate) with 6 mozzarella sticks, large fries, a piece of cake, and a large Coke (M = 1.6, SD = 0.66). Meals thus varied both in physical size as well as calorie content. Scheffe analyses demonstrate that these four meals differ significantly from one another. A one-way within-subjects ANOVA by gender demonstrated a gender difference on ratings of Meal 1 [F(1, 31) = 6.20, p < .01] and Meal 4 [F(1, 31) = 6.91, p < .01]. Females tended to rate more extremely than males, but both females and males rated Meal I as most "feminine," Meal 2 moderately "feminine," Meal 3 as moderately "masculine," and Meal 4 as most "masculine."

We then scripted a scene in which a young woman sits down at a table by herself, orders one of these four meals, then proceeds to eat it. We chose a college-aged woman of average weight and attractiveness to act out the four scenarios, and we videotaped her ordering, beginning to eat each meal, and finishing each meal. The sequence of movements was identical in the four meal conditions, with the pace and number of bites and sips carefully choreographed. Because a large meal takes longer to eat than a small meal, we controlled for the time factor by only showing the beginnings and ends of each meal with fadeouts between scenes. Each of the final tapes was five minutes in length.

[snip]

We then scripted a scene in which a young woman sits down at a table by herself, orders one of these four meals, then proceeds to eat it. We chose a college-aged woman of average weight and attractiveness to act out the four scenarios, and we videotaped her ordering, beginning to eat each meal, and finishing each meal. The sequence of movements was identical in the four meal conditions, with the pace and number of bites and sips carefully choreographed. Because a large meal takes longer to eat than a small meal, we controlled for the time factor by only showing the beginnings and ends of each meal with fadeouts between scenes. Each of the final tapes was five minutes in length.


Given that now women are expected to not just be a size 4 or 6, as I was at my thinnest (a time which lasted about 3.2 minutes), but a size 0, I can't imagine things have changed much. Therefore, I don't put a whole lot of stock in this article from yesterday's New York Times:

Ms. Wilkie was a vegetarian in her teens, and even wore a “Meat Is Murder” T-shirt. But by her 30s, she had started eating cow. By the time she placed the personal ad, she had come to realize that ordering steak on a first date had the potential to sate appetites not only of the stomach but of the heart.

Red meat sent a message that she was “unpretentious and down to earth and unneurotic,” she said, “that I’m not obsessed with my weight even though I’m thin, and I don’t have any food issues.” She added, “In terms of the burgers, it said I’m a cheap date, low maintenance.”

Salad, it seems, is out. Gusto, medium rare, is in.

Restaurateurs and veterans of the dating scene say that for many women, meat is no longer murder. Instead, meat is strategy. “I’ve been shocked at the number of women actually ordering steak,” said Michael Stillman, vice president of concept development for the Smith & Wollensky Restaurant Group, which opened the restaurant Quality Meats in April 2006 on West 58th Street. He said Quality Meats’ contemporary design and menu, including extensive seafood offerings, were designed to attract more women than a traditional steakhouse. “But the meat is appealing to them, much more than what I saw two or three years ago at our other restaurants,” Mr. Stillman said. “They are going for our bone-in sirloin and our cowboy-cut rib steak.”

In an earlier era, conventional dating wisdom for women was to eat something at home alone before a date, and then in company order a light dinner to portray oneself as dainty and ladylike. For some women, that is still the practice. “It’s better not to have a jalapeño fajita plate, especially on the first date,” said Andrea Bey, 28, who sells video surveillance equipment in Irving, Tex., and describes herself as “curvy.” “You don’t want to be labeled as ‘princess gassy’ on the first date.”

But others, especially those who are thin, say ordering a salad displays an unappealing mousiness.

“It seems wimpy, insipid, childish,” said Michelle Heller, 34, a copy editor at TV Guide. “I don’t want to be considered vapid and uninteresting.”

Ordering meat, on the other hand, is a declarative statement, something along the lines of “I am woman, hear me chew.”

In fact, red meat on a date has become such an effective statement of self-acceptance that even a vegetarian like Sloane Crosley, a publicist at Random House, sometimes longs to order a burger.

“Being a vegetarian puts you at a disadvantage,” Ms. Crosley said. “You’re in the most basic category of finicky. Even women who order chicken, it isn’t enough.” She said she has thought of ordering shots of Jägermeister, famous for its frat boy associations, to prove that she is “a guy’s girl.”

“Everyone wants to be the girl who drinks the beer and eats the steak and looks like Kate Hudson,” Ms. Crosley, 28, said.


Yes, wouldn't we all. But how many women really can? In fact, the Kate Hudson that this woman is talking about is undoubtedly the immediate-post-pregnancy Kate Hudson, the one who gained 60 pounds while pregnant. But the real Kate Hudson embarked on a fast weight loss track after giving birth, one which would hardly be healthy in a woman who doesn't have an army of nutritionists, personal chefs and personal trainers, and 4-5 hours a day to devote to fitness. And in fact, look at the obsession the gossip rags had with Kate Hudson's weight. This is what we're supposed to aspire to?

So in reality, nothing has changed. You're still allowed to drink beer and eat steak -- as long as you don't get fat. If you're overweight, you're stuck with the salad.

Except me. I plan to consume as much ackee and saltfish and callaloo as I want next week.

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