Yahoo has tapped into the Great Male Hivemind to find out what food all men everywhere hate. Apparently, you do this by asking a couple of dudes what kind of food they aren’t fond of. Judging by this logic and the dietary habits of my roommate Justin, all men subsist on mozzarella cheese sticks, cheese pizza, waffles with cheese and Mountain Dew (apparently cheeseless).
Now, NSWATM’s male readers might be all, “wait a minute. I just kind of eat food that tastes good/is nutritious/will fit in with my rigorous bodybuilding schedule. How am I supposed to know if I’m eating the right food? What if, all along, I’ve been eating food that is hopelessly unmasculine?”
Never fear. I have read the list of Foods Men Hate and synthesized a few rules for how men are supposed to eat.
First, men don’t care about animal rights. Why would they? After all, when the cavemen were hunting the mammoth to feed you, there weren’t a lot of namby-pamby PETA* motherfuckers running about with clipboards trying to figure out whether the mammoth had been hit with too many stone arrowheads. Therefore, men don’t want menus that mention whether the animals are ethically raised, they don’t want to eat tofu or any other source of non-meat protein and they certainly don’t want to eat vegan.
Second, men don’t like healthy food. Men absolutely despise brown rice on sushi, for instance. They hate raw food– chopped-up carrots in ranch dressing isn’t for Real Men, it’s for women on diets (assuming that saying “women” and “on a diet” isn’t redundant, of course! Ha ha I crack myself up someone kill me now). And they absolutely, utterly, entirely despise vegetables. This is because men are basically five-year-olds with a sex drive, and you wouldn’t expect a five-year-old to think that something could possibly taste good if it isn’t neon-colored with a cartoon character on front.
Third, men don’t like fancy food. Hamburgers should be made with buns, not sourdough! Gourmet burgers are suspect! You may think this is somewhat odd, as “Ken, systems analyst” thinks that guacamole should cost ten dollars when everyone, or at least every broke college student, knows you can get as much guac as you want for free at Moe’s, but the only logical conclusion is that men both dislike fancy food and are not very good with money. Also, that dude who was interviewed for the article who ran a “Virtual Gourmet Newsletter” isn’t a real man. I mean, he’s a food editor! Probably a fag.
Fourth, men hate tableside guacamole. Don’t know why, they just do.
So you’ve got yourself the perfect meal: sliders (made with only the most tortured factory-farm beef, of course– their tears flavor your food), cupcakes and macaroons. It’s unhealthy! It’s not fancy! Tabletop guac doesn’t make an appearance! It’s everything a man could want!
Unfortunately, no. You see, men hate small things. We don’t know why. Maybe it’s a phallic thing. But the point is, you are not allowed to eat any small burgers. You are not allowed to eat any small cakes. And you are definitely not allowed to eat any small… egg-white… sugar… things. Especially not ones that are named in French! French people are just cheese-eating surrender monkeys.
To recap:
- No food that involves treating animals well.
- No healthy food.
- No fancy food.
- No table guacamole.
- No small food.
Just follow these five simple rules, and you too will be able to Eat like a Man ™!
*PETA sucks. This message has been brought to you by the Coalition for Reasonable Vegans.
I agree with the guacamole, because if I want to eat crappy guac that is not being done right (and seriously no tableside service I’ve ever seen makes the guac properly) I better damn well not be forced to pay ten bucks for it.
@Dorkboy – “People who use “it’s not natural” to argue against homosexuality (or anything else they don’t like) are using the naturalistic fallacy; anyone with a halfway decent grasp of logic know that natural does not automatically mean good.”
Years ago I saw a button that read, “Cyanide is ‘all-natural,’ too!”
I’m still regretting not buying it . . .
“Atkins? Bleah. ”
It’s slow poison for some people. For others it’s mother’s milk. It’s silly trying to find the One True Diet. Before contact the Inuit lived on a pure meat diet and did fine.
“My philosophy of eating echoes Mark Bittman’s: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
Yes. This one works for me.
@Schala – I find the “no carbs/no fat” people even more annoying, because at least the people who eat cake every day aren’t fooling themselves into thinking that what they’re doing is healthy. The vast majority of fad diets are just trading one unhealthy habit for another. Atkins? Bleah. The only good thing about the Atkins craze was that it introduced a lot of products to the market that are great for people with diabetes. My philosophy of eating echoes Mark Bittman’s: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. @Chris R L. Hubley – Yes, it is natural for omnivores… Read more »
_But Tofu isn’t perfect, either… I’ve heard there are a lot of health issues. (Of course, I still eat it)._ I think the issue is that it can be a problem if you’re eating a lot of soya or getting most of your protien that way. Of course there are many sources of protien that are neither meat nor tofu, so if you’re sensible it shouldn’t be a problem. “It’s like milk-drinking and lactose intolerance – sure, there is a lot of cultural baggage around milk in lots of cultures, but at the end of the day you either have… Read more »
“Nothing about human’s lives is “natural”. ” A few years ago a commneter over at FC, who has since vanised, made the point that it is idle to quibble over whether something is natural or cultural since it’s human nature to generate and be shaped by culture. “I also gey very suspicious whenever anyone uses the “it’s natural/not natural” argument about any aspect of human behaviour, whether it’s eating meat …” But with food the culture argument is only part of the discussion. We are adapted to eating meat, and not just meat, but spoiled meat. We evolved our meat-eating… Read more »
But Tofu isn’t perfect, either… I’ve heard there are a lot of health issues. (Of course, I still eat it).
@Chris R L Hubley:
“I also gey very suspicious whenever anyone uses the “it’s natural/not natural” argument about any aspect of human behaviour, whether it’s eating meat or homosexuality.”
Off-topic, but when I hear someone someone use the “not-natural cause they can’t have babies” argument against homosexuality, i ask them how many times they themselves have had sex without the purpose and result of making a baby.
Jim asks me “why not eat tofu and be done with it?” That’s a very good question. And the answer lies in the Masculine/femmephobic perception of Tofu. Tofu (a form of Bean-curd) is seen by the great Macho Manly overmind as the most damningly unmanly food that one can ever eat. Tofu is the Anti-bacon to the Dudebro. The Dudebro would rather eat his own shoes than Tofu. None of which answers the question of where vat-grown meat comes from. But then, where do we come from? We grow and develop via the ingestion of protein and nutrition. Therefore, vat-grown… Read more »
“You’re correct in the sense that humans are omnivores so it is natural for us to eat meat,” Actually what being omnivores means is that we can thrive on a wide range of foods, and therefore we are lucky to be able to make ethical choices about what we eat without affecting our health. I also gey very suspicious whenever anyone uses the “it’s natural/not natural” argument about any aspect of human behaviour, whether it’s eating meat or homosexuality. Nothing about human’s lives is “natural”. People especially don’t seem to get the irony of saying this through the medium of… Read more »
My old flatmate used to steal my food when she was up late studying. I think she got pretty close to a Manly-man diet in those day because she would always go for stuff that was incredibly unhealthy and cheese infused.
I still remember coming home to “I ate your eight(!) pizzarolls that I found in the back of the fridge” . Yeah.
“@Schala – Regardless of whether sugar is healthy or not, your body would certainly care if you ate nothing but cake and bacon. Eat only a thousand calories’ worth a day and you’ll be thin, but without fiber you’ll be constipated and without vitamins you can get a whole host of diseases. Rickets and scurvy are making a comeback for this very reason. I love sweets and I love to bake (I have a pie in the oven right now, want a slice?), but I don’t fool myself into thinking that all foods are created equal. ” Sure, but people… Read more »
@Schala – Regardless of whether sugar is healthy or not, your body would certainly care if you ate nothing but cake and bacon. Eat only a thousand calories’ worth a day and you’ll be thin, but without fiber you’ll be constipated and without vitamins you can get a whole host of diseases. Rickets and scurvy are making a comeback for this very reason. I love sweets and I love to bake (I have a pie in the oven right now, want a slice?), but I don’t fool myself into thinking that all foods are created equal. @Ashley Pariseau – Lions,… Read more »
@Titfortat, that is a propaganda site that’s out to get your money. I don’t trust it at all.
@Jim — “That was so much gentler, and maybe even more vegetarian answer than ‘Get a life of your own…..’”
I’ve found that strategy tends to work about as well with a particular sort of person as telling an Internet troll to “stop it.” Sometimes the only real way to get them to leave you alone is to convince them you’re so far off the rails you ‘re best avoided. 🙂
@schala
“I seriously doubt that sugar itself is bad.”
http://bodyecology.com/articles/25_reasons_to_avoid_sugar.php
“ozymandias42, I was just trying to point out that eating meat is natural. Some people think it’s horrible, evil, and inhumane and it’s not. It’s just nature’s way of life.”
If we were hunting/scavenging our meat, then maybe I would agree with you. But there’s nothing natural about modern farming practices. Especially not how the animals are pumped full of antibiotics and other similar crap, even if I didn’t care about animals I still wouldn’t want to eat that.
@Ozzy, I typically go to http://nutritiondata.self.com/ this website. It’s pretty comprehensive.
“At one point, he suffered a round of gender-shaming about his “girly” eating from some other guy….”
Isn’t it a shame to soem people have so little to think about that they get all interested in other people’s completely harmless personal choices?
“and when he finally got teased one time too many, he told this guy,…..”
That was so much gentler, and maybe even more vegetarian answer than “Get a life of your own…..”
Heh. I had a friend in grad school who ate a basically vegetarian diet because, as he put it, “I can afford to buy either meat, or fresh fruits and vegetables. As far as I’m concerned, the veggies win.” At one point, he suffered a round of gender-shaming about his “girly” eating from some other guy (a friend of his roommate, IIRC), and he had the best-ever strategy for dealing with it. My friend had a reputation for being something of a weirdo (he was a geek who read tarot cards and had books on the occult, etc.), and when… Read more »
“I would like to ask the people arguing about nutrition to cite their damn sources.”
Oh nooooooo!!!!!! There are sources and sources and even some of the most official and peer-reviewed ones are full of sh*t. And even when they’re not, they are easy to misinterpret and over-generalize.
“Nutrition is an inexact science and it’s subject to some amount of personal preference and lots of politics so it requires good judgement no matter what, but there is a lot that science does know.”
One thing it does know but the public seems impervious to is that what is good nutriion for one person is not necessarily good nutrition for another. We may be equal but we are not the same. http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2011/10/iceman-stories-begin-arriving.html
I would like to ask the people arguing about nutrition to cite their damn sources. 🙂
@Dungone, there’s actually no good evidence that sugar is “bad for you.” Large quantities of it are bad for you but a 100% oxygen atmosphere is bad for you and one can drink enough water to kill one’s self.
“@Jim, um, the bran has a lot of iron and a fair amount of protein… not so much on the vitamins. But we’re eating fish! As for vitamins, seaweed! Cucumber! Etcetra!”
Kelp has a lot more B vitamins than any kind of bran does. The key is availability. Not everyone has access to kelp or laver or the other things, and good fish can be hard to get. But here in the PNW there’s not much reason to eat anything else except as candy on the side.