Today’s post is about gender roles and “food issues”.

You’d think such a commonplace thing as food would not be as deserving of all the attention it gets. TV shows, yea verily entire cable channels, are dedicated to the subject of food. Guy cooks. Girl cooks. Cooks for celebrities. Cooks for weddings. Cooks for pets. Turn to the news channel, and you’ll find yourself watching the obesity reports. And we wonder why.

What’s especially delicious is observing the differences between men and women’s reaction to food.

Men love food. They talk about food. They like hunting for food. They love delicious, messy, red-meaty, carbohydrate-laden, unhealthy food. They love grilled food. Specifically, they love grilling the food themselves. My father, the family foodie, will regale me for a full twenty minutes every Sunday afternoon on what he cooked, how he cooked it, and how much of it there was to cook. I smile and nod patiently. My friend in the mafia is always sending me video clips from online cooking shows. I watch them, but I tend to be thinking about the mannerisms and funny-looking goatee of the Italian 30-something chef more than the food.

Women have a love-hate relationship with food. We love how food tastes. Especially sweet things—and just about anything involving chocolate. But thanks to Hollywood and the covers of most magazines, most of us are painfully aware that our figures don’t match the unnecessary expectations set by those photoshopped models who probably live on half a celery stick a day. So as much as we love food, we resort to desperate measures to avoid it, especially the sweet stuff. Tragic, I know, but blame the entertainment industry, not us, for our unnecessary paranoia and affinity for bland salads.

There’s got to be a good reason for this vast divide. More interpersonal yin-and-yang, I suppose. But it certainly doesn’t make deciding on a restaurant any easier.