Diners, Dudes, and Diets

How Gender and Power Collide in Food Media and Culture

Emily J. H. Contois

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781469660745, 9781469660738
• eBook ISBN: 9781469660752
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The phrase “dude food” likely brings to mind a range of images: burgers stacked impossibly high with an assortment of toppings that were themselves once considered a meal; crazed sports fans demolishing plates of radioactively hot wings; barbecued or bacon-wrapped . . . anything. But there is much more to the phenomenon of dude food than what’s on the plate. Emily J. H. Contois’s provocative book begins with the dude himself—a man who retains a degree of masculine privilege but doesn’t meet traditional standards of economic and social success or manly self-control. In the Great Recession’s aftermath, dude masculinity collided with food producers and marketers desperate to find new customers. The result was a wave of new diet sodas and yogurts marketed with dude-friendly stereotypes, a transformation of food media, and weight loss programs just for guys.

In a work brimming with fresh insights about contemporary American food media and culture, Contois shows how the gendered world of food production and consumption has influenced the way we eat and how food itself is central to the contest over our identities.

CHAPTER ONE

Crafting Dude Food Media

From Advertising to Men’s Cookbooks

Birthed from the historical context of the new millennium and amplified by the recession, the dude provided a solution for the food and media industries as they sought more male consumers for feminized products. They built these strategies upon the wholly masculine precedents set by a specific food genre: dude food. But what is dude food?

A Google Images search for “dude food” provides visual clues, as it returns thousands of photos of burgers, pizza, and hot dogs. On Instagram, posters use the hashtag #dudefood alongside the far more popular #foodporn, as well as derivatives like #meatporn and #burgerporn.¹ Unlike stylized food Instagram shots, often taken from directly overhead, these photos capture dude food on a slight angle or head-on so to display the full girth and height of immense sandwiches and bulging burgers. As is typical of food porn images, cheese and sauces ooze seductively as visible fat glistens and beckons.² In these photos, dude food often involves meat: beef burgers, fried chicken and wings, and barbecue favorites including brisket, ribs, sausages, and pulled pork. Although meat—a food perceived as masculine in cultures around the world—figures heavily, defining dude food proves more complicated than just a list of meat-laden dishes.³

Food writing and blogs describe a set of gastronomic qualities that typically define dude food. By and large, dude food’s flavors and ingredients align with conventional notions of masculine foods and food attributes, but with a dude twist. Conventional (and often binary) definitions of gender create hierarchies that feminize certain flavors, foods, and appetites, marking dainty, light, and sweet flavors and foods, eaten in small portions with restraint.⁴ Conversely, masculinity typically translates to spicy, hearty, and savory flavors, and hefty portions consumed with gusto; all characteristics of dude food. In the Washington Post, editor Bonnie Benwick defined dude food, with input from a number of food experts, by its emphatic and substantial flavors and textures: “salty, fatty, and crisp,” “hearty, smoky, grilled,” “heavy on the grease,” and “tasty simplicity,” “with bro-tastic sweetness and wicked heat.”⁵ Stated more bluntly, the New York Times food editor, Sam Sifton, defined dude food as “a cuisine that sits at the intersection of stoner and tailgate.”⁶ Devoured within moments of leisure, relaxation, and informality, dude food transcends ingredients and flavors, as it indexes the dude’s anti-professionalism and slacker-friendly ease.

A look at recent food writing in print and online also delineates dude food as a broader culinary and social phenomenon with a number of underlying contradictions, particularly with regard to social class.⁷ On a short-lived blog titled “Dude Food: Culinary Survival Guide for the Modern Man,” Brooklyn-based chef Erik (no last name) wrote in 2011, “I’m all about ‘guy food’ and, well … the pursuit of whatever the hell that means” (italics in original).⁸ Dude food possesses an inherent ambivalence, making it difficult to define the type of eater who cooks and consumes it, even among those who willingly adopt its label. Despite his admitted uncertainty, Erik wrote that the food on his blog “isn’t going to be ‘chefy’ or pretentious. It’ll be straightforward guy food with an everyday accessibility.” Erik’s characterizations of dude food as unpretentious, straightforward, and accessible reinforce the classed connotations of dude food as antithetical (or at least resistant) to the perceived pretension of fine dining. Like the dude himself, dude food indexes a particular type of anti-elitist masculinity, but one that even dudes themselves engage from a wary distance.

Infused with class politics, dude food embodies notions of lowbrow food and eaters, fast food value menu quantity, and the enthusiastic pursuit of exaggerated eating experiences. “Junk” food, a culinary category that includes dude food, can provide an alternate route to food knowledge and social status through “an ironic embrace of culinary capital by those who seem, on the surface at least, uninterested in it or the status it can confer.”⁹ The dude resists professional accomplishment and endorses slacking off, while maintaining masculine social power. Similarly, dude food plays around as it resists the typical standards of haute cuisine, even as it finds its way onto the menus at fine dining restaurants, where dinner menus offer burgers alongside continental classics and modern American creations.

Indeed, gastropubs are the dudes of contemporary American dining. With kitchens run by talented chefs, U.S. gastropubs offer top quality but relatively affordable food and drink in a relaxed and casual atmosphere that bucks some of the aesthetic and etiquette traditions of fine dining. These upscale urban eateries often combine the techniques and sensibilities of modern American cuisine with dude food. Early gastropubs in the United States built their reputations on excellently executed dude food, such as the now iconic burgers on the menu at Father’s Office in Santa Monica in 2000 and the (now #MeToo infamous) Spotted Pig in 2004.¹⁰

Although gastropubs typically populate cosmopolitan cities, dude food codifies an inclusive sense of place and regionality beyond what are often framed as “elite” coasts and “hot” food cities. Dude food somehow manages to include regional or local specialties from sea to shining sea, whether a food’s origins are specific or more diffuse. Chicago deep dish pizza is dude food. So is a Philly cheesesteak and Cincinnati chili. So are cheesy tater tot delights from the Midwest, chicken fried steak beloved in Texas and Oklahoma, and barbecue specialties from Kansas City, Memphis, and Austin, to name just a few. Dude food playfully resists classed understandings of high and low, junk and haute in a way that also claims people and places as its own.

Dude food also embodies the confidence, fearless freedom, and privilege of the dude to eat—and by extension do and be—whatever he wants, as well as the anxieties, risks, and consequences that come with eating and living like a dude. Concern for health tops the list of such anxieties. Defined by massive portions and full-throttle flavor, dude food enthusiastically endorses excess, as it thwarts nutritional advice that emphasizes restraint or even balance. Dude food serves as a site of resistance against dominant dietary advice, such as the healthy eating and anti-obesity mandates endorsed by government recommendations and policy.¹¹ For example, the description of the dude food Instagram account “Fat Fucks Unite” once read: “Make America Fat Again.”¹² The account’s description referenced Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, which has inspired memes throughout U.S. popular culture, as well as significant social conflict. It also resists federal nutrition policy, such as that endorsed by former first lady Michelle Obama, which promoted healthier school food and a vegetable garden on the White House’s south lawn. Later, the account’s description changed to “It’s a lifestyle. Join the movement,” ironically rewriting dude food in the language of health and wellness trends.

Resisting healthy eating mandates, dude food is comfort food but with an edge of competitive destruction. Emphasizing such qualities, Sarah Lawson of First We Feast defined dude food as, “over-the-top, in-your-face culinary creations with no concern for moderation or decency.”¹³ Dude food demonstrates the contradictions inherent to ambivalent masculine body discipline, which devalues and discourages “healthy” eating as feminine.¹⁴ Writer David Sax similarly asserts that food advertising to men “presents a cleverly crafted challenge to our manhood: Are you man enough to eat this shit?”¹⁵ Dude food’s propensity toward hyperbolic flavor and massive portion sizes yields potential overeating, health consequences, and food waste as eaters accept the challenge of being “man enough” to clean their plates. The Zagat-rated Triple Coronary Bypass burger at the Vortex Bar & Grill in Atlanta and the Quadruple Bypass Burger on the menu at Heart Attack Grill in Las Vegas ironically pose dude food consumption as a serious health risk. Articles on dude food address this contradiction with titles like “Dude Food That Is Actually Good for You,” “7 Healthy Dude Foods,” and “Diabetic Dude Food: Six Healthy Recipes Guys Will Love.”¹⁶ Chef, restaurateur, and Top Chef judge, Hugh Acheson, similarly critiqued dude food’s unhealthy qualities, asserting that “dude needs balance. Maybe a salad? Hopefully we can lose the gender stereotypes of the ’80s, when real men didn’t eat quiche, ’cause often real men are morons.”¹⁷ Taken together, such messages create a paradoxical feedback loop between definitions of masculinity, dude food, and health.

These paradoxes of dude food grow more complicated when viewed through the more feminized gaze of Pinterest, a social media platform where women make up 70 percent of users and pin 93 percent of the platform’s content.¹⁸ Within Pinterest, one still finds recipes for bacon-wrapped meatballs oozing cheese out of their centers, but dude food’s meaning shifts toward men as subjects to be fed and cared for by female cooks.¹⁹ A number of pins link to Father’s Day meals and menus. Recipe roundups such as “Dude Food: 18 Foods Dad Will Love” promise “man-approved” recipes, echoing the language that has appeared in cookbooks for many decades that reinforces traditional gender roles. Such pins prescribe dude food with a domesticated and feminized air, even as they offer recipes for baked buffalo wings, pizza dip, and meatloaf. The commercial media context of Pinterest also blurs the meaning of dude food. Some of the interspersed ads sponsor typical dude food, such as Old El Paso’s promoted post for grilled steak bowls or Crown Royal’s ad that asserts itself as “a better complement than fries.” Other posts incongruously endorse dude food alongside products, such as RXBAR with its purportedly simple healthy ingredients and Daily Harvest’s made-for-Instagram smoothies. Whether on websites, blogs, Instagram, or Pinterest, dude food connotes an unassailable sense of masculinity through its embrace of culinary excess, at the same time that it navigates contradictions surrounding power, access, waste, and health.

What’s more, dude food saturated food media at a moment when men were increasingly engaging with food as part of their lifestyle and identity. The Men’s Health website began running a “Guy Gourmet” column as a twice weekly blog in the mid-2000s, which primarily published recipes and cooking tips. In September 2012, Guy Gourmet had just surpassed 37,000 followers on Twitter.²⁰ Near its peak popularity in July 2017 it had more than 160,000 followers. In a 2012 article, “In Defense of Dude Food,” Men’s Health writer Paul Kita argued that the magazine’s food readership had expanded dramatically to the point that food articles were among the most popular content they published online. Kita cited the increasing number of male-centric cookbooks, memoirs, food blogs, Twitter accounts, and Pinterest boards as evidence of “guys everywhere putting food at the center of their lives more than ever before,” which he argued was “fueling a progression of gender equality in the home kitchen and a point of celebration when it comes to dining out.”²¹ Despite some men’s increasing interest in food media and a supposed progression toward gender equality, dude food promotes a strict heteronormativity. Everything about dude food endeavors to heterosexualize food as a way to distinguish straight male interest in food and cooking from perceptions of femininity or gayness.

These paradoxical dude food relationships also guide the treatment of the male body, particularly with regard to a chiseled, muscular ideal.²² Contemporary fat stigma frames fatness as a social problem, one with a corporeal and ideological force that obscures gender.²³ This results in what are perceived as out-of-control women and failed, effeminate men.²⁴ Even within the food features that Kita mentions, Men’s Health framed dude food alongside health and social status. Men’s Health magazine covers and articles, both in print and online, assert men’s right to dude food, that is, to celebrate and satisfy supposedly manly appetites. At the same time, Men’s Health demands of its readers personal responsibility for fitness and health, continuing to uphold the strong, muscled but lean, male body as central to straight white masculinity.

The cultural phenomenon of “the dad bod,” which first made media waves in 2015, poses a different path altogether. While societal expectations predominantly hold a woman’s body to the beauty standard of the thin ideal at every stage of her life, the dad bod celebrates “a nice balance between a beer gut and working out,” as a male body of any age that “says I go to the gym occasionally, but I also drink heavily on the weekends and enjoy eating eight slices of pizza at a time.”²⁵ In short, the dad bod is the dude (and dude food) body. Representing in physical form the laidback ethos of dudeness, the dad bod dispassionately resists unreasonable, male, ideal body types.

At the same time, the dad bod (just like the dude) remains complicit in overall structures of power impacting gender, sexuality, social class, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface: These Are the Stakes
• Introduction: Gender, Consumption, and the Great Recession Era of Corporate Food Marketing
• Chapter One: Crafting Dude Food Media: From Advertising to Men’s Cookbooks
• Chapter Two: Creating a Dude Chef: Food Network’s Guy Fieri
• Chapter Three: Producing Foods for Dudes: The Masculinization of Diet Soda and Yogurt
• Chapter Four: Marketing Diets to Dudes: Health, Bodies, and Selves on Weight Watchers
• Conclusion: Dude, What Happened?
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index