Gender: some tasting notes

Exhibit A: Torquay, 2010. After hanging out with the penguins at Living Coasts, my friend Steve and I are casting about for a place to eat lunch. The best option, somehow, is Camelot — Torquay’s premier (, only?) medieval theme restaurant.

Inside, there are some wooden beams and a cursory suit of armour or two. All of the cocktails are named after characters from Arthurian legend — the Morgan le Fay sound particularly sickly. There is exactly one vegetarian dish on the menu — mushroom risotto — so that’s what I’m eating. Steve is in the mood for a mixed grill.

When the food turns up, the waiter smirks. “I know who’s having the mixed grill,” he says, and Steve and I both smile slightly awkwardly. I’m twenty and marginally employed, living with my parents post-graduation. I am not a confident, self-actualised feminist. The comment angers me, but I can’t articulate why, let alone act on that irritation.

Exhibit B: the Gatwick Hilton, South Terminal, 2015. I am staying for one night, waiting for a flight the following day. My mother, my sister and my (male) partner are with me. It’s surreal in the way that most hotel restaurants are surreal — bizarre and enjoyable. There’s a typo on the dessert buffet menu; we are promised “mandaren” cheesecake if we hang around.

Our food comes. Steak and chips first. It’s placed in front of my partner — there is no question that he, the man, will be in receipt of the manliest of all foods (meat, pure meat, pure seared juicy meat). Except it’s my mother’s dinner.

Fish and chips next. The second-most-masculine of all of the dishes we’ve ordered. Once again, it’s offered to my partner first, even though it’s my sister’s. After that, a chickpea and spinach curry. Not the most obviously manly choice, but, hey, men like curry, right? It goes to him before it goes to me, even though it’s mine.

His food arrives at last. Roasted vegetable pasta. Roasted vegetable pasta is the most feminine of all possible foods.

Exhibit C: Benito’s Hat, King’s Cross, 2015. Hunger strikes on the way to catch our train, and my partner and I stop for burritos. He’s not as hungry as I am, but that’s okay — you can get a baby burrito as well as a regular burrito.

We order a baby burrito and a regular burrito. I am asked what fillings and toppings I want on the baby burrito.

I name names and give examples not in order to shame, but to show a microcosm of the range of places where this kind of thing happens. We were served in this way equally by men and women. And it’s happened on other occasions, and it’ll happen again — it’s easy not to notice, easy to brush off. Or else I’m gendered “correctly” when food comes out at a restaurant because I don’t eat meat, and I only notice this happening when my attention is specifically drawn to it, as with the strange pageant at the airport hotel. And, of course, not everybody does it — the best servers do the sensible thing, and just ask who’s having what when the food arrives.

It’s easy to assume that these experiences are accidents or coincidences, that I’m reading something into them based on my own politics. But it adds up, and I can’t unsee or unfeel the cumulative experience.

This is some of what women (and other non-dominant groups) mean when they talk about microaggressions — incidents which, when taken in isolation, can be brushed off as harmless or thoughtless or accidental, but which, when taken over and over again across years and decades, stack up to something that feels hostile. A conspiracy, however unconscious. Something embedded in our culture, deeply and without much acknowledgement.

The problem with gendering food service in this way is that it denies women’s appetites. It reinforces any number of latent, unpleasant cultural and societal attitudes about what women should and shouldn’t eat, where they should and shouldn’t eat it and how much they are allowed to be seen to ingest at any given time.

Name me a woman who eats with abandon on television, in a situation where her consumption isn’t a joke someone else is making at her expense. Women on TV putting food that they want to eat in their faces whenever they want to eat it is only (barely) sanctioned when there’s an ulterior motive — like Lexie Grey in Grey’s Anatomy binge-eating as a front for the actress’ pregnancy. Even then, she’s not allowed to eat without shame. Look at her face! There’s as much guilt as there is hunger, because that’s the only way to make it seemly. We tell women, through an onslaught of media messages like these and plenty of real-life reinforcement, that their appetites must be tempered and controlled.

Liz Lemon in 3o Rock is a rare example of a woman who eats what she wants to eat on TV, but nonetheless there’s an attitude of defiance — she knows she’s transgressing a cultural norm. She doesn’t care, but the link is undeniable — if this were normal or acceptable, there’d be nothing for her to defy. And the people in her life delight in interfering, expressing either disgust or concern at the way she eats.

I don’t have the energy to tie this into another desire that’s unacceptable in women (unless used for comedy value or shaming purposes) — sex — but the link is there, and the message loud and clear. We are not allowed to want, to desire, to have appetite, to express that appetite, to feed it or fulfil it. We are socially conditioned to express fulfilment of those desires as a weakness in willpower, or something we have to rationalise — “oh, I know it’s so naughty, but I just couldn’t resist dessert”, “I wouldn’t normally eat this, but I’m only having half a sandwich for dinner, so it’s all right”.

It’s seen as greed or lust or gluttony when women fulfil their own desires for the sheer joy and sake of fulfilling them, without apology or explanation, and we’ve developed powerful and effective methods of social control to prevent this from happening in the first place. And more of us than not, of all genders, have at some point participated in this control by shaming or policing or trying to excuse ourselves or others. I know I have, but I refuse to continue.

We often suppress and ridicule what we fear. What are we so afraid will happen if women fulfil their desires and honour their appetites?

I don’t want my mother to be forever second in line for a steak, and I sure as hell don’t want the baby burrito. I hunger, and I am not ashamed.

I’m eating the full-sized burrito, with as much guac as you can cram into it, and I’m not going to apologise. If you don’t want to watch, that’s your problem.