You will "save" if you buy right now! There must be someone in your life who needs a "Tower Of Treats." In my case, that person appears to be me.

click "full size" to enlarge

Aw, the Gingerbread Man is adorable. Wait: You have to take his head off to get to the treats? Hmm. I guess that is the fate of all Gingerbread Men and Women. More important: I spy yogurt-covered pretzels. Mmmm.

Look at the size of that chocolate chip cookie. Look at it. Then turn your attention to the true Christmas miracle: Peppermint bark.

Ignore the fruitcake and focus on the Cheesecake Party Wheel. Ask yourself this: Would you like to make a reservation for a party of one?

Fruit paired with cheese and crackers and then a side of popcorn, with cookies and candies for dessert? This is a full meal.

A Tower of Chocolates, however, has my name all over it.

Salty and sweet together really gets those taste buds going, Crunch goes so well with creaminess, and vice-versa. You can nibble, gobble, savor and… um, what were we talking about?

Damn. Forget what I said about fruit not being appealing. That pear looks juicy.

Harry & David [Official Site]

Earlier: Dean & Deluca Thanksgiving: Mouth-Watering, Wallet-Emptying
Mackenzie: Hot, Steamy, Scrumptious Food Porn

Related: Free People: Let's Pretend It's The Summer Of '69
Anthropologie's Hazy Shade Of Winter
Fetchdog, Drs Fosters & Smith: Howliday Humiliation For Dogs & Cats

All previous catalog posts

Foer writes eloquently of his early attempts at vegetarianism, his re-commitment when his son was born, and the moral underpinnings of his choice ("Try to imagine any end other than taste for which it would be justifiable to do what we do to farmed animals"). But what stood out for me about his piece was the descriptions of food he'd given up. He writes,

Some of my happiest childhood memories are of sushi "lunch dates" with my mom, and eating my dad's turkey burgers with mustard and grilled onions at backyard celebrations, and of course my grandmother's chicken with carrots. Those occasions simply wouldn't have been the same without those foods - and that is important. To give up the taste of sushi, turkey or chicken is a loss that extends beyond giving up a pleasurable eating experience. Changing what we eat and letting tastes fade from memory create a kind of cultural loss, a forgetting. But perhaps this kind of forgetfulness is worth accepting - even worth cultivating (forgetting, too, can be cultivated). To remember my values, I need to lose certain tastes and find other handles for the memories that they once helped me carry.

It's true that not every tradition is worth preserving, and plenty of things that we now consider abhorrent were once happy memories for some. At the same time, Foer is more honest than many vegetarians about the personal cost of not eating meat. For me, becoming a vegetarian didn't involve jettisoning a lot of beloved foods. I was such a picky kid that my favorite foods were toast, apples, and ice cream, and although I enjoyed a brief food renaissance when I went to college, I didn't really become emotionally attached to meat. Giving it up at the age of 20 was easy.

But I got sick. Vegetarianism led to near-veganism led to an obsession with "healthy" food (combined with a summer on a very strict beans-and-broccoli budget) that left me underweight, cold, and anxious all the time. I was never diagnosed with an eating disorder, but my friends were concerned, and my doctor sternly told me to gain weight. Which I did, in part by eating seafood again.

I still do it, and I'm still not completely proud of it — while I don't share Foer's ethical fervor for the vegetarian cause, I do know that fishing can be as bad for the environment as factory farming. I think of my eating style as a way to eat less flesh and use fewer resources than I would as an omnivore — which it is — but it's also a way of honoring good memories and keeping bad ones at bay. Being a pure vegetarian or a vegan still reminds me of a time when I was sickly and scared and not taking good care of myself. Eating the occasional clam linguine or California roll reminds me of getting better, of feeling physically and mentally healthy again. I know that many, many people thrive on animal-free diets, and I believe that, with the right preparation and the right frame of mind, I could too. And I don't believe, as some do, that vegetarianism is just another eating disorder. But I am afraid of how easily my ethics can turn into self-denial, my self-denial into self-punishment. And I don't want my diet to remind me of my summer of beans.

Foer says that when his grandmother made her chicken and carrots, she "wasn't preparing food, but humans." And it's true that food is rarely just food — it's also the stories and the values that surround it. For me, for now, a can of anchovies tells a story about healing myself, and it's not a story I'm willing to give up just yet.

Against Meat [NYT Magazine]

Maybe, sorta. Times Magazine writer Jon Gertner profiles a group of human guinea pigs whose feed seems a lot less spartan than the Quorn-and-asparagus regime Julian Dibbell described in his 2006 New York article. Participants in the Calerie (Comprehensive Assessment of Long-Term Effects of Reducing Intake of Energy) study are supposed to reduce their caloric intake by 25% for two years, so researchers can measure the effects on the aging process. But they still get to eat potatoes, pasta, even Häagen-Dazs. And most of the subjects say their biggest problem isn't hunger, but the fact that counting and reporting calories is a pain in the ass.

Then again, Gertner talks to Jeffrey Peipert, who occasionally woke up in the middle of the night because he was so hungry, and couldn't go back to sleep without a bowl of cereal. These incidents, researchers determined, were caused by his active lifestyle, and their advice was just to move around less. While calorie restriction is apparently better at increasing lifespan than exercise, it seems a lot less entertaining. And, of course, a few people had to drop out of the study because of anemia or bone loss. Everybody needed sweaters. People deemed prone to eating disorders were excluded at the outset.

This exclusion, along with a number of others, may point to the biggest problem with the Calerie study. Not only do participants have to be of "normal" weight and free of any tendency towards anorexia or bulimia, they also have to be the kind of people who are willing to restrict their diet for two years for only a few thousand dollars. In fact, those who were motivated by even this small amount of money were excluded from the study, so basically everyone participating had to kind of want to eat way less for a long time, which sets them apart from most people.

One investigator in the study, John Holloszy, says 99% of people aren't capable of calorie restriction. He also thinks the participants will quit doing it when their two years are up. And neuropsychologist Robert Krikorian says, "I don't think humans are designed to pay attention to how much they eat." Participants in the Calerie study have enviable blood pressure and cholesterol readings, and other research indicates that if they stick with it, they may enjoy longer live. But they're also the kind of people who say things like, "I've never gotten so much pleasure in my life. I'm wearing a medium shirt now. I haven't worn a medium since high school." Some people may get more pleasure out of not having to weight their potatoes.

Back in 2006, the media cliché about calorie restriction was that it was so unpleasant it wasn't worth the added lifespan. The Calerie study may be less extreme than what hard-core, arugula-counting restricters do, but its participants' diets are still pretty rigid and circumscribed. And if anything, this now seems unfashionable. Three years ago, eating next to nothing might have seemed like a cool rebellion against excess. But now excess is harder to come by, and eating like a pauper seems a lot less hip if you are one. Not only that, but the obesity crisis has been so variously trumpeted and debunked that the Times Magazine's whole Food Issue (tagline: "putting America's diet on a diet") seems a little dated. Diet is such a dirty word now that even Weight Watchers won't admit it is one, and something as, well, restrictive as calorie restriction just seems pretty passé.

This doesn't mean America isn't still obsessed with weight and weight loss, just that the buzzwords now tend to be things like "sustainable" and "lifestyle changes." And while one calorie restricter claims the practice just "teaches you how to eat normal foods but make better choices," it's pretty clear that it's not sustainable for most people. Which might be fine. American food culture is still pretty fucked up, but in the last couple of years there has been a little more emphasis on eating food you enjoy with people you like. This may not increase anyone's lifespan, but compared to a lot of recent diet fads, it seems pretty healthy, not to mention fun. Holloszy says hard-core calorie restricters are motivated by "fear of death," but someone once told me that people fear death more if they're not enjoying their lives. And except for a select few, logging every calorie just isn't enjoyable.

The Calorie-Restriction Experiment [New York Times Magazine]

According to the Daily Mail, women eat less with a man present than they would with a woman. When eating in a group, women ate less the more men there were. "But," writes an unnamed Daily Mail reporter, "when in all-female groups women pigged out and consumed more calories - reinforcing the image of an indulgent girls' night in with ice cream and chocolate."

In a slightly more sober and detailed (than the Daily Mail? No!) writeup for WebMD, Kathleen Doheny quotes study author Meredith Young:

"Women in groups of women tended to increase the caloric value of the food they choose," she says, compared to eating alone or with men. "The bigger the group of women, the more they eat," she says. For instance, women who ate in a group of three each ate about 650 calories, while those who ate in a group of four averaged about 800 each.

Young hypothesizes that women may eat less in front of a man "to look more feminine and in control." Doheny writes,

women want to look more attractive, especially if a potential date or mate is sitting at the table. Other research, Young says, has found that women who eat less are viewed as more attractive and that thin women are seen as more attractive.

It's not really a surprise that women still buy into the stereotype that eating a lot in front of the man is unfeminine (although it is possible that some women eat less with men out of sheer nervousness). But the Daily Mail's "indulgent girls' night" and Doheny's headline — "Ladies' Night Out a Diet Wrecker" — are a bit simplistic. Is it necessarily worse to eat more when you're with your girlfriends? Sure, there's the old trope of women goading each other into ordering dessert (and the equally popular trope of looking down on each other for eating it), but not every meal shared with women is an eating-disordered binge-fest. Some variance in how much we eat at each meal is normal, and while Young's advice — "I suggest it's just something to be aware of" — is pretty measured, it seems unnecessary and unfun to raise your diet-guard every time you go out with your friends.

Young found that men didn't change their intake no matter who their eating partners were. The Daily Mail says, "men simply eat what they want no matter who they are with." What a novel idea.

Want To Lose Weight? Women Eat Less When They Dine In The Company Of Men [Daily Mail]
Ladies' Night Out A Diet Wrecker [WebMD]

Earlier: Friends, No Friends Both Lead To Obesity

In the first study, kids were paired with either a friend or a stranger and told to eat as much as they wanted. Both overweight and "normal" weight kids ate more with a friend, but overweight kids ate more if their partners were overweight, whether they knew them or not. ScienceDaily says the study "demonstrates that friends may act as 'permission givers' on children's food intake." And study author Sarah Salvy says,

Overweight children are more likely to find food more reinforcing than non-overweight youth. Being in the company of overweight peers may give them the permission to eat more or may decrease their inhibitions, increasing what are seen as the norms of appropriate eating, or how much one should eat.

The study doesn't appear to address whether overweight children actually "find food more reinforcing," but it does manage to moralize eating by talking about it in terms of "permission." It's not odd that kids felt more comfortable eating with a friend than with a stranger, but it's interesting that coverage of the study implies that the higher intake is the disordered one. Isn't it possible that kids consciously or unconsciously eat less than they normally would when they're with a stranger, because they're uncomfortable? And isn't it also possible that overweight kids eat less with a skinnier partner because they're embarrassed about being heavier? As someone who loses my appetite when I'm stressed, I've relied on friends to cook with me and encourage me to eat during difficult times, and I have to object to the notion that eating more at a shared meal is a bad thing.

The second study examined groups of monkeys, and found that the ones who were lower in the social hierarchy — who "are often the target of aggression and aren't included in group grooming sessions as often as dominant monkeys" — gained more visceral fat, or fat in the abdominal cavity. This type of fat contributes to atherosclerosis and heart disease. In women and female monkeys, hormones can protect against these conditions, but researchers also found that monkeys with more visceral fat had lower levels of protective hormones. Study author Carol A. Shively wisely points out that "obesity is directly related to lower socioeconomic status in Western societies, as is heart disease. So, the people who have fewer resources to buffer themselves from the stresses of life are more likely to experience such health problems."

Not only do people of lower socioeconomic status have fewer material resources to cope with stress, they may also have more "social stress" as a result of being lower in the economic hierarchy. And perhaps there's a feedback loop here, in which overweight people are socially stigmatized, causing them to build up more visceral fat and increase their risk of heart disease. Visceral fat is much more dangerous than fat in other areas of the body, and the stress of being overweight in a sizeist society might cause people who don't have a lot of this type of fat (not all overweight people do; not all skinny people don't) to develop it.

So might some of the vaunted health risks of obesity actually be the result of stigma? It's possible. It would be interesting to see how overweight people fare health-wise in societies that don't look down on them (although some of these societies, like Mauritania, have their own problems). Failing that, scientists could take a more nuanced look at childhood social influences, rather than telling us that eating with friends makes kids fat.

Friendship Influences Eating Behavior, Particularly When Friends Are Overweight [ScienceDaily]
Overweight Friends Alter Eating Patterns, Study Shows [Softpedia]
New Research Links Social Stress To Harmful Fat Deposits, Heart Disease [EurekAlert]

From an early age, Frank Bruni says, he was an over-eater. Although he was naturally big-boned and had legendarily hearty appetite from early childhood, his relationship to food was always more about excess than satisfaction, and he routinely continued to eat after he was full. What is distressing about his account is that he was clearly someone who naturally loved and appreciated the tastes and experiences of food, but this natural love was tainted by his feelings about his weight and the connection that developed in his mind. The fact that he and his mom started going on diets as a child can't have helped. It's clear that Bruni and his family accepted being a "fat kid" as a bad thing, to be cured - and while clearly he was developing an unhealthy relationship to eating, the two things were conflated in a depressing and all-too-common way. (Indeed, this still seems to be the author's POV.)

The extra weight was the confirmation: once a fat kid, always a fat kid, never moving through the world in the carefree fashion of people unaccustomed to worrying about their weight, never as inconspicuous. It was the stubborn thing I seemed least able to control, and I often felt that all my shortcomings flowed from it - were somehow wrapped into and perpetuated by it. If only I could fit into pants with a waist size of 31 or 32 instead of my 33s and 34s, I could walk briskly and buoyantly into a crowded school party instead of hovering tentatively at the door, unable to decide whom to approach and questioning whether my approach would be welcome.

As a young man, Bruni becomes bulimic. While he thought of his habitual vomiting as mere weight management rather than an ED, his description tells a different story.

To be a successful bulimic, you need to have a firm handle on the bathrooms in your life: their proximity to where you're eating; the amount of privacy they offer; whether - if they're public bathrooms with more than one stall - you can hear the door swing open and the footfall of a visitor with enough advance notice to stop what you're doing and keep from being found out...You need to be conscious of time. There's no such thing as bulimia on the fly; a span of at least 10 minutes in the bathroom is optimal, because you may need 5 of them to linger at the sink, splash cold water on your face and let the redness in it die down. You should always carry a toothbrush and toothpaste, integral to eliminating telltale signs of your transgression and to rejoining polite society without any offense to it. Bulimia is a logistical and tactical challenge as much as anything else. It demands planning.

He stops, finally, when his friends hold an intervention of sorts. He says, "I succeeded, I think, because so many other extreme or warped weight-management regimens - including more Atkins and more fasting - took the place of bulimia as I struggled for decades to figure out how to answer my appetite without being undone by it and as I traced an unlikely route to the most implausible of destinations: professional eating."

These are accounts we normally hear coming from women, and it's always good to be reminded that EDs target men and boys, too - and a part of me wonders if a man who wasn't openly gay would feel as comfortable, even today, talking frankly about a disease which is still perniciously linked in the public mind only with young women. I'm also glad to read about someone who not only managed to recover, but seemingly managed to recover a love of food - enough that he can take pleasure in it in his career. (So one hopes, anyway - and this is certainly the impression anyone reading his food writing has always received - and I look forward to reading this memoir in full.) What is distressing, though, is that at no point does the adult Bruni seem to find much acceptance for his heavier self - just relief that the pain and loss of control is over. On the one hand, in his case, there seems to have been a clear relationship between his chronic overeating and his weight - and his resultant self-loathing. But even so, and perhaps this is unfair to ask in a personal memoir, I wish he were able to distinguish between the two - if only for the sake of changing things a little for a new generation of young boys, and girls, who feel that same self-loathing.

I Was A Baby Bulimic [NY Times]

Unlike the earth-mother types who cook their own afterbirth, hoping to combat postpartum depression and increase milk flow, Stein's wife hires a pro. "To my surprise, Sara did not look unkempt, frumpy, heavy or in any way like a Wiccan," writes Stein with typical charm. For $275, the full-time placenta cook will prepare and dry it and turn it into pills - much more palatable, as she explains to the aghast new dad, than the "placenta smoothies" some new moms slurp.

Here's how Stein describes the placenta, which he carries home in a cooler:

Though I am exceedingly squeamish, when my son was born, I was shocked that I saw only the beauty of childbirth. Until the placenta came out. There are many normal human reactions to seeing a placenta, ranging from screaming to vomiting to warding it off with a cross. For those of you who have never seen one, the placenta is to the baby what Stephen Baldwin is to Alec Baldwin. It's what your liver would look like if it got into an accident on the autobahn with one of those aliens from Mars Attacks! and their bloody carcasses threw jellyfish at each other.

Sara, required by law to cook the placenta in the home, steams it with herbs, dehydrates it, and delivers the pills "in a pretty glass jar, [with] a card, a CD of lullabies and a satin pouch. In which was part of my son's umbilical cord, fashioned into a heart." Now, as I told Anna, Joel Stein and placenta-cookery are a combination fairly guaranteed to make my stomach roil. And I was not "disappointed," if that's the word for having one's worst fears confirmed. Nudge-nudge old-school wife-indulging with a dollop of VH1-level snark is hard to take in the best of circumstances. And when it's combined with placentophagy - "the kitchen got that ironlike smell of cooked organ meat, with vague undertones of a consciousness-raising group and a Betty Friedan rally" - the results call for, in my case, a piece of dry toast and some Canada Dry.

Afterbirth For Dinner [Time]

Earlier: Is Sharing Placenta The Recipe For Sisterly Bonding?

Save Some Womb For Dessert

"Only In A Woman's World," Frito-Lay's new Sex and the City-inspired commercials have already started running on TV and more print and online advertising will be rolled out early this month.

Though the four cartoon women are shown gabbing over Frito-Lay products, it's a little unclear what's being advertised in the commercials. Mainly, the commercials focus on the friends worrying that bikini season is approaching, obsessing about hot guys, and crying hysterically at the loss of their hairdresser or "skinny mirror."

In the worst commercial/webisode, Episode 2, two of the friends visit "Cheryl," who is home sick and hasn't been able to eat in days - but lost four pounds. The other two swoon and say she is "so lucky." One remarks: "You guys are whack jobs, you know that right?" Maybe so, but Cheryl says she can almost fit into her skinny jeans!

The unbelievably involved website also features commercials, games, and e-cards. In the "meet the girls" section, we learn tons of information about each character's job, weakness, and relationship status. Is knowing that Anna's favorite author is Toni Morrison, that Cheryl, the stay-at-home mom, "puts everyone else's happiness first," or that Maya "hides how much she spends on shopping from her husband" supposed to make women want to buy chips? The one thing that would make us life-long Frito-Lay customers (aside from, of course, the company producing delicious snacks) is an ad campaign that shows women eating potato chips like normal human beings, without making a self-loathing comments about their weight.

Earlier: The Complicated Business Of Getting Women To Buy Crap

Researchers from the Universite Laval in Quebec had 14 students relax while sitting, read and summarize a passage, and perform tests on a computer, then offered them as much food as they wanted. Even though the intellectual tasks only required 3 more calories than relaxing, the students ate more than 200 calories after summarizing the text and performing the tests. Researchers say the overeating may have been motivated by stress, or because the subjects were trying to restore glucose, which the brain uses for fuel. "Caloric overcompensation following intellectual work, combined with the fact that we are less physically active when doing intellectual tasks, could contribute to the obesity epidemic currently observed in industrialized countries," said lead researcher Jean-Philippe Chaput. [UPI]

While a lot of people are eating organic, Greene's stunt it noteworthy for its length and thoroughness, eating only organic food — defined as that produced without pesticides, antibiotics or hormones — both at home and in restaurants. "He chose three years as a goal because that was the amount of time it took to have a breeding animal certified organic by the Department of Agriculture. While food growers comply with organic regulations every day, Dr. Greene wondered whether a person could meet the same standards." Obviously, this was pricey — organic food can cost up to twice as much as what Whole Foods parlance terms "conventional," no laughing matter in these straitened times. (He found that cutting down on meat helped equalize the costs.) Then too, even in Dr. Greene's relatively health-conscious neck of the woods (where he was able to join a CSA and shop numerous farmers markets), organic chow could be hard to come by at, say, truck stops. Quoth the good doctor, “It was much more challenging than I thought it would be, and I thought it would be tough. There were definitely days where there was nothing I could find that was organic.” He'd call ahead to make sure restaurants could ensure that no non-organic morsel passed his lips; his family was into it.

Greene's rationale was that "his findings offer new insight into the challenges facing the organic food industry and those of us who want to patronize it." He also hoped it would improve his own health which, anecdotally it has (the scientific verdict is still out on whether organic foods are healthier, with arguments for both sides.)

Three years later, he says he has more energy and wakes up earlier. As a pediatrician regularly exposed to sick children, he was accustomed to several illnesses a year. Now, he says, he is rarely ill. His urine is a brighter yellow, a sign that he is ingesting more vitamins and nutrients.

While the experiment is a laudable one — and, in fairness, predates a lot of the food-related stunt journalism that's glutted the marketplace in recent years, and certainly the recent economic downturn — the rigid and stunt-like nature of it feels slightly arbitrary. It's certainly Dr. Greene's prerogative, and since he has the time and means to do so, more power to him: it's doubtless good to know the practical limitations of theory. It is always encouraging, too, to see a doctor practicing what he preaches. That said, the application is beyond the reach of most everyone, and as such, experiments such as these are feeling increasingly academic.

For Three Years, Every Bite Organic [New York Times]

A Very Feminist Thanksgiving Feast from Megan Carpentier on Vimeo.

For the record, it is really, really difficult to peel balls, as you've basically got to slice the connective tissue, work your fingers in around one end and separate it. It is impossible to do if you're going to be remotely squeamish about it — and the video that Spencer and I watched does not do justice to the sound, feel or odor that comes with peeling balls. If Spencer's reaction to the video when we watched it doesn't scare you off, you can see the original below.

The Testicle Cookbook: Cooking With Balls [Yudu]
The Testicle Cookbook — Peeling Testicles [YouTube]

Earlier: Schweddy Balls

Knives! Needles! A pencil, a safety pin, coins, jewelry and a rubber duck. Oh, and there's the snake who swallowed a golf ball. Probably thought it was an egg.

When I was younger, we had a family cat who liked to chew underwear. Dirty underwear. Specifically the crotch. Anna says her cats are the opposite: "When they see dirty socks or underwear on the floor, they walk by and cover it up, like it's something gross in a litter box." My family has had lots of different dogs, and not one of them has ingested a pair of socks or a rubber duck. Have any of you had pups with odd appetites (and, one assumes, subsequent tummy aches)?

(Aside: Check out this display at the Glore Psychiatric Museum in St. Joseph, Missouri. It's an imaginative arrangement of 1,446 items swallowed by a HUMAN patient and removed from her intestines and stomach. She died during surgery from bleeding caused by 453 nails, 42 screws, safety pins, spoon tops, and salt and pepper shaker tops.)

Bow-ow! Dogs Swallow Pins, Pens, Crazy Canine X-rays [NY Daily News]
Display Of Bad Things Swallowed [BoingBoing]

This is something I've been doing for a while. At first it started in college, when I was super poor and would buy $.99 bags of party mix for a meal, and then eat all the good stuff, then toss the bag with the pretzels in it. Later on, I'd still be hungry, so I'd resort to fishing the bag out of the trash to eat the pretzels. As the years progressed, I've tried to use my trash can as a form of portion control or something, particularly when drunk. This past Valentine's Day, I got pretty wasted and decided to buy a cheese steak and cheese fries after leaving the bar at 2 AM. I got home, ate half the sandwich, felt disgusted with myself, and then threw it out. (I polished off the fries before I even got out of the cab.) In the morning, I woke up hungover and in the mood for something greasy. I went over to the garbage, found the other half of my sandwich and ate it, despite the fact that an empty packet of wet dog food was right next to it. More recently, I've dined on disposed buffalo wings.

I've talked to some of the other Jezebels about this and I know for a fact that I'm not the only one. It's slightly fucked up, because I know that it's rooted in an impulsive way to try to restrict my intake of the fattening food I love so much, and a compulsive need to actually finish it the next day. (There's also a big element of being just too lazy to drag my ass down and back up the four flights to actually buy new junk food at the deli.) But you know, it's still not one of the stupidest things we've ever done to lose weight.

Earlier:What's The Dumbest Thing You Ever Did To Lose Weight?

Maybe it's just me — and I'm already anticipating the hate comments I will get about this — but something about a man refusing to eat meat seems sort of...sissy-like. I realize it's probably cultural brainwashing, but when I hear the phrase "male vegetarian", I picture a dude with matted dreads and a patchouli stink who cries when a tree is felled. In short: I picture a hippie, and I cannot hold with hippies. Take the male vegetarian and Florida real estate agent quoted in the Times, Ben Abdalla, 42, who says he prefers to date fellow vegetarians because meat eaters smell bad and have low energy." Anyone using the word "energy"? Definitely a hippie.

To be fair, these are not entirely fair assumptions about men who shun meat. But they are real. An (admittedly old) study commissioned by the Vegetarian Times conducted way back in 1992 found that "of the 12.4 million people who call themselves vegetarian, 68 percent are female while only 32 percent are male." (We're looking for more recent statistics.) And the women at Feministing, in fact, have an fascinating post about a set of new Maxim-like PETA ads which assert that (in their words) "it's okay to buck the stereotype of Real Men Eat Red Meat, because here are some naked ladies to reassure you that you're still a superhetero manly man!" (Plus, there's an entire book called The Sexual Politics of Meat by Carol Adams, which apparently intertwines feminism and vegetarianism. Go figure!)

I also polled the other Jezebels, and honestly, most are a little prejudiced against the idea of a male vegetarian. Moe admits that she's "prejudiced against sissies but would date a vegetarian... only if he wasn't a sissy about it though. Like, no freaking out about chicken boullion or whatever." Tracie says she converted a vegan to a full blown flesh-eater: "My ex was a vegan for 10 years when we met and I used to use eggs and chicken stock in recipes after a while and not tell him. Then I got him to eat fish and now he eats steak like every day. I changed him for the better." And Jennifer? She says, she's only gone out with one vegetarian in her lifetime. "I met him at yoga class," she says. "He was a sissy. Hence the reason we only went on three dates. That and he was a really bad kisser."

Then you have someone like my brother, who only ate meat and potatoes growing up, and is now married to a vegetarian. She won't cook meat herself, but she is never judgmental about it when my brother orders a burger, proving that love can conquer carnivorous instincts. Question is, how much of a dealbreaker is a person's issues with food? And how often do people put aside major dietary differences for true romance?

I Love You, But You Love Meat [New York Times]

Related: The Sexual Politics Of No Meat [Feministing]
The Gender Gap: If You're A Vegetarian, Odds Are You're A Woman. Why? [Find Articles]