Is Kentucky Fried Chicken implicitly black? Is Bistro Crustini implicitly gay? Is any kind of salad implicitly feminine? Why isn’t Stouffer’s lasagna implicitly for women, since there is a salad in the background and casserole dishes are associated with mothers?

What would implicitly black food look like? What would implicitly gay food look like?

Working-class masculinity is NOT implicitly white; white people THINK implicitly that working class males are white.

These products target characteristics of individuals (even “Hungry-Man”, the way I see it, is nothing but an allusion to comic book superheroes – hence the font and all caps, reminiscent of the superman logo). These characteristics are part of certain stereotypes, but actual real people do have these characteristics, even if they don’t fit the stereotype at all. People like sports, they don’t have to be white males with beer-bellies to fit the bill and be a good target audience for a TV dinner. Some people like Merlot wine, they don’t need to be effeminate to it, even if the stereotype says they are. You’re extrapolating from the distinct, discrete characteristics that the products are aiming for, into a broader stereotype that I really can’t see in these products (and some of these feel like your own idiosyncrasies rather than something objective), and then blame the products for perpetuating the stereotype — when in fact, you’re the one doing the perpetuation.

Let’s try an exercise: design a TV dinner packaging that you would NOT be able to put in this post as somehow targeting a stereotype.

I think your point is excellent. I also think that when we teach students about these ideas, we do need to teach them to somehow see that race, class, gender etc are categories of analysis and teach them how this is problematic. Absolutely.

I would suggest, though, that class is racialized and gendered, and gender racialized and classed, and race gendered and classed. Thus the working class = white (vs. poor = black and brown) and upper class = feminine (vs. working class = masculine). This is an important part of the lesson and one that, I still think, can be fairly read (into?) these dinners.

The rest of the products I mostly see as neither particularly masculinised or femininised (though the top Lean Cuisine is quite pink, it’s true.) They do look higher-quality and, I agree, seem to aim for a cosmopolitan air in their choice of wording.

But I just don’t buy that the fancier wording is particularly feminized. It sounds like an attempt at chef-speak, and there are still more men at the top levels of restaurant kitchens than women.

If anything, I would associate fancy cooking with the stereotyped male cook, and homely favourites with the stereotyped female cook. Men cook for special occasions, with fancy utensils and with a lot of fuss; women put dinner on the table using whatever’s in the larder/refrigerator. An example of this would be the recent Hellmann’s Mayonnaise “deli chef” advert where the addition of the mayonnaise transformed Mum into a (male) New York deli cook.

(I don’t believe these stereotypes myself! But you see them a lot in British advertising and media.)

Also, I can’t understand how come a dish of pasta stuffed with four different kinds of cheese is marketed as diet food. Seriously.

For one to belief that there is racial messaging in the first two packages requires that the viewer extrapolate independently that working class or budget products are necessarily white. Perhaps it is interesting to point out to our students the tendency to see one thing (working class) and think another (white), but it hardly makes it a property of this package.

This post is strongest where it identifies concrete messaging, such as the use of code phrases like “bistro” or “lean” or the use of uppercase and lowercase letters. I worry, though, that presenting some of these interpretations to students would have the unintended consequence of priming them to make stereotypical associations instead of priming them to recognize them.

I prefer to use examples in my classes that actually illustrate the problematic associations of advertisers (such as that between blue collar culture and whiteness) rather than train my students to use logics of practice (i.e. stereotypical understandings of the relationship between race and class) as categories of analysis.