I guess nowadays you’re supposed to eat “guy” food… and still be skinny, though, natch.

I half-agree with the idea of salad being gendered feminine. When it comes to restaurant behavior, I find that there’s no gender association with the act of eating a salad as a starter or side. However, choosing salad as a main course is regarded in Northern Europe and much of North America as a feminine behavior.

There’s a cultural and an agricultural component to this. The former, obviously, is the idea that women are more concerned about their appearance, worried about gaining weight, and somewhat masochistic in their pursuit of beauty compared to men. Surely, only a person on a diet would eat a salad when they could have a bowl of pasta or a steak! The latter is more subtle – I find that in more mediterranean or tropical climates, where more vegetables are fresh and appealing year-round, salads are more universally favored.

In other words – if you live in a place where salad is always really, really nice and the weather is warm (California, Israel, Vietnam…) there’s no symbolism attached to making it a nice refreshing meal meal. If you live in the cabbage belt, it means sacrificing pleasure for vanity. And we only expect women to do that.

Meanwhile, reading this post, what is going through my head is Bart and Homer singing “You don’t make friends with salad”, conga line style, from the episode of the Simpsons where Lisa becomes a vegetarian.

I don’t really like/eat cake either, but my boyfriend sure does.

The main basis is the notion that “dieting is girly” (because all women are assumed to be on a diet). Dieting usually calls for salads. Therefore, salad is girly. By extension, salad is not “manly.” For a salad to be manly it must be covered in meat, cheese and fat. That is, things that are not diet-friendly (and thus not girl-friendly).
See, for example, Taco Bell’s latest: the “Fully-Loaded” taco salad, which is touted as “The Un-Salad” (meaning that it’s diet-hostile; it contains 75g of fat) and is unmistakably, undeniably, targeted at men. This part of the meme is usually expressed jokingly (as in the TB ads), but I think a lot of people actually believe this at some level.

The other part is the “salad on a date” cliché, which states that a woman on a first date will (at one time, “should”) only order a salad because:
a) she’s on a diet, natch;
b) she must seem like a delicate flower of femininity; and
c) she mustn’t order anything too expensive, lest she seem like a gold-digger.
This part is fading now; these days, few people actually believe it. It’s referenced now mostly as an object of scorn and backlash. (Google the phrase “salad on a date,” in quotes.) Of course, there could only be a backlash because it was so prevalent for so long.

Top of the list? Salad and quiche. :) Of course, this was in the 80s and early 90s, and I think Seinfeld kind of ruined quiche for everybody.

Now I live on the West Coast, in liberal southern California, and I expected things to be different — after all, fresh fruit and veg is so easy to find and so cheap out here, salads must be really delicious and popular, right?

But among my parents’ set, which is 90% white, very conservative, Republican, evangelical Christian, the men STILL refuse to eat salads, saying that it’s a “wife” thing.

So at church picnics, the women all sit around and eat salad and dessert, and the men all eat fried chicken and potatoes.

And yes, their explanation is specifically that salad and cake are “girl food.”