Men’s Evolutionary Eating Habits

The other night, I was watching one of the many, many cooking-based shows currently broadcast, wall-to-wall and round-the-clock, on television. A group of people were cooking for another group of people – I forget why – and, as is often the case in these jeopardy-seeking productions, something went a bit wrong.

A tray of salmon en croute was taken out of the oven, beautifully golden and screen-lickin’ good. But whoever took them out put them to rest on top of a stove that was turned on, and the pastry got burnt on the bottom. Well, the burnt bits got taken off, and the dish got served up anyway (and the programme certainly made a meal within a meal of that little drama) and people seemed to enjoy it all the same. However, there was one person who didn’t like the remaining slightly burnt bits, and she happened to be a woman.

This made me think about the difference between men, women and burnt food. I think that, in general, men don’t mind a little bit of “burnt” with their food, and women, on the whole, do. I may be completely wrong, but that is my proposition. I think that, for example, men like their steaks charred on the outside and bloody on the inside, whereas women prefer them a bit more evenly cooked, and can shy away from the more acute states of cookery.

So why do men like a bit of burnt? Well, it could be that they have some greater evolutionary need for digestive charcoal in their diets; or it could be because they have some need to show their manliness by consuming the more extreme versions of food – raw, incinerated, scorchingly hot etc. Yes, maybe.

But I think it’s actually because men have an instinct to eat the bits that nobody else wants – burnt bits, offal, kebabs of uncertain provenance. I think it’s another evolutionary instinct for a man to throw himself on the potential grenade of indigestion or food poisoning, so that his family can have the more regular, safer bits of the dinner and, in doing so, survive.

He might seem a bit like a living garbage bin at the end of the table, but that’s just because our standard of living is so much higher nowadays. Centuries ago, there wouldn’t have been enough nice parts of the dinner to go round, and good old Dad would have chewed on the gristle and twigs left over, so that the rest of us didn’t fade away between mammoth hunts/potato foragings/shifts down the mine. And even though food is now more plentiful, man’s instinct to pick off the nastier bits and have them first – the crispy bits at the end of the roast joint, the bad banana in the fruit bowl, and so on. The need has gone, but the urge is still there.

So next time your bloke has a packet of pork scratching with his beer, give him a bit of slack. He’s eating them so that you and the kids don’t have to.

Contact the author here: thewhy@morningquickie.com