Consider it a counterpoint to Amanda Cohen contemplating industry sexism: Today on Time.com, Josh Ozersky mulls the phenomenon of “dude food.” Recently, we considered a trio of new cookbooks and decided “the whole dude-food thing is getting to be a little nuts,” and Ozersky agrees: “Dude Food has officially gotten out of control.”
Ozersky posits that food personalities used to be either gay or “not really the kind of guy you could imagine sharing a Schlitz with” — until, of course, Guy Fieri, a.k.a. the “anti–Ted Allen,” a.k.a. the “Dudai Lama,” came along. Ozersky admits that “other than Fieri and Bourdain, the rest of the Penis Posse is either trying too hard (think Andrew Zimmern eating bugs on Bizarre Foods) or are vaguely likable but innocuous.” But he thinks men are better off than in the “bad old days”: “So many recent innovations, from food blogs, to DIY butchering, to the gradual banishment of the word ‘gourmet’ from the American vernacular, have made culinary life better for men, and not just because they want to get laid.”
