"Not Simply a Cuisine, but a Lifestyle"

"I think it's maybe less in dude food itself than in the way marketers use the idea of the dude to combat gender contamination. You see how these brands are trying to construct ideas about masculinity, and that shows you so much about how they actually think about femininity and women. It's that idea of 'Diet Coke' versus 'Coke Zero,' women's weight loss and women's consumption versus men's. And it's so binary and so hierarchical in a way that is bad for both men and women." 

Rachel Sugar at Vox interviews Emily Contois, author of Diners, Dudes, and Diets: How Gender and Power Collide in Food Media and Culture.