There are many connections that have been established between food and sex , at all levels. Since some foods, such as shellfish or chocolate, can have aphrodisiac effects, until certain fruits can aesthetically resemble a penis or vulva.
But those links do not stop being more or less spurious. The first person who wanted to relate food and sex in a scientific (although certainly heterodox) way was an Austrian Freudian psychologist named Ernest Dichter .
His theories became popular when he began advising food companies on a marketing level.
The sausage with phallic connotations
For Dichter, there was eminently masculine food and eminently feminine food. Showcasing his Freudian training, he made rather obvious statements with the shape of the food to be able to separate it by sex. Thus, while the food was generally female, if the food was vaguely phallic in shape, like a penis, it was male .
That included asparagus, for example, but also sausage.
Dietcher also claimed that oranges or roast chicken were neither male nor female, but both at the same time: they were bisexual foods .
All these associations, naturally capricious on a scientific level, were the theoretical corpus he used to impress the brands that hired his services. According to Dietcher, understanding the subconscious and psychological reaction that consumers experience with food based on their sex (that of the food and that of the consumer itself), could influence purchasing decisions .
Dietcher’s knowledge did not come to him through inspiration or reflection, but through sessions he conducted with groups of consumers, usually housewives, who had a style similar to a psychotherapy session. In contrast to the standard market research methods of the time that sought to quantify what consumers were doing, Dichter was interested in why consumers made given purchasing decisions .
However, in addition to pouring out theories of dubious scientific support, Dietcher made notable contributions regarding the motivations of consumers. Not surprisingly, he is known as the “father of motivational research.”
To earn that title, he conducted major research at a castle overlooking the Hudson River in Croton-on-Hudson, New York: the so-called Institute for Motivational Research . There he developed unique experiments with children from the neighboring town, who had to play with toys or watch television while being monitored by researchers through a one-way glass.
A much-cited example from Dichter’s studies is the attempt to understand why people use cigarette lighters. The conscious explanation is that lighters are used to light cigarettes, but on a deeper and unconscious level people would use lighters because it gives them a certain dominance and power.
According to Dichter: “The ability to summon fire inevitably gives every human being, child or adult the feeling of power. The reasons go back to the history of man … the ability to control fire is an ancient symbol of conquest. of the physical world by man. “
The sociologist Vance Packard , a leading researcher on the American consumer system and its excesses, as well as the effects of publicity on the population and the psychological methods of marketing, came to compare Dichter’s procedures with “the chilling world of George Orwell and his Big Brother “. For Packard, Dichter’s gothic mansion was a sinister factory that manufactured and implanted self-destructive wishes. Fortunately, much of what he tried to postulate has never been proven scientifically true.
