So what is it with certain foods (and drinks) getting the boys vs. girls treatment? There may be a few male stars — like Joaquin Phoenix and Tobey Maguire — who are vegetarians, and women may be joining the ranks of bloody-aproned butchers, but in the American consciousness, real men still don’t eat quiche and women stick with chocolate, tofu and yogurt. This could easily be the handiwork of the evil geniuses on Madison Avenue, but might these clichés also arise from some long-buried grain of truth? Are genetic differences responsible for our gendered eating? How many of our eating patterns come from gender socialization, and how many are hereditary? And why is it that food rarely seems to be categorized this way outside the U.S.?

Marcia Pelchat is a sensory psychologist specializing in food and beverage selection at the Monell Chemical Senses Center. Women, she said, are genetically predisposed to prefer sweeter tastes, with greater sensitivity to bitterness. As a result, cocktails and alcoholic drinks aimed at women tend to be sweet — as an attempt to mask the burn — and colorful (because, you know, pink will make anything more palatable). Drinks for men, on the other hand, tend to let the bitterness take the fore: “Men who drink hoppy drinks don’t just not notice the bitter taste, they actually like it,” Pelchat said.

Others, like Yale University’s David Katz, said some of our gender-driven eating can be explained by evolution. Men, as hunters, see meat as a reward and also need more protein than woman in order to build muscle mass. “Men and women have differences in physiology which might have to do with access to different kinds of food,” said Katz, who is the director of Yale’s Prevention Research Center. That is, the different caloric requirements of men and women may be because we had differing access to foods as cavemen and cavewomen. We’re only continuing along those patterns today.

Another factor, Katz said, is the different hormonal composition of men and women. Women’s craving of certain foods during pregnancy, and, in some cases, before their periods, might also explain why they prefer to eat different foods throughout the year.

One of the foods that’s classically gendered — and adheres to both Pelchat’s theory of the feminine sweet tooth and Katz’s explanation of hormone-related food cravings — is chocolate. In the American imagination, in particular, a craving for chocolate has always been the exclusive preserve of premenstrual women and post-breakup slumber parties. (Really, how many times have you heard a man say he’s dying for a box of Kisses?) A 1999 study by Debra Zellner, a psychologist at Montclair University, found that 50 percent of American women craved chocolate, while only 20 percent of men reported doing so.

But beyond the borders of the United States, the story is different. The same study found that in Spain, men and women craved chocolate equally — about 25 percent, while in Egypt, neither sex craved chocolate, with both sexes showing a high preference for salty foods.

Elsewhere in the world, studies have found that instead of girls, it is boys who like candy and sweets. Lucy Cooke, a researcher at the University College in London found that school-age British boys showed a clear preference for sugary and fatty foods, meats, and eggs, while girls were more willing to eat fruits and vegetables.

And when I took my work home, I realized that my husband and I — both of us grew up in India — have eating habits that fly in the face of all these studies. My husband has an insatiable sweet tooth, can’t go to bed without his nightly Mars bar, and diligently spends hours in the fruit aisle. I, on the other hand, am a complete dairy fiend, love my protein, adore a good whisky, and wouldn’t notice if Ben & Jerry’s stopped producing Cherry Garcia tomorrow (my husband would react with some emotion). And when I tried to think of differences in eating habits between men and women in India, I was unable to come up with anything conclusive — for every woman who likes chocolate, there’s a man who likes it too, and for every man who is rabidly carnivorous, there’s a woman who can out-meat him.

As I thought more about global dietary practices, it occurred to me that the U.S. has perhaps one of the more gender-segregated eating cultures in the world. (Can you imagine a French woman saying she stays away from red meat or a French man saying that chocolate is chick food?)

So while it seems possible that some food preferences could be put down to gender, it’s obvious that American culture has a way of exacerbating them.

Brian Wansink is the director of Cornell University’s Food and Brand Lab, the author of Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think, and all-around food psychology genius. People, he said, are more likely to eat a food when they associate with it qualities they’d like to see in themselves. So a man who wants to be strong and masculine is more likely to eat a food described as strong and masculine — hence the prevalence in American culture of meat as a manly food. Besides, he said, America has some of the most psychographically segmented advertising in the world — all messages that the food we eat is subconsciously saying something about us. “The reason we can view food as a commercial product is because we’ve never had a major starvation or a food shortage. We’ve always had an abundance of food,” he said. In India, it occurred to me, food was sacred, an elemental life force that provided sustenance, a resource we rarely took for granted. In the U.S., instead, it was an extension of one’s identity, a phenomenon made possible by the United States’ unique history of unrivaled luxury.

Despite the current obesity epidemic, American women, and specifically rich American women, tend to be very weight conscious — yet another factor that affects eating choices across genders. The same calorie consciousness is not societally required of men, said Paul Rozin, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

But might things be changing? After all, women are charting brave new culinary landscapes — they’re brewing beer and drinking it in larger quantities than ever before, and meat, say many women, is the new black. Rozin didn’t seem to think so. The family meal, he said, is important in terms of men and women eating the same food. “And as the family continues to splinter, or as people continue to eat out more often, men and women will order different foods.” But ever the optimist, I’ll continue to wish for advertisements that see me as belly first and boobs later.

Riddhi Shah is an editorial fellow at Salon.

Although hey, maybe it’s not as healthy living as she’d like America to believe. “I’d rather smoke crack than eat cheese from a can,” said the mother of two, before admitting that she “drinks constantly” while cooking. While it’s probably equally difficult to find canned Kraft and cocaine rocks anywhere in a 40-mile radius of the Paltrow-Martin estate, I can’t help but worry a little bit for young Moses and Apple. Undoubtedly she was being more facetious than factual, but what kind of example is mom setting when she talks about the evil of trans fats while guzzling Romane Conti straight from the bottle every time she puts on an apron?

In a certain cheese shop in my town, there is a rack of rolls. Gleaming golden outside and airy, stretchy, satiny inside, they’re sourdough and only vaguely square as if cut by clowns. One fits in my palm, then my sweatshirt pocket, which it must because this is the acid test by which I define comfort food: It’s small. It’s portable. It can be consumed silently. My comfort food must never call attention to itself. It must be dazzlingly bland, like Zen koans. Rolls. Marshmallows. Mochi. One round bowl of rice.

For you, of course, it’s something else. Celery, say, or vindaloo or wings. A friend of mine craves slick, sticky, flamboyant food that she can stir with slow, exaggerated swirls to make a sucking sound. This is her comfort food.

When you begin to eat, your eyes, hands and mouth start the chain of command. Then the brain kicks in. Sugar and starch spur serotonin, a neurotransmitter known to increase a sense of well-being. (It’s what makes Prozac work.) Salty foods spur oxytocin, aka the “cuddle chemical,” a hormone that is also spiked by hugs and orgasm. Hence, potato chips. Mice unable to taste the difference between regular and extra-high-calorie food in a recent study preferred the high-calorie kind, which suggests that fattening food appeals simply because it is fattening. Which makes sense, given how much fuel our prehistoric ancestors burned crisscrossing savannahs, fleeing carnivores and chasing prey. Fat is a good balm for the fear of starvation.

There’s also how the brain links emotion, memory and sensory stimuli. Popsicles nibbled to break childhood fevers, pizza when your track team won, coconut on your honeymoon: The brain associates good experiences with specific flavors, fragrances and textures, coding them as harbingers of happiness. Henceforth, even when you neither have a fever nor have won a race, eating Popsicles still brings the rush of relief and pizza feels like a reward.

But buried in this (like the caramel at the heart of a Milk Dud) is the deeper question of what counts as comfort.

Neuroscientists define it as the opposite of stress. Whether with pharmaceuticals or firearms or flannel sheets or funnel cake, we seek to de-stress by any means necessary. The brain reaches its relaxed, restorative comfort state when we feel safe and/or when we receive rewards and/or when we feel part of something bigger than ourselves — a culture or a community.

Security, reward and connectedness: Each of these three feelings activates a different portion of the brain, and each of these is more or less crucial to each of us, which further explains why we don’t all relish the same comfort foods. A competitive person or one who feels chronically undervalued cherishes foods that the brain has coded as rewards. A loner finds no comfort in those foods the brain links with community. An abused person who lives in fear might hoard safety foods.

When we feel endangered, unsung and/or lonesome, we eat.

Food is a fort we build. Rolls in my pocket feel like ballast. As a former anorexic, I imagine they will keep me safe because they are small, round, clean, dry and can be eaten stealthily. Someone else might feel most secure when eating pudding, say, because she ate it in the playroom before knowing the meaning of pain.

Food is the gift we give ourselves. My husband beams as if it’s Christmas whenever Sriracha sauce or tonsil-searing salsa make him sweat. His Jewish/Danish DNA never predicted this. He grew up in a capsicum-free home. Yet kimchee signals “treat” to him, because hot-spicy foods were his private discovery, not something that was ever given to him but something he gave himself. They are his prize, and thus they comfort him in that explosive, pore-widening way by which hot saunas heal. (Which makes me think: Is it reincarnation? Given that some people find comfort in what they grew up with, and others specifically in what they didn’t grow up with, do we choose our comfort foods or do they choose us? Does this process parallel the ways in which we acquire other preferences — for bondage, say, or for stiletto heels or hairy men?)

Food is also the friend who never disappoints or ditches us. Psychologists call comfort food a “social surrogate” — in other words, not quite replacing real companions but reminding us of them. Participants in yet another recent study felt less lonely after writing about — and not even necessarily eating — comfort foods. The psychologists who designed that study theorized correctly that consuming comfort foods soothes us in the exact same ways as wearing our favorite clothes or watching our favorite TV shows. Reminding us of those who love us and/or look and talk like us, comfort food also reminds us of who we are. Away from home, we seek the foods of home.

Of course, all matters of psychology are unrelentingly complex. Comfort food feels good, but — for some of us — in that first rush is also a twinge: For some, comfort food invokes a special hot-faced shame because both food and comfort are so intimate, and using one to do the other borders on self-pleasure. From there, it’s just one small step to guilty pleasure, which is what most of us would call caramel corn and curly fries. Perhaps it’s because in this crowded, hard world, we have convinced ourselves that seeking comfort is itself embarrassing, as if need makes us weak. We are ashamed to crave the salty, starchy, soft, unctuous and sweet, because we tell ourselves we are too smart to want what the judgmental would call junk — although, surrounded by food that is market-tested to appeal to our most primal urges, we don’t stand a chance. If comfort food exposes those urges, a drive-thru window can become a harsh confessional.

We spoke to JJ Virgin over the phone about what qualifies someone to be a “freaky eater,” as well as some of the more extreme measures they’ve taken on the program to make people confront their dangerous life choices.

This is the second season of the show, and there has been a lot of controversy about programs similar to “Freaky Eaters,” like “Hoarders” and “Intervention.” Some people are wondering if putting these people up on screen is helpful or just exploitative. What is your response to that sort of claim?

On “Freaky Eaters” we are dealing with people who don’t really fall into one specific disorder, one kind of psychological classification that can be treated. These are people that fall through the cracks, and they are desperate. They need help. I watch some of these shows out there that I do think are exploitative — though I do think most of them are more life-changing than exploitative — and I have to tell you, that’s not what we do. We do shock therapy, so you have people see the extent that they need to make the change, but I think everything is done in a very respectful way.

When you are dealing with someone who drinks gallons of tartar sauce and make them wade around in a pool of it, or have a guy who loves meat spend a day turning a pile of it into ground chuck in a freezer basement, would you call that behavioral therapy? Is that something you’d see psychological professionals doing if people weren’t falling through the cracks?

You know, behavioral therapy is really more what we do at the end of the show, what I call the “lateral shift”: having people make small changes in their lives. When someone is an addict of any type, the classic thing is to deny the problem or the extent of it. Shock therapy is to show these people their problem in a way that makes it impossible to deny or to downplay it.

What were some of the more outrageous examples you’ve had on the show?

The meat episode, that was so disgusting. We were hysterically laughing because the meat was spewing everywhere, as it was being ground up. The first season, we had a girl who ate 6,200 calories of sugar every day. She did all her shopping at the dollar store; it was amazing she wasn’t morbidly obese. So we had her lie down in a coffin and covered her with all the sugar she ate, and had her son read off a eulogy about all the things she was going to miss if she died from her lifestyle.

That’s intense.

We also had a pizza guy, where we had him pour all the fat from all the pizzas he ate in a year into a big bucket. And then we had him pour the bucket into jars. And at the end we had him dump the bucket, but instead he threw it, and it landed right on the cameraman, who was then covered in fat goop. And then we had a guy who ate 3-6 burgers a day, so we backed a truck filled with burgers right up to him and dumped out all the patties, just covered him up.

I can see how a lot of this is TV-friendly. Do you have a hard time differentiating yourself from the other TLC show, “My Strange Addiction,” where people eat stuff that is non-edible (like couch cushions, cigarette ash, and laundry detergent)?

People confuse us all the time. But what I think makes our show stand out is how relatable it is. I have people come up and ask me all the time, “This is what I do, am I freaky eater?” And I’m like “No, just because you eat a muffin everyday doesn’t get you qualified, sorry.”

Well that’s what’s so interesting, right? How blurry the lines can get? Because you’re not showing people with Pica, you’re showing people addicted to French fries. And I think a lot of people at home roll their eyes and go “Sure, we’re all addicted to French fries” until they see exactly how much this person is eating of it.

We did have a woman who had Pica and ate a lot of corn syrup, but that is still edible.

In my mind, the difference is severity … you can die from being obese, but it’s probably not going to kill you as fast as, say, downing laundry detergent every day.

Maybe not as fast, but you’ll find what we deal with is way more common, and therefore way more relatable. We try to get to the root of a lot of these issues on the show, because there is a psychological element to it, though a big part of being a “freaky eater” is biochemistry. Many of these people have a food sensitivity. They either are addicted to one taste, or they hate another kind. So the burger guy and the french fries person, they were both supertasters, they could taste things a mile away. And then this year we have a guy addicted to maple syrup, and he’s a “sweet taster”: nothing is sweet enough for him. These people can’t taste sweet well, so they keep wanting things sweeter and sweeter.

That’s interesting: so our predetermined sensitivity to different tastes can determine how hooked we get on a food?

Oh totally…we’re only at the beginning of understanding the biochemistry behind “taste.” It turns out you can taste things all down your G.I. tract. What we’re seeing now is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of some of the extreme forms of people with a tasting sensitivity.

“Freaky Eaters” can be found on TLC at 10:00 and 10:30 EST every Sunday night.

Sadly, these kinds of calls aren’t as uncommon as you might think. In March 2009 a woman called the police after being given the wrong order of McNuggets at McDonald’s.

That wasn’t even the first time that year an emergency hotline was called because of fast food. In fact, it happened quite a bit in 2009. (Maybe McDonald’s was just particularly sucky that year.)

Regardless, it’s 2011 now and we’re all grown-ups. That doesn’t mean we expand our 911 repertoires to calling in about botched Chinese food orders. It means that we stop tying up the police phone line unless we actually have an emergency that doesn’t involve a delivery service.

But how “friendly” is Ronald? A new study done by outside marketing group Ace Metric found that in a survey group of 500, an overwhelming amount found a guy with big red lips and white greasepaint more creepy than cute.

McDonald’s refuses to give up on Ronald, though, and its defense on why it needs to keep a terrifying clown as its mascot would be charming if it weren’t so ridiculous and backward. Below, five of the responses McDonald’s has given for keeping Ronald on the payroll.

1. Complaint: “It’s really remarkable how often I saw the word ‘creepy’ [in regards to Ronald],” says the V.P. of a company that conducted the survey.

McDonald’s response: “For everyone who may feel that way, there are more who feel the opposite.”

2. Complaint: Ronald McDonald is an evil clown.

McDonald’s response: “He is a force for good,” says McD’s CEO, Jim Skinner.

3. Complaint: Too many damn clowns running around.

McDonald’s response: “There’s only one Ronald,” McDonald’s chief creative officer Marlena Peleo-Lazar said in response to several questions about how many actors portray the smiling clown.

4. Complaint: He is hurting a brand image that is trying to be more adult … like Starbucks.

McDonald’s response: He is the brand image. “It would be almost as if the Geico gecko disappeared, or the Aflac duck,” says one marketing strategist. God forbid.

5. Complaint: Ronald encourages childhood obesity.

McDonald’s response: Around 2004, McDonald’s christened Ronald as a “balanced, active lifestyles ambassador,” and stuck him in commercials where he trained for the Olympics. He got workout clothes. He got a tuxedo. He moved from McDonaldLand into the real world. 

You know who can also move into the real world after being trapped in a fantasy land? Freddy Krueger.

It’s actually in CAI’s favor to have a scary mascot act as a deterrent for children trying to buy fries. It should be thanking McDonald’s for keeping such a creepy figure right in front of the golden arches.