TRENDSPOTTING.

I, for one, welcome, and ready myself to join, our new gastrosexual overlords. A few thoughts:• OMG PEOPLE UZE COOKING IN COURTSHIP!!!1! is not exactly a new thought. "Men take up cooking in a bid to seduce women" makes it sound all devious and manipulative, but rephrase that to say "men trying to cook women great meals in order to seem like better boyfriend bets" and you're dealing with something pretty mundane. Women, for instance, have been doing this for some time, and even thought of a pithy aphorism to describe it: "The way to a man's heart is through his stomach." This is especially true with spicy food, or for men with acid reflux disorder.• There's also a weird causality issue I've begun to notice. Cooking is an inherently communal activity. For most of us, the prime association with cooking is that it happens within a family context; mom or dad cooking for the family. This makes cooking for yourself a more acutely lonesome activity than it has any real right to be. So though I wouldn't go so far as to say that cooking makes men -- or woman -- want a partner where they didn't desire one before, it's the sort of pursuit that tends to consistently remind people that they are crushingly alone in a cruel and unfeeling universe.• "Over half of the men surveyed prepare meals using separate ingredients everyday spending on average 41 minutes cooking on a daily basis," enthuses the article. "Separate ingredients?" How is that a useful definition for cooking? What is thing-on-stove? Chopped liver? (Ed note: "Chopped liver" here is being used metaphorically, so as to signal disrespect. Thing-on-stove is indeed chopped liver if the thing on the stove is chopped liver.)Image used under a Creative Commons license from Mike Autry.