Add industrial motors to household tools. Grunt. Eat meat.

That could have been the mantra of clumsy 1990s alpha-male Tim “the Tool Man” Taylor, played by Tim Allen in the long-running sitcom Home Improvement. In one episode he presented his Tool Time viewers with a “man’s kitchen,” complete with a pantry filled with beans and potatoes and a fridge with a butcher named Benny inside.

According to a new study, men really are concerned with eating manly foods, opting for a cup of Joe over a café latte, spaghetti with big homemade meatballs over a tomato and basil sauce, and salad piled with cold cuts and cheese over something more worthy of being called a salad.

The study, by researchers from the Kellogg School of Management at Chicago’s Northwestern University, suggests men are more likely than women to conform to gendered notions of food.

In a series of experiments, men and women were asked to choose between “masculine” and “feminine” versions of items (so deemed in separate experiments).

Men were more likely to choose the masculine items, especially when they were given as much time as they needed to decide.

“Initially men are trying to make choices, just like women, based on what tastes better, what they like better,” says David Gal, professor of marketing, who co-authored the study “Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche: Regulation of Gender-Expressive Choices by Men” with doctoral student James Wilkie.

“When they have extra time to make those choices, then they tend to incorporate the gender norms into their choices and they tend to choose the more masculine stuff — even if it’s not what they like more.”

In other words, a distracted man might listen to his instincts and eat what he likes, but if a man has time to think, he’s more likely to choose the meal with better street cred.

The research has interesting implications for marketing, Gal says. For example, by calling a new low-calorie soft drink Coke Zero, Coca-Cola was able to appeal to health-conscious men that Diet Coke often did not (the word “diet” being inherently girlie).

In one experiment, the researchers saw the gendered affects of the items fall away after giving their male subjects a chance to talk about masculine things they did.

“Once they felt good about their manliness, they no longer were concerned about showing or demonstrating their manliness by making masculine food choices,” Gal says.

This behaviour has deep cultural and maybe even evolutionary roots.

From an early age, boys are told that “men should act like men” and that being perceived as masculine is important, Gal says. Men are more likely than women to be penalized for “gender transgressions,” such as, in the case of boys, playing with dolls.

Dr. David Katz, director and co-founder of Yale University’s Prevention Research Center, says there was likely a division of labour in the days of hunter-gatherers, with men, the larger and stronger of the sexes, hunting for live prey while women, who often had a sharper sense of smell and could see better in low light, searched for edible plants.

The cultural meaning we endow our foods with today did not materialize out of the ether — it might have an evolutionary basis. But, regardless, Dr. Katz says men and women would both benefit from a similar diet with less red meat and more fruits and vegetables than the current norm.

He says women tend to be more clued into prevailing health messages, while men try to be tough, stoic and unconcerned, thinking, “ ‘I’m a guy, I’m just going to soldier through. I’ll soldier through my cholesterol, and I’ll soldier through a pile of French fries’ and then guys stop soldiering when they wind up on their backs in the coronary care unit.”

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Food isn’t the only consumer product imbued with gendered meaning. Another experiment in the study looked at household objects instead of food — items like doorknobs, beds, tables and trash cans — offering participants a choice between angular, sharp-angled items and more rounded versions of the same items.

While both sexes agreed that the rounded items were more feminine and the angular ones more masculine, the men were once again more concerned about adhering to gender norms.

“Our findings might suggest you might want to make items that are more masculine, because women don’t really care so much about an item being perceived as masculine,” Gal says.

But men? Just keep them away from the girlie stuff.

His and hers:

Masculine pasta: Spaghetti topped with hearty marinara or meat sauce, served with big homemade Italian meatballs

Feminine pasta: Spaghetti with sungold tomatoes, fresh basil, extra virgin olive oil and garlic

Masculine salad: Genoa salami, pepperoni, mortadella ham, mozzarella and provolone cheese, lettuce and veggies

Feminine salad: Garden veggies, lettuce, pine nuts, sun-dried tomatoes, artichoke hearts and Gorgonzola cheese

Masculine ice cream: Vanilla ice cream smothered in hot fudge, chunks of chocolate fudge cake, peanuts and whipped cream

Feminine ice cream: Premium vanilla and chocolate ice cream with a cherry and almond centre enrobed in fine chocolate, served with walnuts and fresh whipped cream