According to Katherine Parkin,Parkin, Katherine, Food Is Love: Food Advertising and Gender Roles in Modern America, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006 the gender binary in advertising took shape in the 1950s, following the theories of Ernest Dichter. She believed “by convincing Americans of a food’s sex and its resultant gendered identity, as well as its sensuality, advertisers could suggest their foods to meet consumers’ need to fulfill their gender roles."Parkin, Katherine, The Sex of Food and Ernest Dichter: The Illusion of Inevitability, Vol. 5, Issue 2, Advertising & Society Review, 2004 And “Dichter believed that many people categorized the sex of foods. However, his own subscription to a gendered taxonomy of food is evident in his assessment of the findings”.
