" It contained generalizing tips like, "Men love meat," "Anything good is better with bacon," and "Butter, butter, butter!" This kind of popular literature shows that it is common knowledge that a difference exists between men and women when it comes to eating habits and desires. I also found two more scientific studies based loosely on the concept of gender eating habit differences. The first study, "Gender Does Matter: Important Differences in the Eating Habits of Boys and Girls," by The Sodexho Research Institute of the Quality of Daily Life, found there to be two fundamentally different eating models for boys and girls between the ages of five and seventeen. The study claims that girls use "an eating model that favors a need to eat efficiently and a desire for simple, natural products" and that boys follow "an eating model that combines a social ritual and good-tasting food and which provides a high-energy diet" (Sodexho 2). This study also goes on to examine how this difference in eating impacts children's" lives in other areas. The second study, "His-and-Her Hunger Pangs: Gender affects the brain's response to food," appearing in Science News, examines eating habit difference very scientifically. It looks at obesity and eating disorders with the premise that hunger triggers a totally different response in the male brain than it does in the female brain (Science News 4). All three articles looked at different aspects of the question of gender differences and their effects on eating habits and all three are evidence to validate my research question by showing that my idea has been studied before and is therefore a worthwhile pursuit of information.
My hypothesis is centered around the idea that there is definitely a clear-cut distinction between the way males and females eat. In order to answer my research question sociologically and locally, my research question will become more specific: Does a difference in gender correlate to a difference in food choice among Davidson College students eating at Vail Commons cafeteria? In order to begin researching this I will first need to define the variables of my experiment.