Fast-Food and the Feminization of Health

Advertising has long relied on gendered and sexualized images and text.  Advertising uses hyper-gendered images and text to catch our attention and it participates in (re)constructing stereotypes (see here).  The health food craze of the 80s and 90s hit fast food restaurants hard.  The McDonald’s colors (red and yellow) came to signify unhealthy food.  Many chains changed their logos to include blues, purples, and greens to appeal to what they perceived to be a more “health-conscious” set of standards of American fast-food customers.

For instance, as Americans became increasingly conscious of the detrimental effects of fried food, Kentucky Fried Chicken changed its name to “KFC” and commercials in the early 2000s implied it was an abbreviation for Kitchen Fresh Chicken.  But in 2007, “Kentucky Fried Chicken” was resurrected and this time period marked a change in the way fast food advertising dealt with what they perceived to be a much more health-conscious population.

While initially, fast-food chains tried to disguise their food in more healthy packaging, from the mid-2000s on many chains charted a different route to address this problem.  Perhaps reminded of Bruce Firestein’s 1982 classic satirization of American masculinity, Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche, fast-food restaurants became emboldened to challenge American men to forgo health concerns in their advertisements.  This theme is probably best illustrated by Burger King’s 2006 commercial, dubbed the “Manthem,” used to promote their newest sandwich to the menu: the Texas Double Whopper.  The commercial rewrote Helen Reddy’s classic “I Am Woman”–a song released in 1971 that was widely held as capturing some of the spirit of feminist activism during that time.