Simon Doonan breaks down the gay/straight food divide

Bestselling author and Barneys new York creative director Simon Doonan spells out the secrets to looking and feeling fabulous in "Gay Men Don't Get Fat." Here's an excerpt.

Popular wisdom dictates that there are four food groups: meat, dairy, grains, and fruits and vegetables. I disagree. As far as I am concerned, there are only two food groups: gay food and straight food.

Simply put: Straight foods are basic and uncontrived. Gay foods are fiddly and foofy.

Straight foods are dark of hue. Gay foods are brightly colored.

Straight foods are often protein rich. Gay foods are nice to look at, but may contain little or no protein. For example: lettuce. As Diana Vreeland once said, “Lettuce is divine, although I’m not sure it’s really a food.”

Sushi may well be the gayest food on earth. The design of the average ikura gunkan maki or hirame nigiri is, if you look at it objectively, really quite extraordinary. Sushi chefs are basically taking sloppy bits of fish and magically reworking them into exquisite bonbons. How gay, right?

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While sushi is swishy, Mexican food is unbelievably macho. Italian food is unarguably, unrelentingly Tony Soprano straight. By now I’m sure you are getting the general idea: Big fat slabs of wild boar are straight. Duh! And wafer-thin fillets of sole meunière are gay. Ladurée macaroons are at one end of the gay/straight spectrum, and beef Wellington is at the other.

The irony—the raging, screaming paradox—of the gay/straight food divide is that the gayest food—brace yourselves, because this searing insight is really going to send sparks flying out of your lettuce spinner—is produced by the straightest people!

Did not see that coming, did you, now?

I encountered this strange paradox when, in 2009, I served as a judge on Iron Chef. The two hairy, sweaty, manly competing chefs were Mike Lata and Jose Garces. Sparkling wine was the Secret Ingredient, and I was definitely the gayest person on the set.

As the show began, I braced myself for the butchest gastronomic onslaught of my life. At the very least I expected, based on the look of the chefs, to be eating deep-fried buffalo stuffed with beef cheeks, or Guinness-marinated yak testicles on a bed of wildebeest giblets.

Blue Rider Press

When the food appeared, I was gobsmacked by how gay it was: I have never seen so many tangerine emulsions and champagne gelées in my life. Everything was a “duo” of this and “lassi” of that. Nothing was served without a mini-artichoke or a micro-dollop of sheep’s cheese. Don’t get me wrong: I had a total blast. I am merely attempting to shine a spotlight on this foodie conundrum.

Last year I was gourmandizing in the South of France. In the mood for a healthy, balanced meal, I ordered sardines. In my mind I saw a rustic, casual assemblage of grilled, pudgy sardines (straight) nonchalantly hurled onto a mountain of organic greens (gay). J’adore!

When the dish arrived, my gay nerves just about snapped: The plate was triangular (gay) and the raw (!) sardines were cut into narrow, perfectly rectangular strips (so gay) and arranged into an abstract basket-weave pattern (Liberace gay). The sauce was a swirl of chartreuse something or other. When le chef appeared to mingle with we diners, all was revealed. He was straight, Sarkozy straight, even Dominique Strauss-Kahn straight. Only a straight chef could have taken a nice, wholesome hetero sardine and transformed it into something so explosively gay. A gay chef would never create anything so poofy and contrived, for fear of being vilified, pelted with stuffed zucchini blossoms and chased out of town.

At the end of the day (when, exactly, is “the end of the day”? I have often wondered) I believe that we should all be eating balanced meals, which involves a healthy combo of both the gay and straight food groups. By following this regime I am able to stay slim and trim. Straight men get fat when they go berserk and pig out on straight foods. Gay men don’t get fat because they ingest a creative fusion of the two. It’s just that simple.

Bon appétit!

Reprinted from "Gay Men Don't Get Fat" by Simon Doonan © 2012 by Simon Doonan. Used with permission of the publisher, Blue Rider Press, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.