Thinking way too hard about the manliness of rice-based dishes

When I saw Man-Pleasing Recipes (1971), I was a little surprised by the big bowl of rice front and center. Given that men are stereotypically supposed to be so meat-focused, I'd have expected the roast in the prominent spot.

Then I saw that this recipe booklet is from Rice Council of America. That's why rice is so prominent! Maybe rice could seem manly by association with things that typical Americans at the time saw as manly.

For instance, the book offers a hearty beef stew to be served with Rice Verte.

Using the French word for "green" to emphasize the rice's veggie content isn't what I would expect for a 1970s book that bills itself as "man-pleasing." Maybe that's why the stew has to be served in a roughly football-shaped vessel.

I was surprised that the book had so many recipes with Frenchified names, like the Beef Choufleur.

It's kind of confusing to use the French word for cauliflower for a dish that seems inspired by American Chinese food, but this book is not about meeting one's stereotypical expectations.

Though it does meet my expectation that 1970s foods be predominantly brown....

Sometimes the book really pushes at one's expectations. Rice Jardin omits meat entirely and uses a French name. Pretty bold move for something marketed as manly in the 1970s.

I'm not sure "A garden of flavor, fresh or canned" is the best tagline for a recipe, but I still have to appreciate the assumption that even manly men can enjoy veggies with a fancy name as long as said veggies are strewn through buttery rice.

Maybe men can even appreciate non-brown foods?!

And then I got to the final recipe in the book, and I had so many questions. First of all, how is Royal Rice "low calorie"?

It's just rice with some butter and veggies. In fact, given that this has a larger proportion of rice to vegetables, I'd imagine that the Rice Jardin might be less calorie dense than Royal Rice. The claim seems to arise from nowhere.

Beyond the questionable assertion of being low calorie, the bigger question is whether this is an admission that men might be concerned about calories too, even though women were typically thought of as being the calorie counters. Or is this just a tacit admission that the Rice Council of America had the same stereotypes about men and women as the rest of America, and calling the recipes "Man-Pleasing" was just a way to catch the (likely straight female) audience's attention, while most of the actual recipes were meant to appeal directly to their tastes? Is this book an attempt to change conventional ideas about masculinity? Or is it just doubling down on stereotypes about women by assuming they want to please men in theory because that's what they're culturally expected to do, but that they really want lighter food and will overlook the disconnect between the title and the contents?

Oh, yeah. It's just a way to sell rice by any means necessary, as the supposedly low-cal rice nestled under a big hunk of meat and a pile of deep-fried onion rings reminds us. It just wants to show that rice can be everything to everybody, and I put way too much thought into the premise, here... Certainly more than the people who put the booklet together. I guess these rice recipes just prove that I'm an over-thinker.