Appetyranny

One of the most memorable TV ad campaigns of my youth in the late 1960s was “How Do You Handle a Hungry Man?” The stakes were sky-high. Imagine the scene: a harried housewife in her perfectly pressed apron, hair teased to high heaven, facing off against her husband, the archetypal Hungry Man. He enters the kitchen with the imposing gait of a lumberjack who’s felled a forest, his appetite as vast as the Grand Canyon. He casts a skeptical eye over the bubbling pot on the stove, nostrils flaring like a bloodhound on the scent. The tension is palpable. But fear not! With a dramatic flourish, she opens a can of Campbell’s Manhandlers soup, the magical elixir that transforms her kitchen into a culinary Colosseum. She pours the contents into a pot, and it’s as if she’s summoned the culinary gods themselves. The soup is no ordinary broth; it’s a veritable cornucopia of steak chunks, peas, and potatoes, swimming in a rich, hearty base that promises to tame even the most insatiable of appetites. As the aroma wafts through the kitchen, her husband’s eyes widen in delight. He grabs a spoon and dives in, and the transformation is instantaneous. His previously skeptical demeanor melts away, replaced by pure bliss. He slurps the soup with the gusto of a Viking at a medieval banquet, and she watches, triumphant. The jingle plays in the background, a triumphant anthem to her victory over hunger.

The food industry at the time was relying on Appetyranny–the 1970s advertising-driven psychosis in which a woman’s entire self-worth was measured by her ability to quell the beastly hunger of her man. Fueled by jingles and canned soup, Appetyranny framed female failure not in terms of character or intellect, but in spoonfuls: if he’s still hungry, you’re unlovable.

It was the golden age of culinary gaslighting, where a man’s growling stomach was treated like a ticking bomb, and your job—housewife, mother, woman—was to neutralize it with sodium-laced beef sludge. Fail, and you risked suburban scandal. Succeed, and you were serenaded by baritone jingles that implied your marriage had been saved by soup.

Side effects of Appetyranny include:

• The belief that men turn feral without starch by 6 p.m.
  
• Buying food with names like Manwich, Sloppy Joe, or Hearty Beef ‘n’ Barley
  
• Mistaking Campbell’s labels for emotional validation
  
• A lifelong association between love and ladles
  

Appetyranny wasn’t just marketing. It was a meat-chunk manifesto from the patriarchal pantry, where the kitchen timer doubled as a ticking bomb of feminine adequacy.