• Representation: Shopping and nutrition are still primarily matters for women. The gender-specific division of labour demands that looking after private needs and running the household are jobs that are allocated to women, so they do the lion’s share of shopping and housework. Nutritional policy can work towards promoting a fairer sharing of housework.
  
  
• “Taste”: Women and men often have different cultural demands on food; women often prefer vegetables, while men tend to prefer meat. Where do these preferences come from, and how can an awareness of a diversity of needs be developed in the kitchen, which still tends to be geared to the traditional norm of the male worker?
  
  
• Budget: Nutrition is one of the largest items in the budgets of less-well-off households and is often used as a reserve when unforeseen expenses have to be financed. Women, whether they have small children or not, families with a large number of children and immigrants are over-represented in this group. An exact target group analysis is needed here. Fighting poverty and malnutrition will be more successful if gender issues are systematically integrated.
  
  
• Eating disorders: Eating disorders such an anorexia nervosa and bulimia have long been thought of as a women’s phenomenon. But current studies show that one person in ten suffering from eating disorders is a man. So gender plays an important part in advice on nutrition and health.
  
  
• Education: Nutritional habits are acquired in childhood, but the change in lifestyles is increasingly shifting nutrition from families to public educational institutions. Measures communicating overall nutritional concepts and which envisage proper nutrition for children as no longer being exclusively a task for families must be differentiated to meet the needs of various target groups and thus be gender-sensitive.
  

Mensink, Gert: Essen Männer anders?, in: Altgeld, Thomas (Ed.): Männergesundheit. Neue Herausforderungen für Gesundheitsförderung und Prävention, München 2004.

Zittlau, Jörg: Frauen essen anders, Männer auch - Fakten und Hintergründe zum Speiseplan der Geschlechter, Frankfurt 2002.