Do you know what an “herbivore boy” is? It's a term to describe Japanese males who eschew the macho for the mild. These are men who have abandoned the aggressive tendencies of their salary-men fathers, like drinking heavily and eating spicy food, opting for desserts, being generally shy, and not so much interested in sex or getting that promotion. NPR had a lengthy story on it two years ago–a fascinating read.
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Now comes the flip-side. Last week, CNN had a video short featuring “carnivore girls,” who are career-driven and have seemed to pick up the slack where the men left off–proof that for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction.
Here's the food angle: The story focused on a particularly enterprising restaurateur who took the term “carnivore” literally and opened a growing chain of raw-meat sushi bars now popular with these girls. If it just seems a self-fulfilling prophecy, it's also kind of poetic.
Before becoming an award-winning restaurant critic for OC Weekly in 2007, Edwin Goei went by the alias “elmomonster” on his blog Monster Munching, in which he once wrote a whole review in haiku.