Aw shucks, as so often happens, once you look it up it’s not quite as fatuous as it looked.
Thank you to all of our customers who have provided feedback on the recently launched Men’s and Women’s Wellbeing breads. We’ve had many positive comments about these new breads, but have also had some customers express concern about the gender-specific labelling.
As background, our intention when creating the Wellbeing breads was to support the unique and different nutrient needs of men and women. We worked under the guidance of a registered dietitian to identify the specific nutrients men and women require on a daily basis and what they may fall short on. For example, Health Canada indicates that up to 50% percent of men fall short of magnesium, while 80% of women may not get enough calcium. Therefore the Wellbeing bread for women was enhanced with calcium and for men with magnesium. Since bread is a staple food in many diets, we felt it was a smart place to add more nutritional value.
We now fully understand that while our intention was focused on nutrition, we appreciate and respect our customer concerns over the marketing of the product and have therefore decided to remove any gender-specific labelling. These highly nutritious products will still be available to you, but with new labelling.
Ok. Honestly though, you’d think someone in their marketing department or their customer relations department or their what color shall we make the labels department would have realized how silly it looks to add gender to bread.
I demand unisex bread for all. The bread’s preferred pronouns are they / fzzms.
I need to make bread.
I’m picturing all men falling and not quite grabbing hold of magnesium. I’m also picturing Allen Wrench from the Simpsons: “I WAS FOUND IN A METEOR, I NEED TUNGSTEN TO LIVE. TUNGSTEEEENNNN”
Sigh, and now I’m picturing the book Uncle Tungsten, which everyone should read. And I’m remembering spoiling when we went to get our engagement rings by explaining how platinum and diamonds are harvested.
I’m kind of a dick.
Which might explain why my ring is objectively worse than Mrs Latsot’s.
Um… I’m sorry but I can’t really get offended by the “gender specific labelling” of bread.
If it is true that men and women tend to have different nutrient deficiencies, then making products with that in mind isn’t crazy. Expecting your choice of bread to have a big effect on your health might be crazy, but that’s another matter. I don’t think it’s comparable to marketing science toys for boys and cooking toys for girls, for example.
I’ve bought Stone Mills breads before. What mattered to me the most when making a decision was the ingredients label and the taste. The colour on the label wouldn’t matter. For many years I’ve bought products that say “women’s ____” because I preferred the product itself. No one’s ever given me a hard time about it. But maybe I’m weird.
Wait. I should have checked to see if the breads were priced differently…
Gender-specific bread sort-of maybe might make sense, but not in the ways stated. Folic acid is added to bread as a public health measure. The major reason is to reduce the number of babies born with spina bifida and related conditions (“neural tube defects”). Of course, folate supplements pose no real harm or risk for males.
Couldn’t they just chuck a multivitamin into the dough and have non-gender-specific vitamin enriched bread?
Ah, so this is where the genderbread man came from.
I guess I could get behind the motivations, but I fail to see how adding that stuff to bread is actually going to help. Surely it’s not going to have a huge impact on those numbers in practice, and even if it did, what about those people who aren’t falling short of their RDA? Would they be overdosing now?
Besides, this is a company that advertises the fact that their products are GMO free – are their customers likely to be happy to hear that their favoured bakery is now putting chemicals in the bread? (As opposed to before, when all they put in were good, healthy, natural ingredients!)
@DrewN:
Have you missed all the “For Men” and “For Women” multivitamins?
Does eating the wrong bread make you gay? I can picture men lumbering into a sandwich shop dirty and unkempt, and prancing out preternaturally well groomed because they got the wrong bread. I can also see women slipping the sandwich maker a little something extra to make sure they get the wrong bread.
I can also imaging a form of gender transition fatigue as people shift back and forth a half-dozen times a day while eating meals and snacks.
Will the transphobes folks stop sweating about bathrooms and introduce bills to make sure people only purchase bread for the sex they were assigned at birth?
Seriously, this is just dumb. True, male and female nutritional needs may vary, but so do children, young adults, and seniors; if you eat a good diet you’re probably fine, unless you have special needs. I’d rather make my own bread and know what goes into it than eat “medicine”.
I’m sure that children, teen and senior breads were in the works. Companies make those distinctions with multivitamins, after all. Trying to combine the concepts (bread+multivitamin) probably made these gender specific breads inevitable…