Why are so many of us middle-aged men so sloppy? We stand around, exposing our big bellies, and from the side we look like an avalanche. I think it stems from the way we men eat.

Men eat food that comes in slabs – preferably slabs and mounds. Or a slab between two mounds – often yellowish – either by age or design. That eliminates everything green, everything that swims, and everything that might keep us alive past midnight Tuesday.

It’s easy to buy food for a man. Just buy something with a large bone in it that Mr. Caveman can wrestle with and gnaw on, then walk away from with barbecue sauce stuck on his cheek.

Women are not like this. Women do not enjoy making a spectacle of themselves when they eat. Women dread it when a man says, “You wanna go for ribs?” (Which men always want, because they come in a slab.) That’s the last thing women want, to spend all evening sucking sauce off their fingers and picking corn from their teeth.

Women eat like cats – from a bowl. They’ll eat tidbits, then leave the rest for later. Men eat like dogs, consuming everything in front of them and not even tasting their food. Their task is simply to finish it as quickly as possible. “Hey, Jimmie, what was that thing you just ate, that thing that looked like a piece of fried stuff?” “I don’t know. It was brown, right?”

It’s a waste of time for a waiter to recite any of the day’s specials to a table full of men. If the waiter gets to the last special, say, “Fresh sea bass, lightly battered and sauteed in a raspberry vinaigrette, with basil and cilantro and a bouquet of fresh garden vegetables almondine,” a man, realizing he’s run out of choices, will say, “Good. Gimme that, and put some nacho cheese on top, okay? And fries.”

When men finish their food, they pause for a second, making a big show pausing so women will understand that they’re trying to be polite, then they go around the table and eat the food off the plates of the women and children. “You done with that?” a man will ask impatiently. Women know how this game is played. Women deliberately leave some food so that men can finish it.

Women get their revenge, though, by mixing their foods together. Men hate that. Geez, how they hate mixed foods! (“Look, don’t put the peas so they’re touching the potatoes, okay?”) While all men eat purposefully and sequentially, women eat randomly, much the way they shop. A male shopper goes in for a shirt, he buys a shirt, he leaves.

Women like to mix things. Ordering premixed things like risotto, they will mix in more things. Women commingle and create. You look at a woman’s plate and it looks like an artist has painted it. You look at a man’s plate and it looks like Rin Tin Tin has licked it.

Watch how differently men and women eat at a cocktail party. A woman will “plate-hop,” circling once, taking something from this tray, then that tray, and a couple of things from the center of the room. She puts all those things on a small plate and casually nibbles on them for the rest of the party.

A man goes straight to the swinging doors and camps there, toothpick in hand, picking off whatever comes out on a tray, like he’s defoliating the jungle. Putting nothing on a tray, he will stand there sniping. Get him a shovel.

Women know this and care about how they look eating in front of men. On first dates, a woman will order “light,” not wanting guys to think she eats like a pig. She’s picky with food and picky with men. And she doesn’t want to create the impression that if he stays with her, he’ll wake up one day twenty years later to discover he’s married to Bossy the Cow.

So on a first date, a woman usually won’t order spaghetti, garlic, onion, or anything that hangs out her mouth. And she’ll rarely order dessert.

But she’s probably starving. And the moment he drops her off, she’ll head straight for the Haagen-Dazs, sit there in her housecoat, and stuff herself just like – a man.

Contact Observer columnist Robert Brake, not suffering from an “edible complex,” at oobear@pacifier.com.