Is this the dumbest gender reveal ever?

Feel free to tell the world whether you’re having a girl or a boy, but for the love of carbs, don’t ruin an iconic Italian dish in the process, writes Darren Levin.

It’s official.

Your baby’s gender is a dish best served with a caesar salad and some crusty garlic rolls. Thanks to one opportunistic American restaurant, soon-to-be parents can now reveal the gender of their baby via Garfield’s favourite food, lasagne, all for the bargain price of $140.

Confused? Let me explain.

Much like a gender reveal cake where the batter is dyed blue or pink, the gender reveal lasagne replaces coloured sponge with blue or pink pasta sheets that I can only assume are made from Smurf’s tears. Instead of cutting into a cake to show the innards to those who actually care about the gender of your unborn child, you tuck into some hearty and sickly-looking pasta.

The response from the internet has been, as you’d expect, less than positive.

Blue and pink gender reveal lasagne is now a thing thanks to one US catering company. Picture: Facebook

“Ban heterosexuals,” one cheery Facebook user commented, mistakenly conflating sexuality with gender. Another nice bloke called for a ban on all babies, while someone else threatened to — trigger warning — end it all. “Done with this world,” they declared on Twitter, “just let me die and bury me inside a gender reveal lasagne.”

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There’s no doubting these parties are getting — pardon the pun — cheesier, but what is it about a pink lasagne that’s causing such a visceral response? Are there layers to this online rage I’m missing? Maybe it all boils down to a deep-seated aversion to pasta? Was there this much outrage when some bloke in Arizona got so excited about the impending birth of a son he burned down a 47,000-acre forest? Or when a number of Australians decided that pink and blue burnouts at the local racetrack was the next natural progression for announcing the sex of an infant?

When did telling the world if you were having a girl or a boy get so complicated? Picture: iStock

Ultimately, gender reveal parties are about a misguided and completely tone-deaf expression of pure joy. People are excited about their baby and want to share it with the world, sometimes via visually unappealing food.

There are some that reckon gender reveal parties are going too far, but I think they’re not going far enough. Why limit it to just two genders or colours? Blue is for boys and pink is for girls is far too binary for our multi-coloured rainbow world. (If the upturned polo trend of the mid-2000s taught us anything it’s that boys can wear pink, too.)

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Perhaps gender reveal parties would be a more acceptable social practice if they reflected the full spectrum of gender identity? The upcoming birth of a gender neutral baby, for example, could be denoted by a wheel of Swiss cheese as the centrepiece of a beautifully arranged board as a nod to the nation of neutrality.

Australian couple Joelene Puntoriero and Blake Hertel announced the gender of their unborn baby by doing a burnout. Picture: Katrina Bridgeford

Personally, I yearn for the good-old days when gender reveal parties were held in sterile clinic offices full of pictures of babies and holiday snaps of your obstetrician in a pair of Speedos.

Your wife would be laid out on a table with gel all over her exposed belly while a nice doctor would exclaim, “It’s a girl!”, or in our case, “It’s two girls!” as you try and process the news you’re having twins.

For a second there I was tempted to load pink paint dust into my exhaust pipe and do burnouts in a local Coles carpark like the true heroes of our nation. But I remained chill and sent a message with two dancing girl emojis to my mum who completely missed the point and thought I was inviting her to a ball.

Oh how I yearn to live in a gender-free world.

Darren Levin is a columnist for RendezView.com.au. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram.