This article focuses on how the theme of food is used for making social, gender, and other distinctions in the weekly Danish radio series The Hansen Family (The Danish Broadcasting Corporation, 1929-49) and in relation to other radio programmes from the 1930s and 1940s. These distinctions serve to diminish the distance between the radio listeners and the characters, but also to make more universal statements about marriage, the working conditions of housewives, and gender relations. To Mr. Hansen, food represents the one highlight in a rather repetitive cycle of working, sleeping and bickering with the wife. To Mrs. Hansen, it is the fruit of hard labour rather than a meal to be enjoyed. On a more general level, food is a limited resource, which often causes social tensions to burst onto the surface of human interaction.