Lustful Appetites

We take the edible trappings of flirtation and infatuation for granted: chocolate covered strawberries and romance, oysters on the half shell and desire, the eggplant emoji and a suggestive wink. But why does it feel so natural for us to link food and sexual pleasure? In this enticing new book, historian Rachel Hope Cleves explores the long association between indulging in good food and an appetite for immoral sex. From the Parisian invention of the restaurant (which soon became a popular place for men to meet with prostitutes and mistresses) to the intersection of culinary and erotic tourism, she reveals how these anxieties coloured cultural norms of respectability and gender. However, the link between gourmet food and disreputable sex enabled bohemians, new women, lesbians and gay men to embrace epicureanism as a sign of their rejection of bourgeois sexual morality. A taste for good food became central to queer culture in the twentieth century; only after the sexual revolution did straight men and women reclaim eating for pleasure as respectable through the archetype of the ‘foodie’. Taking readers on a gastronomic journey from Paris and London to New York, Chicago and San Francisco, Lustful Appetites reveals how this preoccupation changed the ways we eat and the ways we are intimate—as well as how stigmas persist well into our own twenty-first century.