Lustful Appetites: An Intimate History of Good Food and Wicked Sex

We take the edible trappings of flirtation 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? Rachel Hope Cleves explores the long association between indulging in good food and an appetite for naughty sex, from the development of the Parisian restaurant as a place for men to meet with prostitutes and mistresses, to the role of sexual outlaws like bohemians, new women, lesbians and gay men in creating epicurean culture in Britain and the United States. 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―while also creating stigmas that persist well into our own twenty-first century.

Rachel Hope Cleves is Professor of History at the University of Victoria.