How Sexy is Food?

About 25 years ago – and I’m dating myself here – a groundbreaking erotic movie called Nine and a Half Weeks was released. The movie starred Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger and was based on a book by the same name. The book was definitely hotter than the movie, but the movie brought some indelible images to the screen. Arguably, the most indelible of those images involved Mr. Rourke eating fruit from Ms. Basinger’s flat little belly. (This was beautifully parodied a few years later in the Charlie sheen movie, Hot Shots.) Eating fruit was certainly sensual and sexy as done in these movies.

So I was thinking about that fruit – and food in general – and whether food is inherently sexy. And if so, what foods are sexiest?

To start with, it could be said that any fine meal has the potential to be sexy, especially when shared by two people anticipating making love. Just the eye contact across the table could be considered a form of foreplay. Certainly all the mouth movement of biting and chewing can suggest things sexual. I’m thinking primal here, as in a thick, juicy steak. And the wine sipped with that meal can release all kinds of inhibitions and lead to unbridled naughtiness of a sexual nature.

And that leads me right into thinking about phallic-shaped foods like bananas, sausages and cucumbers. Not as sophisticated as a candlelit dinner, but certainly more to the point, a lover sucking and licking penis-shaped foods can visually titillate most men. When I asked my husband about it, he agreed that most men would find this image arousing. He also thinks that a peeled orange can be suggestive of lady-parts when the segments are still loosely connected, and the contours of a green pepper are sensual and possibly suggestive. (Who knew?) And of course it is widely accepted that raw oysters resemble the female anatomy, though I don’t know that the act of eating them is particularly arousing, even though they are know to be an aphrodisiac.

What about other purported aphrodisiacs? Dark chocolate contains components that release chemicals similar to those released during organism. I guess you could say that eating chocolate is like sex without the – ahem – sex. And other common foods – honey, basil, asparagus, and almonds to name a few – can stimulate hormone production or enhance the libido.

What about food in the bed? We’ve all seen the paintings of Roman orgies where semi-nude, plump, reclining women are feeding men by hand, nuts and grapes and figs. Just about any finger food can be made part of sex play when lovers share between the sheets. And let’s not forget whipped cream, which can be applied directly to the lover’s body and eaten off of it. No question about whipped cream being sexy. And there are lots of non-food oils and lotions that have been flavored (cherry, chocolate, berry, etc) to make licking them off the naked body even more fun and palatable.

So here are my questions for you readers: Is food inherently sexy? What food is sexiest? Have you read a book that had a great food-and-sex scene? If you’re a writer, have you written a scene like that? Come on, guys – dish!

-- Pepper
"Let's read something spicy!"