Description
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.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Good Food, Wicked Sex
Chapter 1: The Pleasures of the Table
Chapter 2: Innocents Abroad
Chapter 3: Perverted Tastes
Chapter 4: Private Rooms and Rooms Private
Chapter 5: Pretty Waiter Girls
Chapter 6: Dinners in Bohemia
Chapter 7: Greedy Women
Chapter 8: Mistresses of Gastropornography
Chapter 9: Gay Gourmets
Chapter 10: Foodies
Epilogue: Good Sex, Bad Food
