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

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 intimatewhile also creating stigmas that persist well into our own twenty-first century.

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

The depth and scope of the research alone is remarkable. That Rachel Hope Cleves is able to weave so many strands in the history of food and sex into such a fascinating and readable book is a testament to her skills as both a scholar and an author. Lustful Appetites is an essential book for anyone interested in the transgressive history of food.
John Birdsall, author of The Man Who Ate Too Much: The Life of James Beardlƒ-