LUSTFUL APPETITES

“Good food held little importance at the tables of my childhood,” writes historian Cleves, who has since overcome those overlooked meal presentations to produce a rousing study of gastronomy and carnal appetite. The author has spent a decade making impressive use of historical archival information, scientific research experiments, blogs, films, books, ancient Chinese poetry, and modern multimedia to present a lush and fascinating chronicle of cuisine. Her text incorporates key discussions involving the Puritan hypothesis linking alimentary appetites with gluttony and illicit sexual behavior, the emerging restaurant industry in late-18th-century France (locales that were often favored by sex workers and adulterers), and how a preference for food became identity markers for bohemian and queer cultures and sexual outlaws of the late 19th and 20th centuries. She traces the interwoven legacy of the first French restaurant, its “sexual disreputability” upon arriving on U.S. shores, its association with sex work, the advent of the waitress, and the sexual aphrodisiac symbolism of “archetypal seduction food” like oysters, crawfish, partridges, eggs, tomatoes, beets, chocolate, and, naturally, strawberries. Cleves highlights reproving Puritan ministers and leaders, such as Seventh-Day Adventist Church founder and prophet Ellen White, who developed cautionary theories in the late 1800s about the correlation between “bad eating” and “sexual sin.” In that same era and beyond, bohemian culture emerged alongside a landslide of queer communities exhibiting a “passion for the table” and for gourmet cooking. Having spent time immersed in European culture, Cleves cleverly integrates a discussion on international epicureanism into the book’s second half, which celebrates the arrival of the “foodie” in the late 1900s, detaching the term from its former association with sexual immorality, and on how the term “food porn” became synonymous with eating with both the eyes and the mouth. While Cleves sadly attests that some of the stigmas surrounding cuisine and intimacy remain intact, food will always be, for many, an “instrument of seduction.”