Kathryn Flett:
I love food. I love cooking it, love having it cooked for me and, mostly, I love eating it. I'm very fond of sex too, but if you forced me to choose between the two then that would be silly, wouldn't it? Sex is obviously a physical, spiritual and emotional necessity, while food is merely a pleasant recreational activity, like golf, or peering in estate agents' windows and going 'blimey, half a million for that?'
Only joking. Eating disorders are so not my thing. Obviously I couldn't live without food but I could probably struggle by without sex, if only by staying in and watching films starring both, such as Tampopo, which was foodily erotic, and Babette's Feast, which was erotically foodie. And even though I found Last Tango In Paris about as sexy as a cholesterol test, remaking it with I Can't Believe It's Not Butter would be a disaster.
I once went out with a chef, in the early 1980s when chefs were still just blokes who cooked stuff for a living. He was a bad boy, that one - liked doing it al fresco, al forno, al dente... basically as often as possible, everywhere, and being a creative soul, in all sorts of inventive ways, with lots of olive oil.
The morning after one particularly memorable date he made me a fabulous cooked breakfast in the nude - my very own naked chef, back when Jamie Oliver was still burning water. He also tried to get me to assist, but I said that if the nudity was compulsory I'd rather just lie around in bed, ta ever so, rather than end up hauling my second-degree post-coital glow off to casualty.
We split up shortly after - the chef said it was because he was emigrating, but I've always wondered if it was because I refused to make bubble and squeak in the nude.
These days I'd be perfectly happy to make bubble and squeak in the nude, though it would be my poor children who'd end up emotionally scarred for life by the experience, so I shall refrain. Though, when the kids are away, I may feel a sudden compulsion to cook something complicated in my smalls. Nostalgie de la bouillon? Bring it on...
But I digress: is food better than sex?
Well, bad food is often worse than bad sex because women are quite often primed for bad sex but remain terribly disappointed by a crappy meal. And bad food cooked for you by the person who is also responsible for the bad sex is, probably, inevitable.
Good food, meanwhile, is obviously much better than bad sex, though good food is sometimes even better than good sex, especially while pregnant. And of course it goes without saying, though I shall say it anyway, that fabulous sex is better than almost everything... except great food cooked for you by someone with whom there is also the prospect of having fabulous sex.
Alex James:
The best meal I've ever eaten was in Morocco, something I find surprising because I dislike Moroccan food. Endless diarrhoea-spawning sloppy tagines, chewy bread, and nothing to speak of cheese-wise, and yet the best, most memorable repast of my life was a slipshod vegetarian hooch cooked on a Primus stove in a tent in the Moroccan desert.
As my girlfriend and I entered the silent dunes of the Sahara, the whole of the rest of the world fell away: much as it does when I enter the Wolseley or Brown's Hotel in London. The setting was glamorous and made the rest of life seem dull, as any good restaurant should. Food and each other were the only things we'd brought, by camel. We stopped for a night on the dunes. We could have been naked in the desert. The primary appeal of food was suddenly laid bare, nourishing and essential in the wilderness, and led to the most intimate and loving embrace. When we came back to civilisation we were engaged. I bought the blanket that we slept on from the camel guy. It still smells of camels.
Food and sex are the greatest of the sensual pleasures. If we had sex three times a day, with the odd erotic snack mid-afternoon and at bedtime, perhaps we wouldn't wonder about it so much, but we don't - and so we do a lot of wondering about sex. It's difficult to discuss sex the way we talk about food with our friends. We're happy to tell a stranger how much we love chocolate or cheese, but with sex there is no comfortable ground between the puerile and the medical, only a morass of bog, eggshells and broken glass. There is no Michelin type guide to sex, updated each year. The quantities are vague. How many units should I be consuming? The WHO gives no indication. Where are the TV expert equivalents of Delia, Heston and Gordon to sort out our Bedroom Nightmares, or show us How to Cheat at Sex? Who's making sex sexy? No one.
Food and sex are close cousins. Our enjoyment of both depends upon who else comes to the table. Food shopping for one is more depressing than masturbation. Dinner with strangers can be a delight, but the world's best restaurant can't guarantee a good time if we discover we don't like the people we've gone there with by the time the menus arrive.
In the 21st century, things taste better than ever before. We're all gastronomic adventurers to a degree. We know at least a little about olive oil. But sex is still wallowing in the dark ages: foreign and intimidating, a piece of sushi in 1987. Even though we've upped our game now with our caffe lattes and organic vine-ripened tomatoes, we've still got a way to go before we catch up with the Italians or the French. Our attitude to food is becoming more sophisticated but we're still judged on the quantity of women we've slept with rather than by any notions of quality. We still just guzzle food and sex like we guzzle booze. Pass the sauce.
