The relationship between food and sex, like that between Nick Clegg and David Cameron, or camping and fun, is not all it's cracked up to be. Sure, a lot of sex happens after meals. Then again, as we generally eat three times a day, there's always likely to have been a meal somewhere in the timeline. A lot of heavy manual labour and chiropody also happens after meals, but no one bigs up those connections. Trust me, if you want to spot a mediocre novelist, all you have to do is look for the scene in which the writer uses a meal as a metaphor for sensuality. It's a cheap shot. Dinner isn't a metaphor for anything. It's dinner. All of which makes me anticipate the publication next month of The Aphrodisiac Encyclopaedia by Mark Douglas Hill, much as I would a colonoscopy.
To be fair, most of the recipes aren't bad. But blimey, the boy does go on. He clings to alliteration like a lazy lad looking for love. Or something. The book is full of references to "magnificent mangoes"; to oysters being "squelchy soft and silky smooth". It is also full of cobbled together history, hack psychology and cod-science. The evidence to support the notion of a single food stuff encouraging arousal is negligible. That said, the author does acknowledge two key points. First, that if the food is done really well, the sex won't happen. After a 16-course tasting menu all you will really want from your bed is sleep. Indeed, someone who cooks a meal because they think it might get them laid, rather than out of a genuine instinct to feed, simply won't end up doing either properly.
Second, there is only one truly ingestible aphrodisiac and that's the grape, after it's fermented. Oh sure, you can go on about pearly oysters loaded with zinc, about split figs and the pulling back of the skin to reveal the pink flesh within; you can murmur about the joys of sea urchins and the thrill of roast iguana with chipotle and oregano marinade (the latter is a Douglas Hill special, on account of the dear iguana being blessed with two penises). But if sex did occur after any of these were eaten it would have everything to do with the booze that was slugged back alongside it and nothing to do with the food itself.
Last month the New York Post ran a feature about people having sex in restaurants. It seems there is hardly an eatery anywhere in that city – in the world – in which it hasn't happened, except perhaps an Aberdeen Angus Steak House; only a pervert would find one of those a turn on. In all of these stories there was one constant. The participants were very well lubricated (stop sniggering at the back there). Without booze there are legions of people who would never have got any sex at all. I know. I'm one of them.
And yet… and yet. There really is something about the process of eating a meal with a significant other that is sexy, but it has nothing to do with the food itself. It's all to do with the intimacy of the act, its elemental nature. Eating, like sex, is something instinctive. Get it right, by which I mean do it with real enthusiasm and intensity, and immediately you are wearing your elemental self on your sleeve. And it is that – rather than oysters slurped from the shell, or raspberries fed to a lover by hand – which is truly the sexiest thing of all.
