Although we missed class on Monday, we would have discussed three articles that bring together the ideas of food and sexual desire, as a prelude to thinking about how to write a food encomium.

Jessamyn Neuhaus’ “The Joy of Sex Instruction” looks at women’s marital self-help books from the first half of the 20th century, and argues that these books frequently use cooking as a way to express certain anxieties about women’s role in marriage: preparing a meal often becomes a metaphor for women’s perceived sexual obligations in marriage. Indeed, her argument is most compelling when she explicates examples that specifically equate cooking and connubial bliss, suggesting that women had better do well in preparing the home-cooking, lest their men--who deserve to eat according to their tastes, not their wives’ tastes--grab a snack down town. What I find compelling here about the way that these metaphors work is how clearly they construct the man as consumer: not only does he eat the meals (and his wife), he literally buys them with the salary he uses to pay for his wife’s upkeep. Here the wife becomes an employee of her husband as well as his consumable commodity. Desire is therefore expressed in economic terms (through food as metaphor), not the actual terms of emotion or physical lust upon which we might want to base those concepts.

Andrew Chan’s article, “’la grande bouffe’: Cooking Shows as Pornography,” makes a more direct link between comestible and sexual appetites by looking at cooking shows and examining them as if they were a certain kind of pornography. His first point is that a host of cooking shows use sensuality (if not sexuality) as part of their appeal. Shows like Nigella Bites with the voluptuous cooking of Nigella Lawson and the cheeky dishes of Naked Chef Jamie Oliver rely upon much the same visual vocabulary as adult video. His most compelling point, however, is that cooking shows actually serve the same simulation-as-stimulation appeal as actual pornography: cooking shows are not about instruction, but about emulating the very same pleasure of being cooked for through visual stimulus.

Finally, an article by Laura Esquivel entitled “Intimate Succulencies,” a self-described “philosophical treatise on cooking” is something of an old essentialist argument about returning to some edenic past (she literally begins with the forbidden fruit) where cooking and food and sex are all part of a conduit to a more ethical world. There’s a lot of talk about male and female energies, and active and passive roles, and generally silly stuff, but the point again is clear: food and sex are related, and not just in metaphorical ways.

Food and sex are life sustaining pleasures, and more life-sustaining the more pleasurable they are. We talk about food and sex together when we think about decadence, even though their pleasures lead to decay (all of these three elements, food sex, and decay are contained in the image of an over-ripe fruit).

What I hope can be compelling about our thinking about food writing is the idea that the writing, for once, can similarly be a source of pleasure. While cooking shows may be designed to stimulate visual pleasure by simulating savory pleasure, perhaps writing about food can provide a similar (but perhaps more substantive) pleasure.