PLEASE NOTE: This is a minimally-edited transcript that originates from a program that uses AI.
Anita Rao
It's a Friday night. I'm 22 years old, standing behind the hostess stand at Bogota Latin bistro in Brooklyn, playing my favorite game, guess their order. A cute, awkward couple comes in. I clock it as a first date, they'll order a platanos appetizer to share, then separate main courses that are easy to eat with a fork and knife while chatting. Doe eyed lovers walk in next they are definitely getting shareables, ceviche. I'll bet something they can eat with their hands. Playing this game kept me fully entertained during long restaurant shifts, what I witnessed many nights was just how intimately food and sexuality are connected. Some of those links are obvious. Food and sex are both pleasurable sensory experiences. But if you dive into the cultural history of our erotic and elementary appetites and even into your own sensory memories, you will find that the connection goes much deeper. This is Embodied. I'm Anita Rao.
Rachel Hope Cleves
Well, I've always been in love with food. I had eyes bigger than my stomach when I was a kid, but I'd say from the time I started dating, food was always pretty central in all of my relationships.
Anita Rao
That's Rachel Hope Cleves, a historian and professor at the University of Victoria. Her interest in the erotic side of food is partly academic. She's the author of 鈥淟ustful Appetites: An Intimate History of Good Food and Wicked Sex.鈥�.That book investigates everything from restaurant sex commerce to the appetites of queer women in the early 1900s but her observations are also personal.
Rachel Hope Cleves
I remember with my very first boyfriend, which was in my first real boyfriend, which was in 10th grade, we would cut school in the afternoons. Often I grew up in New York City, and we would go to this Italian deli in the Lower East Side, which is where our school was. And I would buy a roast beef sandwich with mayonnaise, lettuce, tomato and black pepper. And it was like just when I started eating pepper, you had just becoming like an adult in my palate. And we'd go back to his apartment and we'd share this sandwich, and I knew I was falling in love with him when I wanted to give him the bigger half of the sandwich. So, yeah.
Anita Rao
That's so great. So we can't get too far into this conversation without mentioning the word aphrodisiac, which is definitely the first thing that pops into my mind when I think about food and sex. And I want to start with the biggest and maybe hardest question first. So is the power of aphrodisiacs real?
Rachel Hope Cleves
It's real if you believe it.
Anita Rao
Oh no, okay, tell me more.
Rachel Hope Cleves
I don't believe in the inherent power of any food to spark the libido, although I do think that there are foods that their mouth feel evokes sexual experiences for us, and so maybe they do put us more in the mood. But I don't believe any of the theories about like, high levels of zinc and oysters or something. So I subscribe to the belief that the biggest sex organ we all have is the one between our ears. So you know, anything that stimulates the brain is an aphrodisiac. So, yes, if you believe that, if you believe your food is an aphrodisiac, it is.
Anita Rao
Well, so why, like, I guess. How did we come to have these certain associations with particular foods? Maybe, let's talk about oysters in particular. Why do we associate oysters with sex?
Rachel Hope Cleves
Well, the oysters and all seafood are associated with sex, and for a variety of reasons. First of all, it traces back to like the root of the word aphrodisiac, which is Aphrodite, the goddess of love. And in the Greek mythology, she's born from the sea, right, and rises up on a seashell. And so any food of the sea in ancient Greece was considered aphrodisiac, like fish were considered an aphrodisiac, not a food that was fit for sacrifice, but something that you ate for pleasure. And then there's a homology for oysters, they look like vulvas, right? They taste briny. They taste like a vulva. So they evoke sexuality for that reason. And there's a lot of that sort of homological thinking and history of aphrodisiacs. So things that looked phallic were often seen as aphrodisiacs, things that were considered in galenic theory to heat the blood and cause the. Direction of sperm, those were considered to be aphrodisiacs, often, like luxurious or rich foods were considered to be heating and if they heated you up, they cause sperm. And then my favorite variety of historic aphrodisiac thinking was that flatulent foods were aphrodisiacs. And this was a medical theory that erections were caused by gasses. So anything that was gas producing, the erection producing but then there was a sort of medical debate about whether a gas produced erection was likely to be as like seed rich as a non gas produced erection. So like, maybe it was, like, a false direction.
Anita Rao
Wait, this is hilarious, because I would think that things that would produce flatulence would be the opposite of sexy, in my mind, like, like, beans.
Rachel Hope Cleves
Oh yeah, oh yes, but beans were considered potentially aphrodisiac because they they puffed the penis up.
Anita Rao
Okay. There's also this really interesting kind of cultural history of like something being exotic or hard to find in a particular moment makes it considered romantic or sexy. Like potatoes, I need you to explain how potatoes became sexy.
Rachel Hope Cleves
Yeah, potatoes initially. Well, potatoes are a new world crop, right? They come out of the Andes, out of present day Peru. And so they're very exotic when they first arrive in Europe. And they are initially believed potentially to be an aphrodisiac, as is chocolate, another new world crop that comes out of Mesoamerica. And you can find references to potatoes being an aphrodisiac in Shakespeare. Later, they lose their aphrodisiac reputation, but I still think, like potato chips can be a lovely aphrodisiac.
Anita Rao
What makes them sexy to you?
Rachel Hope Cleves
Oh, there's a wonderful scene in a book by MFK Fisher where she describes eating potato chips with a lover, like these wonderful golden fried potato chips in a hotel in Switzerland. And it's just like an incredibly like sexy and indulgent scene. And I think like any food that we're eating purely for pleasure and not for nutritive value, has that aphrodisiac association.
Anita Rao
So I want to go now back to your personal story. So we had situated you as someone growing up in New York City, studying in New York City, after you got your PhD, you and your husband at the time, and your two children moved to Paris for a year. This was in 2013 Paris. Kind of plays such a big part in our cultural imagination around sexy food. So what was that like to be there for you?
Rachel Hope Cleves
Well, I spent a lot of that year shopping for food, cooking food. I'd actually, I'd at that point, I had had my PhD for about a decade, so I had been working, you know, after, after a long period of study, raising two kids, writing my first book, getting tenure, so it had been a lot of hard work, and then I had this year long sabbatical in Paris. We were living in a small apartment, no dishwasher and no laundry machine, and so a lot of my days I spent like walking to markets. My husband, at that time, was working for a company based on the east coast of the US, so we didn't have to start work until late in the day Paris time. So we would send the kids off to school, and then the two of us would walk to some market every day, and we would go pick out food from the market together and come home, and then I would like cook a big meal. And it was the first opportunity I'd had to indulge myself that way, really, since I had kids, because when I was in a graduate student and writing my dissertation and having children, I gave up cooking. So it did feel incredibly indulgent and wonderful. And the ingredients in Paris were so great. And actually, the funny thing is, I think we went to Paris expecting to like eat at in restaurants and really enjoy your restaurant food, but we didn't that much. What we really enjoyed was the amazing quality of the ingredients in the market.
Anita Rao
Yes. So you had this experience of kind of living a very European lifestyle, I guess. But you also were there to research, as you said, you're on a sabbatical. You were researching food history and sexuality history. I guess I'm curious about a particular moment where you started to realize that there was something more to explore. It wasn't just, oh, we link food and sex because they're both from the natural world, because they both give us pleasure. There was something in particular that you were discovering in Paris that made you feel like this connection between food and sex needed further inquiry. So what was that?
Rachel Hope Cleves
Well, initially I wasn't researching food and sex. Initially I was just researching food history. So I had, at that point, written two books. So I'd written one book about death and I'd written one book about sex, and then I thought, Oh, I'll write a book about food, and then I'll have covered the whole trifecta. Of human experience, sex, death and fruit. I'll be done. So I started researching Americans who learned how to cook in Paris. But as I started reading Memoirs of people learning how to cook in Paris, I read Julia Child's memoir, and I read a Julia Child's editor, Judith Jones's memoir, and I was reading memoirs written by the lesbians of the Left Bank in the early 20th century and the lost generation. And as I was reading their memoirs, there was so much about sex wrapped up with their accounts of food. And so I actually came at it sideways. The moment of realization was like, oh, like, all these people are really linking food and sex in their writing, and like coming for Americans and Britons, coming to Paris creates these linked sensual appetites. And I started wondering why that was, and I discovered that there was really very little written historically about how food and sex were linked in the imagination or in practice, because people, I think, have mostly assumed that it's such a natural linkage, it doesn't need explaining. But what I found when I started researching was that, well, yes, food and sex are often linked over time and space. So we can find people connecting it in ancient Chinese poetry or in ancient Greek poetry, or, you know, in ancient Indian Medical thought, like you can find it all over. But how people link these things changes profoundly depending on where and when.
Anita Rao
Coming up Rachel takes us back to 18th century Paris, to the emergence of restaurants and their intimate ties with sex work. You're listening to Embodied from North Carolina Public Radio, a broadcast service of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. You can also hear Embodied as a podcast, follow and subscribe on your platform of choice. We'll be right back.
This is Embodied. I'm Anita Rao, and today we're looking into the history of food and sex. If you're planning a date in the modern era, say, for Valentine's Day, booking a table for two at a restaurant is a pretty safe choice. But if you were to go back in time, like 250 years ago, to the emergence of the first restaurants in Paris, things would be a little different. Restaurants were still large rooms filled with warm light private tables and good smells wafting in from the kitchen, but there was a heightened element of sexual allure. Going to a restaurant was a much more illicit act, and yes, we're alluding here to a history of sex work. A heads up that that's going to be part of this next segment of the conversation. Here's Rachel Hope Cleves, historian and author of the book 鈥淟ustful Appetites: An Intimate History of Good Food and Wicked Sex.鈥�
Rachel Hope Cleves
A lot of those early restaurants had what were called DOM de cometoire, which were women, sometimes the proprietress of the restaurant, sometimes people had been hired. And these women were seated on elevated seats, overlooking the whole room, and they tallied the bills for the diners. So the waiters were men, were grac, but the bill was brought to this woman, and she would tally it up and do the cash. And these women dressed provocatively. They were celebrated for their beauty. People would go to specific restaurants because of the renowned beauty of some of these DOM Decimator. And then on top of that, not all, but many of the early French restaurants had what were called Cabernet particularly, or private rooms. And these rooms were typically furnished with a table and a couple of chairs and a couch. And as La russe, the dictionary writer appear, le Rousseau said, like the couch was the plait de resistance. That was the whole point of these rooms. They had a door that closed. They were serviced by waiters who were notoriously discreet. They wouldn't come in without knocking first, and so men, and most of these early restaurant diners were men. Would bring women into these rooms, sometimes sex workers, sometimes they're mistresses, sometimes innocent parties who didn't know what was in store for them, and they would eat together in the private room and then make love on the couch.
Anita Rao
So what was the role of food in these spaces in terms of how it was linked to sex? Like both the implicit and explicit links between food on the menu and sex in these early Parisian restaurants?
Rachel Hope Cleves
Well, the word restaurant actually comes out of a broth, which was a restaurant, like a restorative broth that was intended to restore the vigor and virility of men who had, you know, lost their virility. This is in the late 18th century, like the 1770s and these, um. Aristocratic men were in the thinking of the time, you know, were like kind of fragile and like using their brains so much that they were drooping physically. So they would have these restoring broths that would like reinvigorate them and get them ready for amorous pursuits. So the first restaurants were actually institutions that sold this restorative broth and then started offering other kind of delicate and light fare. So from the very beginning, the restaurant is associated with sexuality in that way. In the private rooms, the menus varied. I found a lot of different accounts in the sources. There's a lot of like, kind of aphrodisiac evoking food. So like, crawfish were huge on private room menus, and they're associated, again, it's a food of the sea with sexual seduction and sexuality. The most important part of the menu for the private room is that it was very expensive. You could expect to pay twice what you would in the public room downstairs.
Anita Rao
Well, there was also this kickback system where the sex workers would be in partnership with the restaurant tours. I want to know more about that, and maybe use example of the champagne corks. I loved reading about that.
Rachel Hope Cleves
Oh, there's all sorts of kickback systems. So there was a champagne cork kickback system. There were women who sex workers, who specialized in dining with men in these restaurants. They were sometimes called Supers, and so they would take a man into they would get themselves invited into a private room, and then they would order champagne, and they would hold onto the corks because the champagne was expensive, and then they would come back the next day and get reimbursed a certain amount for every cork that they'd managed to collect over the evening. But restaurateurs and sex workers collaborated in all sorts of ways. So, like, if a restaurateur, for example, had, like, a bunch of a particular food that was going to go off soon, he'd be encouraging her to, you know, encouraging the sex workers to order this particular food so he wouldn't waste it, right? It's like, like, modern day restaurant managers try to get waiters to move certain, you know, entrees that like need to be eaten now or else they're going to end up in the garbage. They would also often decorate these private rooms with with knick knacks, things like a fan, you know, or some little thing you could buy. And the sex worker would ask her, her client, to buy it for her, which you would and then she would come back the next day and redeem it for, you know, whatever, five francs, and it would go back up on the mantel piece.
Anita Rao
So just to be clear, like, what we're talking about is these were the restaurants that did exist them. Like there wasn't another option of a place you could go out to eat, really, like, if you were going to go out to eat, this was the thing, which is in part why sex work and sex and food became so linked, right?
Rachel Hope Cleves
Yeah, not every restaurant had Cabernet particularly, but they were absolutely ubiquitous, and so there was a lot of hesitance on the part of respectable women to eat in restaurants at all in the 19th century, French women were more likely to but there were still restaurants that were considered like appropriate to bring your wife, and other restaurants which were only considered appropriate to bring your mistress. And then British and American women hesitated to eat at restaurants at all in the 19th century, and often expressed a lot of hesitance and apology if they did so, like, if they wrote about it to their family back home, or if they published travel diaries, they'd have to explain why. You know, well, it was okay. It really was okay. You know, eating with these other people and everybody assured me it's fine.
Anita Rao
So tell me about how restaurant culture then flowed from Paris to the US. This was in the 1800s and there were still remnants of sex work as part of restaurant culture. How did that go across the ocean?
Rachel Hope Cleves
Absolutely So, the first commonly agreed on restaurant in the United States is Delmonico's, which opens in lower Manhattan in the antebellum era. And it has private rooms. And in fact, again, it's considered very disreputable, like if you go there, you're going to see things you really shouldn't see. And eventually Delmonico's expels sex workers. Takes until the end of the 19th century for that to happen. So when restaurants first arrive in the United States, especially the French restaurants, modeled on the Parisian standard, they often have private rooms, and they often become associated with prostitution and sex work as well. That changes over time. But one of the funny things that happens is, you know, as American cities expand, and American women are joining the workforce, I'm talking about in the 19th century here, and you need places in the city for women to grab food, right? So you need respectable places for respectable women, like they can't mix with sex workers. You. You get the invention of new types of restaurants that are intended to service these respectable middle class women, places like ice cream parlors, so they wouldn't serve alcohol. They only served light food. They didn't have these private rooms. They're supposed to be safe spaces, but like as soon as women start gathering in them, they immediately acquire a sexual reputation. They immediately become sexually suspect. So you start seeing people write in newspapers. So everybody knows that these ice cream saloons are really just brothels, you know, and you can find people canoodling in them. And same thing happens when cafeterias start opening in the like turn of the 20th century. Like to serve again, women office workers, like, they're supposed to be places that are acceptable for women, but like, as soon as women are there in large numbers, they immediately become suspicious. So just like women eating out makes people suspicious totally.
Anita Rao
And I'm curious. I mean, there's a way that, you know, I hear what you're saying is like, Oh, this is a funny, you know, moment of of old history like it's it's not like this anymore. I can go get ice cream wherever I want. I can gather in public wherever I want and eat. But you were a waitress in college, and as you were reading about this history, you really started to like connect the dots between restaurant culture that you were studying about and restaurant culture that you had been immersed in. Tie that history to the present for me, of kind of what still lingers?
Rachel Hope Cleves
Yeah, I think a lot of this would be familiar to anybody who's worked as a waitress, because many of these things still define waitressing as a profession, like I mentioned in Paris, initially, all the waiters are men, and then waitressing emerges as a profession in the mid 19th century. In the United States, you start seeing mention of waitresses in New York City in the 1850s and in San Francisco, which is in the midst of the gold rush. So in the 1850s and from the very beginning, waitresses are seen as this very risque profession. In the book, I call it a parasexual profession, by which I mean, it's not sex work, but you are as the waitress encouraged from the beginning to sort of flirt and hold out the possibility a male customer thinks he might be able to get a date with you. He might be able to see you after and outside of work. He might be able to touch you on the waist or on the arm or in some other place that is not appropriate to touch women otherwise. So it's a sort of profession that evokes sexuality, the promise of sexuality, and that was still the case when I started waitressing in the mid 1990s in New York City. I was hired because I was an attractive young woman. I was willing to wear tight clothes, you know, and like, smile at men and flirt with them. And I got asked out all the time by men, so the assumption was definitely that I was like, present and available to be asked out. And I said no to a lot of people, and a couple of people said yes to because I thought they were cute. But yeah, my tips depended on my my level of flirtatiousness and openness to men.
Anita Rao
So I want to go back into the history a little bit. The way that we have been talking about sex and food so far is in a context that really centers men's sexuality and men's sexual exploits. So I want to talk about some of the first women who publicly centered the connection between their sexual pleasure and food. When did women start claiming food and sex for themselves?
Rachel Hope Cleves
It takes a long time, because it is considered in the 19th century. In the Victorian era, it is considered extremely disreputable for women to speak about their elementary appetites about their hungers. You're not allowed to mention the word stomach at Table. Table manners for women are, you know, if you're going to eat a piece of bread, like, tear it up into tiny little pieces and eat only a tiny piece at a time, if you have an orange, you should eat it with a teaspoon. Like, never accept seconds, you know. But don't ever allow yourself to be served the butter saw. So women are really restricted in how they can eat in public in the 19th century. And so you can imagine how restricted they were about what they could write about food. One of the first people to challenge that is an American woman who is living in London named Elizabeth Robbins Pinel, who was a salonese. She had a salon and she wrote art criticism, and she also started writing a food column for a cutting edge newspaper of the time. And instead of writing recipes, her food columns were these, like evocative descriptions of sort of food as a sensuous pleasure, and she eventually gathers them into a book, which is subtitled The Diary of a greedy woman called the feasts of auto Lycus. So I see her as this really groundbreaking woman food writer, and she's following. Followed by like a subsequent generation in the early 20th century of like women who start writing about their essential appetites, like in the 1920s and 1930s and it is considered at that time very risque. And honestly, those critiques of women who write about food have not let up. I think they are still with us.
Anita Rao
I want you to read a sample from one of the women in this cohort that we've been talking about so we can kind of understand, you know, how risque was it really? What is the content of what they're writing about? So there was a 19 year old writer from Montana named Mary McLean, and she wrote a memoir in 1902 and she spent seven pages describing the act of savoring a single green olive. So can you read me an excerpt from that essay?
Rachel Hope Cleves
Absolutely and Mary McLean the rest of her memoir is very risky as well, because she outs herself as bisexual in the memoir, The memoir she wanted to call it, I await the devil's coming. So she's she's describing herself as like this incredible bohemian in the words of the time, both sexually and in terms of her appetites, she writes, I take the olive in my fingers and I contemplate its green oval richness. It makes me think at once of the land where the green Citron grows, where the Cypress and the myrtle are emblems of the land of the sun, where human beings are delightfully enchantingly wicked, where the men are eager and passionate, and the women gracefully developed in mind and in body, and their two breasts show round and full and delicately veined beneath thin drapery. I set my teeth and my tongue upon the olive and bite it. It is bitter, salt, delicious. The saliva rushes to meet it, and my tongue is a happy tongue, as the morsel of Olive rests in my mouth and is crunched and squeezed lusciously among my teeth. A quick, temporary change takes place in my character. She goes on for another seven pages.
Anita Rao
You were in Paris. We situated you. You described this, this routine that you and your husband at the time had of the mornings together and of cooking together, what was the role that food and sex played in y'all's joint life in that season?
Rachel Hope Cleves
Well, from the beginning, my husband courted me with food. So that was true from from the very, very start, I think one of the first dates we ever went on, he brought me homemade like fresh plain yogurt with fruit mixed in. I was in my teens at the time, and, you know, our first serious date, when we got together and stayed together, was to see a concert in the park in New York City. And he brought this wonderful picnic, which included olives, which, again, I was just learning to enjoy. I was in my late teens, and I remember eating olives, and then, you know, kissing, and our tongues were slick with olive oil, like the juice of the olives. And I think the first time I came to his apartment, he cooked me a brook trout with a lemon and ginger. So, yeah, he courted me. He courted me through food and it it entirely worked.
Anita Rao
I love this. So one of the themes that comes up a lot in your book is kind of who is praised for and who is allowed to enjoy good food and good sex, and we have these narratives that we've been talking about of women and queer folks who've had to push back against claims that they were sexually deviant to be able to own their appetites and really enjoy food. When did food shift away from associations with sexual immorality or sexual deviancy.
Rachel Hope Cleves
Well, throughout most of the 20th century, I think that enjoyment of food is really seen as sexually suspicious, sexually illicit. And especially in the mid 20th century, and especially for men, like being very interested in food marks you as gay. So during the 1950s and 1960s you really get the peak of this, what we call in history, sexuality, the homosexual, heterosexual binary, and this extreme like fixation on like. And I put this in quotation marks, and I'm like, the homosexual is like a type, right? And the homosexual man is effeminate and loves food, and knows about food, and that I think remains powerful, really, throughout much of the late 20th century, it was still very much the way of thought when I was growing up. And then in the 80s, you get the emergence of this new category called the foodies. So the. Word is invented in the mid 80s, and from the beginning it is like a marketing term, like businesses are marketing to foodie. And what a foodie is, I argue in the book, is basically a way of taking this reputation of the gourmet, which has been, you know, so stained by sexual aspersions, and especially for men by this sort of stain of of queerness and making an interest in food safe for straight men so that you can sell them products. So basically, when you create the foodie, then you open up this whole market of straight men who can buy things with their salaries, like pasta machines and now sous vide machines, or, like, whatever the newest gadget is. So the foodie, to me, is basically this, like, straight washing of this queer tradition. Like, you can be a foodie and gay, and there's, like, a, there's, there's books that come out in the mid 80s about, like, what is the foodie? And they say as much. But being a foodie doesn't make you gay, right? Like you can be straight in a foodie. So it makes the foodie, makes enjoyment of good food safe for straight men, even. So, like I said, I do think there is a lingering suspicion of women who are, like, really, really, really into food, that there is something it says something about their sexual appetites and women chefs are, or like women, food writers now, like women, food bloggers and food influencers or whatever, are still totally many of them are still really marketed that way.
Anita Rao
Rachel is going to stay with us just ahead to talk about how our definitions of good food and good sex today compare to what they've been in the past. As always, you can hear the podcast version of this show by following Embodied on your platform of choice. Please stay with us. This is Embodied. I'm Anita Rao. For a long stretch of history, rich, indulgent food was linked to illicit or immoral sex. That argument is the backbone of Rachel hope cleaves book lustful appetites and intimate history of good food and wicked sex. Rachel is a historian who's taken us through more than two centuries of food and sex Chronicles, from the emergence of the restaurant in Paris to food writing, from queer American women in the early 1900s to the modern day definition of a foodie. But what are the links between good food and good sex today?
Rachel Hope Cleves
So things have changed radically, I think, in the 21st century, and I see it all the time when I'm talking to my students. I'm a professor at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, and so most of my students were born in the 21st century at this point, right? And they don't hold these same associations between luxurious food and illicit sexuality, you know, between the restaurant and sex, or between gay men and gourmet food like this is all in the past for them. But what they are very concerned about now, which is something I didn't grow up with, particularly, is this obsession with like, what they think of as clean food or pure food. So I get a lot of students coming into my food history classes who are very concerned with health. And in my book, I describe this as a shift from what I jokingly call the old world of good food, bad sex, or a link between indulgent food and illicit, sensuous sexuality, to now we're in a new world of bad food, good sex, where we think that, in order now, we think that, like sexual pleasure is good, it's no longer morally problematic to have sex outside of marriage. You know, it's a lot less morally problematic Now, depending on where you live, to have sex with people of the same sex or gender as you. But now we have this, I think, increasingly rigid belief that in order to have like, good, pleasurable sex, you have to have like an appropriately sexy body, which means you have to be slim, which means you have to starve yourself of calories. So now we connect, instead of like heavily sensuous food with erotic sexual experience. Now I see a lot of wellness influencers and cookbooks promoting like what they call clean food or pure food as the key to good sex. Like, if you you know, you have to have a juice fast, all, all vegetable, you know, all plant food diet in order to maintain good directions. Like, I've seen that in cookbooks, you can't have good erections if you eat meat, or you can't have like, again, I have seen this in cookbooks, like you won't have vaginal lubrication unless you're eating juice fast. Oh, my God. And exactly, you know.
Anita Rao
It's interesting because, I mean, as you're saying this, for some reason, the image that really came to my mind was, I'm a 90s kid, and I feel like there was this era where yogurt commercials were all, like, zoomed in women very sensually eating yogurt. And it was like a way of, like, selling this, like, healthy food, but it was so sexualized. And, I mean, I'm curious about, like, there's so much going on here. It's like, there's the diet culture influence of like, whose bodies are good bodies and whose bodies are sexy. There's like, the way our thinking about food culture and what is healthy food has changed. Do you think that we think different foods are sexy now because of all of this, or is that mostly like a marketing thing?
Rachel Hope Cleves
I do think it cuts into the enjoyment of sensual food when you have this kind of moral discourse looming in your head that there is, you know, something dirty about food that is enjoyable, like food that is rich in fat, like humans, because we are evolved to eat fat and like eat carbohydrates, we find pleasure in these foods, right? But now we have this, like, you know, warning that like to eat these things are, is, is dirty. Eat, to eat butter, is is dirty, it's clogging your arteries, or whatever it is. So I do think it cuts into our ability to enjoy ourselves. I would like a world where we felt less morally disciplined in what we ate, and also less morally disciplined in how we expressed our sexual selves.
Anita Rao
I'm curious how this fits in, back into your own story. We talked about your food relationship with your husband, you all did end up getting divorced. You are now on the dating scene. I'm curious about like, what it's like for you to explore new romantic and sexual connections as your your relationship with food is also evolving.
Rachel Hope Cleves
Well, we're not divorced. We're just separated.
Anita Rao
Okay, you're just separated. Sorry, correct the facts.
Rachel Hope Cleves
But we will, we will be divorced. Um, so over the course of what was a very happy marriage with my ex husband, food, really, you know, took center stage, and it became something like a familiar story. I think for a lot of people like it became very domestic. For us, it became, we had children, we moved we got older. It became a way that my husband showed his love for me, was by cooking for me and feeding me. And it really took center stage, and when my children grow up and moved out of the house, we decided that we wanted new adventures in life, and so we separated. And then actually, one of the exciting things for me as a like a single person again, suddenly, which I hadn't been since I was a teenager, was like decentering food. Oddly enough, it was like having the freedom to like, express myself sensually, not through food, through new experiences with new people. And so that was kind of fun and liberating for me. It was like for it not to be all about like, great food, but that sometimes to be like, too busy doing other things to eat dinner, you know?
Anita Rao
Yeah, I can read between the lines, yeah.
Rachel Hope Cleves
So that was very like, that was exciting and liberating for me. And then also I, I started cooking again, which I really hadn't done much of, because it had been like, I said this way, that my ex husband showed his love, and he he is a wonderful cook, and we still eat dinner together, usually once a week. So I get the best of both worlds, because I still get him to, you know, cook for me fairly regularly. I still get to enjoy that, but it was exciting for me to kind of like get back in the kitchen too, and and cook things that he didn't particularly like, you know, with flavors. He didn't particularly like food. It was, it felt very liberating to me to be, Ha, I'm gonna use this ingredient that I dill. He hates dill. I'm like, I'm gonna, like, do a soup and put, like, tons of fresh dill in it. So there was something, you know, pleasurable for me about cooking to my own tastes, and like, trying to figure out what I liked, and also kind of a freedom from food, and then also had, like, some wonderful experiences in the last year and a half since we've been separated, you know, with with new lovers, involving food, sharing oysters with somebody on a first date, or eating chocolate with somebody after, you know, after a date, or whatever it is.
Anita Rao
So in the phase of your life that you are in now, like, is there any like ritual or routine around food that feels especially like sensual or connected to sex for you?
Rachel Hope Cleves
Well, I am in a phase right now where one of my particular indulgences would be. Sharing a pint of ice cream with somebody at the end of an evening like after all is said and done. There is just nothing better than lying on the couch with someone. I have a gas fireplace in my living room right now and eating ice cream together. It doesn't get better. What flavor are we eating? Oh, my favorite is coffee with chocolate in it, but it's hard to find like a good espresso chip. I love that. If it's not that often chocolate, I love chocolate. Chocolate does if I believe anything is an aphrodisiac, it's definitely chocolate, but it could be like fruit, nothing too sweet. I don't like the like Cake, ice cream, type of flavors, chocolate is delicious.
Anita Rao
So you write in the Epilog of your book, for too many of us, pleasure inflicts distress where it could produce joy. So how would you encourage more folks to find pleasure in the sensuality of food?
Rachel Hope Cleves
Let go of the belief in pure food, clean food, good food, bad food. All food is good food. Allow yourself to enjoy what you're eating. Eat widely. Take pleasure in it. Embrace your body. Embrace your flesh. Don't obsess about calories and don't don't stigmatize some food types as good and some food types as bad. Just move your body. Feed your body. Enjoy your body. Enjoy your flesh.
Anita Rao
My approach to cooking has always been pretty utilitarian, but after this conversation with Rachel, I found myself thinking about whipping up a more sensual Valentine's Day meal. But where to start? To answer that question, we've got to go straight to an expert.
Manolo Lo虂pez
If you think about it, there's foreplay with food, right? You have your appetizers, then you have your entrees, and then you have your dessert.
Anita Rao
That's Manolo Lo虂pez. He's a Puerto Rican chef and entrepreneur who's been cooking since he was a teenager. He says the first step in making a romantic meal is coming at it with intention.
Manolo Lo虂pez
Listen, sometimes you create dinners in very intimate settings with smaller groups, and it's kind of like you're setting the stage for for your partner, right? So you think about a dinner in this like dim space, and you have the candle lights and you have the sense and you have the wine. And when you know people are having that type of interaction within sexuality, and within sex like you don't just jump into it. I mean, some people do, but they're doing it wrong. To do it right and to have that full course meal, then you have to come through all those stages in order to finish it.
Anita Rao
Okay, that all sounds doable to me so far, but now let's get to the cooking. As Rachel told us, plenty of foods throughout history have been considered aphrodisiacs, but not all foods make us feel particularly sexy. Manolos learned some do's and don'ts for Valentine's Day fare, which start with this cautionary tale.
Manolo Lo虂pez
An old story that I had on a Valentine's Day where my partner was like, I just want you to cook for me. You know, as a chef, you're always cooking for others, so you never cook for yourself. And I'm Puerto Rican, so a lot of the food that we have is heavy on starches, heavy on pork, and I made the mistake of just creating a whole dish, like a whole meal that was just too much for that, and then by the end of the meal, like we're all we're both bloated. So it didn't work out in that way. So definitely, I've learned from my mistakes.
Anita Rao
Noted. No to those foods that make you ready for the Netflix, but not the chill. If Manolo had a do over for that botched Valentine's home cooked meal, this is what he would chef up.
Manolo Lo虂pez
I already made that mistake once of doing something too Hardy, like Mofongo and stuff like that, so let's scratch it, and I would go straight into something lighter. And definitely would do something, something like a whole roasted fish. We work with a lot of local fishermen, so definitely head to to one of the dogs here in Cata or in San Juan and buy a fish. It's probably going to be a snapper. I would ask them to scale it, because that's no easy feat. And then I would bring it home, and then I would debone it. And the way that I would debone it is to make sure that the fish is butterflied bottom to top. So put that in the fridge and let it dry out a little bit, 20 minutes before roasting it in the oven. And actually, I'm taking that back. I'm gonna broil it. I'll broil it in the oven for seven minutes, very light, seasoning, salt, a little bit of white pepper, and then you take it out. It's skin is fully crisp on top, wild apps cooking seven to eight minutes. I'm making a salsa verde with fresh cilantro, parsley, a little grated ginger, grated garlic, white balsamic vinegar, olive oil, red chili peppers. And then just let that sit there when it comes out. Definitely have some tostones next to it, like you can have your fried starches and stuff like that. Just not let that be the main thing. And then I would drizzle all that green side style on top of the fish, and then we would eat it with our hands.
Anita Rao
And to wash it all down?
Manolo Lo虂pez
Definitely a white white wine. Or, you know, if I'm trying to get things going quicker, let's do rum. Let's do we're in Puerto Rico, I would definitely get some donkey rum, some white rum, and just have something very light on top of it, like freshly squeezed grapefruit. That's it.
Anita Rao
Yum. I would love to plan something like this myself, but let's say my culinary dreams don't quite come true. As a novice chef, I burn the fish my salsa is too puckery, and I leave the wine in the freezer by accident, I need a backup plan. So where can you go out and ensure it will be a sensual dining experience, a place with the right mood lighting, a light yet sumptuous meal and a tactile element to the food. Manolo says Your best bet is sushi.
Manolo Lo虂pez
I think, like sashimi and sushi is sexy, right? You're there at a sushi bar, the sushi Master is in front of you. They, they bring out the loin, they bring out whatever it is, and you, they take out this, this knife, and they just, with the precision, they cut it, and then with their bare hands, they're using, you know, they're putting in the rice, and they're molding it, they're put the wasabi, and then they put the little piece of of fish, and then they brush it, just like softly, with a little bit of soy sauce. And then they just put it in front of you, and then you then have a choice whether you want to eat it with your hands or with your chopsticks. And I just can't think of something that is just like more personal than that, also the way that it happens, the way that there is a build up in order to have that and then that satisfaction of understanding what's actually happening in your tongue, the front part of it and the back part of it, the saltiness of the soy, the fattiness of the tuna, how pungent the wasabi is, and the texture of the rice, those are kind of stuff that when we have it, we talk about it in that sense it's very sensual, in the way it's made and the way it's consumed and the way it's a one on one thing.
Anita Rao
A big thanks to Chef Manolo Lo虂pez for sharing his stories with us and to everyone listening Happy cooking. You can find out more about everyone featured on today's show at our website, embodiedwunc.org you can find all episodes of Embodied the radio show there, and subscribe to our weekly podcast. If you have a favorite sexy meal or recipe we want to hear about it, send us an email at embodied@wunc.org or record a voice memo in our virtual mailbox. SpeakPipe, find that link in the show notes of our podcast episodes, or at embodiedwunc.org, you can also stay up to date by following us on Instagram. Our handle is @embodied瓜神app. This program was recorded at the American Tobacco Historic District. North Carolina public radio is a broadcast service of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I'm Anita Rao.