Recently in The Food Issue Category

Photo by Flickr user jslander. Used under a Creative Commons license.

So sure, it takes longer to make scratch waffles with fresh-toasted pecans in the batter and sliced fruit and whipped cream and a delicate lacing of thick maple syrup on top than it takes to scramble an egg. But do we ever say it's a *problem* that waffles take longer to make than scrambled eggs?

Heather Corinna, writing at RHRealityCheck.org continues to demonstrate by example that when people say "gray area" they usually mean "poorly lit." She illuminates the "gray area" of "asking for it." (Even better, she does it with a food analogy.)

I'm a very talented cook, and my friends love it when I cook for them. Some crave my meals intensely. If I have a friend over, and I have them smell some fresh basil I picked up at the market, show them a beautiful tomato from my garden, does my doing that oblige me to cook something for them with those ingredients? Have I promised, committed or consented to doing so? Could we reasonably say that if, after showing them those things, they forced me to cook against my will with the rationalization that I "teased" them with those ingredients, that they'd be in the right and that forcing me to do something I didn't want to do was anything but an exploitation and an abuse? Even if I did at some point say I was going to cook, and then decided that I just wasn't in the mood, would it be okay for them to force me to, anyway, because I "made" them hungry, and thus, am somehow obligated to sate them? She said it here.

Look ma, no gray!

It's another experimental Half-Nekkid Thursday video presentation. I posted a recipe for tomato sauce that I mentioned making last week. In the recipe I forgot to mention that if you let the sauce simmer all day in a crock pot you can smooth it out with a hand blender. And I realized it reminded me a bit of how I like to be touched, at least at first, with that gentle, slow sensual stirring motion.

Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)

So yesterday during a brief lecture on what was meant by "sex-negative" culture, our professor presented a very cool statement about food:

Try to imagine the following world: Accurate information about food is freely available and exists for all ages in appropriate ways. Talking about what sorts of food you like and negotiating with a dinner partner is a simple and relaxed experience. Different preferences, whether personal or cultural, are important for the information they provide and are no more or less important than hair color or family history, unless people are trying to figure out what to eat together. Some people prefer to eat with the same person indefinitely, others prefer to eat in a group and still others eat with a variety of partners as the mood suits them and nobody is ever forced to eat anything or with anyone. Each person is an expert in their desires and needs around food and their choices are respected.

Now what was missing from the presentation was the source of that quote. Once I got home and started Googling around I'm pretty sure the source must have been The Language of Sex Positivity, by Charlie Glickman, from Electronic Journal of Human Sexuality, Volume 3, July 6, 2000. It contains the preceding paragraph and adds a nice follow-up...

While there are many examples of how our world is different from this food-positive one (as anyone who becomes vegetarian in a family of meat eaters knows,) it isn't too hard to imagine this place. Now go back through the last paragraph and substitute “sex” for “food” and “have sex” for “eat.” How much more difficult is this world to imagine? How much more work would it take to make this happen?

On the other hand, our professor's version contained a modified version of the first that didn't require us to imagine...

Try to imagine the following world: Accurate information about sex is freely available and exists for all ages in appropriate ways. Talking about what sorts of sex you like and negotiating with a sex partner is a simple and relaxed experience. Different preferences, whether personal or cultural, are important for the information they provide and are no more or less important than hair color or family history, unless people are trying to figure out what kind of sex to have together. Some people prefer to have sex with the same person indefinitely, others prefer to have sex in a group and still others have sex with a variety of partners as the mood suits them and nobody is ever forced to be sexual or have sex with anyone. Each person is an expert in their desires and needs around sex and their choices are respected.

Our professor suggested that for all of society's bragging about this or tisk-tisking about that, the fact that the two versions of the paragraph have highly different implications suggests that we have a sex-negative society. And *I* would add that the simple fact that we'd consider making the comparison in the first place is evidence of the same thing.

I adore food/sex analogies -- I think they're each wonderful metaphors for the other.

I used to use analogies between food and sex so often I created a separate category for it. And still think each is a great analogy for the other.

Not sure why I was thinking about this yesterday while walking along the beach but I started thinking about how... cliché it is that evolutionary psychologists/sociobiologists/social-darwinists/whatever seem to focus so much attention on the evolutionary psychology of sex, constructing *elaborate* "genetic" justifications for the "evolutionary benefit" of wealthy white Anglo-american women wearing strapless evening gowns while their partners wear tight-collared tuxedos.

Oh, got it. I started out thinking about how much I didn't care to eat fish when I was growing up in Southern Appalachia, and how my midwest-raised partner feels the same because in neither area where there really very many options for fresh fish, and I was comparing that to my own children who just fall all over fish when they can get it -- smoked salmon, fried salmon skins (which is a lot like fish-flavored bacon so isn't as awful as it sounds... to me), and, especially, sushi and sashimi. Yup, that's it. That's the point where I started thinking that if you look at something *even more* fundamentally survival oriented, like food choices, you'd think evolutionary psychologists would be all over that since

a) everybody has to eat
b) we have to eat far more frequently than we have to have sex
c) we have to eat far *far* more frequently than we have to select partners
d) people in almost all cultures are far more willing to disclose what and how they eat compared to with whom and how they have sex.

Yet it's pretty much crickets on the old food front.

Anyway, one common trope of the EP crowd is to say something inane like "does date rape have evolutionary benefits? Well, there's one really, really obscure tribe in the middle of a southeastern University campus that seems to rely on it for mate selection... blah blah blah" as if what obscure groups do says much about the rest of us. And yet both they and, to a certain extent we, lap those sorts of stories up.

But outside of a couple of guesses about our early diet based on current trends in obesity (early humans liked sweets and fats too but they weren't very abundant) you don't really see a whole lot of EP theorizing about diet or eating practices when, when you think about it, our social practices around dining -- for instance who we will or won't eat with under various circumstances -- are at least as complex as our practices related to mate selection or sex.

Funny how we study one but not the other eh?

(Oddly, I think if *I* were to go into EP I'd actually spend a little time studying *that* -- our differential interests in cultures of food vs. cultures of sex. But that's a story for another day.)

William Saletan of Slate Magazine just wrote an article identifying parallels between contraception and obesity control.

The point of birth control is fun without consequences. You still want sex, and you still get it, but we tinker with the process so you don't get pregnant. Last week, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops complained that separating sex from procreation violates nature. Of course it does. Nature put the fun and the consequences together, but for reasons that no longer apply. Nature has produced a creature clever enough to take nature apart. We get the orgasms without the organisms.

Why not try the same with food? Keep the fun and lose the consequences. We invented birth control; why not girth control?

See the quotes in context here.

While the tone of article is in very poor taste. (Saletan sees both pregnancy and obesity as consequences of having too much "fun" whereas sex can be anything but fun) but the parallels are sound.

I'm particularly curious why contemporary moralists, especially religious moralists, have so little to say on the subject of eating when they've had so very much to say about sex.

Any conceivable claim you could make about natural vs. unnatural interventions into sex, any talk of cheapenings, or alienations, or reductionisms, or degradations, or violations of natural orders, or, responsibilities or, especially, any conversations about dignity must hold equally for food. And yet the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (for instance) is mum.

As Saletan says, whereas tradition provided only for abstinence, modern science has provided barrier methods, pharmaceutical blocks, and even surgical interventions to remove offending tissue or to prevent its formation to begin with. If one's bad the other ought to be equally so. And yet...

[Note: Please don't construe anything in this post as an acceptance or rejection of the controversial issue of weight or weight management. The closest it comes is a abstract-level question about the way we discuss that acceptance or rejection. --fl]

Another entry in my more-honored-in-the-breach Saturday Non-salacious blogging series.

I think there are tremendous parallels between sex and food, enough so that I created a separate category called The Food Issue to talk about it.

I'd like to revive the analogizing as a way to revisit the naturalist/neutralist attitude towards sex I outlined last week about Babette's Feast.

In a touching post mulling the decisions of gay and lesbian Catholics to remain celebate rather than have sex with their preferred gender, Lynn Gassiz-Sax of Noli Irritare Leones, responded that

"What sort of makes sense all the same: sex is powerful, sex is important, sex is profound, sex matters! I suppose I'm not really a neutralist/naturalist ... about sex."

Read her words in context here.

Though I fall into the naturalist/neutralist camp I too believe sex is powerful, sex is important, sex is profound, sex matters so I think I need to clarify.

In other religions I think observers of kosher, halal, or (I think) ayurvedic dietary restrictions might make the same arguments about food, i.e. "How can you just go around unconsciously eating whatever you like. How can you claim to be genuinely connected to faith if you can't even discipline yourself to choose what foods to eat and which to give up?"

Yet followers of other faiths can be as passionate, as observant, and as... well... *faithful* to their religions despite their amorality (in the literal sense of "moral neutrality") about food.

More to the point, one can be utterly amoral from a religious standpoint about diet while still placing great value on food in a social/family/personal context -- food can still powerful, be important, be profound, and matter.

The "naturalist/neutralist" position I referred to is simply amoral -- morally neutral -- about sex. That position has, nor needs to have, any bearing on ones ability to be devout, any more than your "failure" to keep kosher has any bearing on yours or Eve's or, say, Hugo's devotion.

In my family's Scandinavian/Anglo-Saxon Protestant/Congregationalist and American-Unitarian tradition neither Martin Luther nor the English and American Puritans believed that sex in marriage should be reserved strictly for recreation yet they distinguished themselves from, say, Catholics out of a belief that one could not be sufficiently devout in Catholicism. (I'm not claiming they *were* more devout, only that they believed they could be and they acted out of that belief.)

Coming from that religious perspective, the debate over homosexuality or celibacy feels as distracting from true faith is as frustrating and heartbreaking as would be a similar debate about whether one can have genuine faith if one eats the hindquarters of a cloven-hooved, cud-chewing animal (which, to be faithful to the letter of the Bible, no Protestant, let alone Jew or, I believe, Moslem should touch since it's unclean.)

At any rate, while I have a naturalist/neutralist stance towards sex I absolutely believe sex is powerful, sex is powerful, sex is important, sex is profound, sex matters socially, familially, and personally. But not religiously.

And with that stance every moment Nathan or Eve spends tormenting themselves about which parts they want to rub against is would be a moment spent alienating rather than reinforcing their faith. This seems particularly tragic because in every respect (not every *other* respect) they seem so clearly to be of enormous faith.

[Speaking of food prohibitions, in the early 1960s Pope John XXIII's Vatican II council declared the prohibition against eating meat on Fridays unnecessary for salvation after all. Half a billion people used to eat fish on Fridays because meat consumption was prohibited on pain of suffering in Purgatory, for thousands of years, before finally passing into Heaven. Vatican II rendered that prohibition inoperative. (To borrow another 60's era term.) Several years later counter-culture comedian George Carlin joked that "I'll bet there are still guys in Limbo doing time on the meat rap." One wonders how long before a future wag can quip "I'll bet there are still guys in Purgatory doing time on the gay rap." --fl]

Update: In a separate post Lynn points out the limits of analogy: they're only illuminating if the analogy works for you, and the food analogy doesn't work for her. A more fundamental analogy (maybe not an analogy at all -- also drawn from George Carlin's meditations on his Catholic upbringing) might be the once-held principle that one must go to confession and receive the sacrament at least once a year or face damnation. While most Christian denominations would state a strong preference for attending services at least once a year I'm not aware of any others with such strict calendar date-certains. Yet it's unlikely that people of those other denominations feel less connected or less devout if for some reason they don't make it to church in a year as long as they remain otherwise religiously faithful. And in terms of this post one would say that Protestants are *amoral* but not moral or immoral -- "naturalist" but not "jehovanist" or "gnostic" -- about the calendar. See also different stances on one's final destination if you fail to die before receiving last rites, a.k.a "dying unshriven."

In the most important book I ever read about sex, Murray S. Davis's Smut: Erotic reality/obscene ideology, the author defines "lust" as an altered state of consciousness distinct from our everyday senses.

The book is about quite a lot more than that and if I can ever find my copy I'll write extensively about the other stuff, but for now let's say after reading the book I got a whole new perspective on what sex means in the social sense, and a whole new set of questions to ask whenever I notice one of my assumptions about sex bubbling up from my upbringing.

Yesterday was Valentine's Day. Today's a good day to talk about this because we've got 364 days before the next one. Anyway, I was thinking about how when Valentine's is working for you it's (traditionally) about three things.

1) By yourself: you select cards, presents, treats, what you're going to wear, what you want to do, what you want to say, where you're going to go. Often you'll be pushing a little load of hopes, fears, dreams, resentments, expectations, lessons learned, and so on. But you'll do almost all of this on your own. Any plans you make with someone else will be superficial to your inner dialog and your thoughts of the one you look forward (or at least hope) to being with.

2) Together: You get together, almost always just you together. People almost always eat together, just the two of you. My experience waiting tables years ago, and sitting at tables listening to people around me, says a lot gets said on Valentine's day that usually isn't said other times. This is often when we bring together and share the thoughts, the gifts, the dreams, the plans, the expectations, the hopes and fears we've collected all day. This is when we have our heart-to-hearts. (I'll get back to this in a moment, but first I want to add the final element of a traditional Valentine's Day...)

3) Together, but not exactly "together:" Often, though not by any means always, you may get together after dinner and fuck the living stuffing out of each other. When I say "not exactly 'together'" though I mean that while we're as physically close as two people can be during sex, we're also maddened with lust, fucking with abandon, star struck, articulating our feelings not with words but cries and murmers and with the urgent gestures of our bodies. In other words, we're in an altered state of consciousness distinct from our everyday senses.

(Depending on verve, libido, and other factors you may repeat #2 and #3 over the course of the evening.)

Now, romantic convention has it that sex is one of the most intimate acts between two people. I'm gonna say maybe it's the most vulnerable thing we can do, and maybe the most physical. But intimate? I say it's when you're head to head at a table for two. Sure, not just on Valentine's Day, and not even especially so. Breakfast the morning after is a good time too. Dates when you've gotten past the are-we-gonna-do-it stage too.

There are other genuinely intimate moments, of course. Long walks work wonders. Long drives together provide lots of opportunity of course. Murmering into the night after sex, or after sleeping in can be great too.

I don't want to sound like I'm confusing talking with intimacy, by the way. My insight years ago in restaurants wasn't just about that. It was about a presence, expression, and contact without the loss of clarity that comes (wonderfully! sweetly! But generally-inexpressibly!) with sex.

Fortunately (as I like to say) we don't have to choose one over the other. You can have a perfectly lovely life with one or the other. Having both however (even for a single evening, even if you part forever only hours later) just rocks.

Update: By the way, feel free to disagree completely. We might just disagree on the meaning of "intimacy" and there's never a problem with getting clarity on the big words we use all the time.

As you've probably noticed I analogize frequently between food and sex and occasionally I post expressly about it. See my introduction to The Food Issue. I was just about to shut up about paleo-chauvinist Leon Kass (who I promise I'm not really obsessed about) when I ran across the following in comments to Amanda Marcotte's Pandagon post.

From Kass, Leon: The Hungry Soul. University of Chicago Press, 1994, 1999) pages 148-149

Worst of all from this point of view are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone --a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive.
"I fear I may by this remark lose the sympathy of many reader, people who will condescendingly regard as quaint or even priggish the view that eating in the street is for dogs. Modern America's rising tide of informality has already washed out many long-standing traditions -- their reasons long before forgotten -- that served well to regulate the boundary between public and private; and in many quarters complete shamelessness is treated as proof of genuine liberation from the allegedly arbitrary constraints of manners.
To cite one small example: yawning with uncovered mouth. Not just the uneducated rustic but children of the cultural elite are now regularly seen yawning openly in public (not so much brazenly or forgetfully as indifferently and "naturally"), unaware that it is an embarrassment to human self-command to be caught in the grip of involuntary bodily movements (like sneezing, belching, and hiccuping and even the involuntary bodily display of embarrassment itself, blushing). But eating on the street -- even when undertaken, say, because one is between appointments and has no other time to eat -- displays in fact precisely such lack of self-control: It beckons enslavement to the belly. Hunger must be sated now; it cannot wait. Though the walking street eater still moves in the direction of his vision, he shows himself as a being led by his appetites. Lacking utensils for cutting and lifting to mouth, he will often be seen using his teeth for tearing off chewable portions, just like any animal. Eating on the run does not even allow the human way of enjoying one's food, for it is more like simple fueling; it is hard to savor or even to know what one is eating when the main point is to hurriedly fill the belly, now running on empty. This doglike feeding, if one must engage in it, ought to be kept from public view, where, even if WE feel no shame, others are compelled to witness our shameful behavior.

Note: I have not verified the quote from Kass's text, but if it's a hoax a quick check on Google suggests it's very widespread.

Wendy of Housewyfe and Caveman summarizes one of the keys to superb sex.

The old menu [was] precise and orgasmically-focused. Now the orgasms are just part of the pleasurable equation.

Ever been to a restaurant with small children?
Do they seem to care much about...

• making plans to go out to the restaurant?
• discussing where to go with the people you'll go with?
• thinking about other people you might want to invite along?
• picking out nice clothes to wear to the restaurant?
• meeting companions out front and chatting in the lobby?
• perusing the menu?
• selecting a nice wine that goes perfectly with the meal?
• nibbling the bread and olive oil?
• enjoying the corking ceremony, tasting, and then approving the wine?
• pouring wine for everyone else?
• contemplating the menu?
• asking about specials?
• eating the salad?
• chatting while you eat?
• eating the entree?
• joking and laughing while you eat?
• commenting on one's own selections and hearing other's comments?
• offering each other morsels of this and that?
• savoring the flavors, textures, aromas, and appearance of each tiny bite?
• the sensation of slowly, pleasurably getting comfortably full?
• contemplating the dessert menu?
• murmuring pleasantries as you wait for dessert to arrive?
• sitting back and relaxing after?
• savoring cordials, coffee, or port after?
• sitting together talking and laughing as you wait for your meal to settle?
• maybe going for a nice walk afterwards?
• bidding your companions a leisurely farewell as you leave to go your separate ways?

• dessert

• they're not very patient with anything that doesn't cut right to the chase: dessert
• if it were up to them they'd go straight to dessert
• you can tempt them to try other things you know are good for them by pointing out exotic, adventurous-sounding items on their special menu but no matter what it's called it's really just the same five bland choices they always want.

So what would public health be like if cultural mores about sex and eating were reversed? I can think of a couple of things right off the bat.

Obesity would be as big a nervous curiosity to the general public as BDSM wear, and as poorly understood.

Diet-related illnesses such as diabetes and arterial sclerosis and food-borne illnesses such as salmonella, trichinosis, and E.Coli would also be pitifully understudied and misunderstood.

The U.S. Deparment of Agriculture would be housed in the Department of Justice.

Trichinosis and diabetes would be lingering uncurable illnesses. Efforts to study it and limit it's spread would be aggressively blocked by conservatives on family value grounds. Meanwhile HIV and Herpes would most likely have been nipped in the bud. If they persisted they'd be studied and attacked in a well-funded, coordinated fashion.

Conservatives would complain bitterly about trafficking of undocumented farm workers but would ignore the much lower-frequency traffick in undocumented sex workers. If they worried about it at all it would be because illegal sex workers were stealing jobs from hardworking American men and women.

Progressives would decry the spread of fast-fuck joints saying that they provide unhealthy and overprocessed sexual experiences. Columnists would wax nostalgic for the good old days when most people had sex at home. Fringe purists would argue endlessly that unassisted two-person sex was more natural. Everyone would think that was going too far. Vagegans would be claiming you should have only vaginal/penile sex. Hardly anyone would pay attention to them.

Not everything would change, of course, Right-wing red-state knuckledraggers would continue having sex with their underage relatives, but thanks to childhood vaccinations and early education programs venerial disease and teen pregnancy wouldn't be as chronic in red states. And blue-state liberals would still feel unnecessarily guilty about giving their children dairy products and red mean, but they'd be put in jail for it if caught doing it.

[To understand this story you may want to read the Food Issue Introduction. --fl]

I first realized Brandi, the girl across the hall, had a "big appetite" when I spotted a telltale flash red plastic mesh in the incinerator chute. It could only have come from one of the potato sack from the little adult "snack" shop in "Irishtown." I felt that familiar stirring in my saliva glands.

I was pretty sure Brandi ate around with a lot of other guys but the dirty little cook never gave me the time of day. Sure, we'd sometimes go out for a shower after word, and sometimes we'd wind up at her place after but every time I hinted that she might be a little hungry she'd ice over. "I like you Brian but not like that. I mean I really don't feel comfortable moving things out of the bedroom." I mean, her kitchen was just completely off limits. But now I had her right where I wanted her.

I made my plans. Saturday I went over to her place early, too early for her to have had time to "ease" herself. By about 10:30, as we were towelling up I could tell she was getting a little antsy to excuse herself but I kept putting it off. We'd talked about food before, of course, just between friends of course (it's 2005 after all and younger people are willing to be a little more frank.)

I mentioned how I'd once found a recipe for homefries in a magazine in the bottom drawer of my dad's desk. I told her about how it said in a lot of places people eat them with ketchup and I could tell she was getting a little uncomfortable. I looked her right in the eyes and told her in some places they use salsa instead of ketchup. Her eyes said "go" but I could hear her stomach (I hate how clinical that word sounds) gurgle. Her lips were sealed tight but when I saw her swallow I knew her mouth was wet.

With a sardonic tilt of an eyebrow I picked up my pants, and teased a new potato sack from a pocket. She let out a burbly moan and I knew she wasn't just wet, she was gushing.

Grabbing her by the shoulders I told her "you can't hide it from me anymore, Brandi" and pushed her into her kitchen and forced her into a chair. Whipping open the "broom closet" I hit the motherlode. Aprons! And a tidy stack of oven mitts. Whoah!

It wasn't time for nicities so whipped I a couple off their hangers (reveling in the heavy aborptive fabric) and bound her to the chrome-set chair. (Chrome set, if you can believe it, the little tummy lead a seriously secret life.) Of course she tried to scratch me but I put a stop to that with her own mitts!

Her eyes were fixed on me as I sliced and diced. She seemed reluctantly impressed at my pan work. She tried to wave away the plate as I slowly moved it under her nose but it only increased the steam and aroma wafting harder and harder into her reluctant nostrils. On the one hand she was begging me to let her go but the saliva practically squirting from her mouth told me she was mine.

Sitting down in front of her I unwrapped the foil pouch I kept in my wallet and ripped it open and handed her a wipe. I think that relaxed her a little, knowing I was at least cautious enough not to risk food-borne illness. At the last minute I popped the top from a fresh tube of margarine (the real stuff, not the petroleum-based stuff you alwasy get from the furtive western europeans that hang out by the docks) and squeezed ounce after ounce after ounce of the sensuous, gleaming, melting, yellow delicacy on her servings.

With a cry she threw herself on the food, moaning and drooling in abandon. Nearly mad with hunger myself I couldn't help but watch her mouth open and close over and over again -- I mean I'd had a little experience snacking in darkened movie theaters but I'd never really seen a woman chewing before.

She was ravenous! She ate pound after pound of potatos, serving after serving. The more she ate the hungrier she seemed to get. When my margarine ran out she admitted she had some of her own. Of course she was ashamed but by her seventh helping she could no longer help herself. I was afraid it would be the soy-based stuff you get from the Thai but no, this wasn't just margarine it was the real thing! Butter!

Yeah it was taking a big risk but with 13 pounds of potatoes in me I was beyond worrying. I heaped both our plates and added pat after pat of butter. As we waited for it to melt -- much more slowly than any margarine I'd ever seen -- she calmed down long enough to point to the iodine bottle she kept in her "fridge." Chilled at the risk we'd almost taken I spun the top off the chilled bottle and splashed the antiseptic all over our plates... and then... we began.

Afterwards, thorougly sated, I looked down at her ordinarily trim flat belly all swollen from our own personal "feast" and sighed contentedly. "Same time next week?" I asked her?

She looked at me with sultry eyes. "Next week? I don't know if I can go so long without eating with you again. How about... lunch?" I was ready to salivate all over again. The little chef was insatiable! But that's a story for another meal.

Think about an alternate society for just a moment, one where sex wasn't taboo but eating was. Actually, you may have to think about it for more than a moment as I think I'm going to be dwelling on it a lot this week.

Sex and eating are a lot alike anyway. Both are necessary for survival (as a species anyway.) We encounter both as very primal urges and we can get pretty wiggy when we're deprived. Sex and eating can done in strictly utilitarian or extravagantly excessive ways. You can pay people to provide you with either. Both have their own publishing genres. Moralists, medics, politicians, and everyday people have strong opinions about both. And nearly every culture has its own fascinating preparations, ingredients, and riturals.

I don't know how far I can go with it, but I'm going to try to provide a little social policy, a little bit of technique, a little bit of "pornography" and along the way I'll provide (and I hope) receive a little more insight into our attitudes about sex. And food.

Stay tuned.