Lustful Appetites

We take the edible trappings of flirtation for granted: chocolate covered strawberries and romance, oysters on the half shell and desire, the eggplant emoji and a suggestive wink. But why does it feel so natural for us to link food and sexual pleasure? Rachel Hope Cleves explores the long association between indulging in good food and an appetite for naughty sex, from the development of the Parisian restaurant as a place for men to meet with prostitutes and mistresses, to the role of sexual outlaws like bohemians, new women, lesbians and gay men in creating epicurean culture in Britain and the United States. Taking readers on a gastronomic journey from Paris and London to New York, Chicago and San Francisco, Lustful Appetites reveals how this preoccupation changed the ways we eat and the ways we are intimate―while also creating stigmas that persist well into our own twenty-first century.

“The depth and scope of the research alone is remarkable. That Rachel Hope Cleves is able to weave so many strands in the history of food and sex into such a fascinating and readable book is a testament to her skills as both a scholar and an author. Lustful Appetites is an essential book for anyone interested in the transgressive history of food.”
John Birdsall, author of The Man Who Ate Too Much: The Life of James Beard

“Rachel Hope Cleves serves up a delightful new history of American food culture. She reveals how ideas about gastronomy and restaurants developed in step with notions of sex and sexuality. Far more than a history of aphrodisiacs and erotic cookbooks, Lustful Appetites shows how appetites for food and sex have been historically understood, embraced, and constrained ‒ and how today’s readers can nurture such true pleasures.”
Emily J. H. Contois, author of Diners, Dudes & Diets: How Gender & Power Collide in Food Media & Culture

"Have you ever been bored in a bar or restaurant, and wished you had a thousand sexy, fascinating anecdotes so everyone would lean in, gasp, and giggle? Well brother, you've found the motherlode. Rachel Hope Cleves' Lustful Appetites is the racy, dishy encyclopedia of all that's sexy and dishy. Like: What bit of human anatomy did all of France once agree resembled a crawfish? Did you ever hear of soupeuses, who lured men to eat soup in restaurants? Did you hear the one about America's greatest food writer M.F.K. Fisher, the 100 raw oysters, and the lesbians in the girls' school kitchen? Did you ever wonder what Hooters and Top Chef have in common? Extraordinarily deeply researched, amusing, surprising, and thoroughly recommended to anyone who wants to wink and drink and chat and wink some more."
Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl, six-time James Beard Award winner, former Gourmet contributor, author of Drink This: Wine Made Simple, and senior writer at Mpls.St.Paul magazine

"wonderfully wicked"
Tip of the Tongue: Think Food

“Extremely detailed on characters, locations and menus, this is a serious and entertaining contribution to the social history of food”
TLS

“A remarkably toothsome and vastly informative gastronomic journey.”
Kirkus Reviews

“delightful […] To write provocatively takes restraint, and Cleves’s style is crisp and wry.”
The Irish Times

Rachel Hope Cleves is Professor of History at the University of Victoria.

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