The Sex Life of Food: When Body and Soul Meet to Eat [Hardcover]

Bunny Crumpacker (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 24, 2006

"The sex life of food" doesn't mean that the strawberries have fallen in love with the oatmeal. It's a look at food--and sex--and how they go together in our daily lives much more often than we realize. There are so many ways that hunger and desire act on each other, and so many things that can influence our preferences. Not only are people moved by the taste, texture, and the shapes of the food they eat, but even the names of some dishes can kindle hunger--of both kinds--in some. As the author writes, "Sometimes cooking is foreplay, eating is making love, and doing the dishes is the morning after."

The many things Bunny Crumpacker shares with the readers of her fascinating book almost could have inspired her to write a novel, sending Adam and Eve (with their apple) traveling through history as the icons of our passions. Instead, she has gone far beyond the obvious to bring us unexpected and tantalizing knowledge of how much and in how many surprising ways we assuage our hunger for both food and sex and how where there's one, there is often the other. The result is a continued delight. There's history and humor, obvious connections and truly amazing ones. The author enlightens us on a myriad of topics, including food in fairy tales, what politicians eat, comfort food, and manners at the table.
But enough! There's too much to say. Turn the pages and let Bunny Crumpacker introduce you to The Sex Life of Food.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Sensual, comforting and "tangled into every human emotion," food has long evoked love in all its forms, and Crumpacker (The Old-Time Brand-Name Cookbook) explores how our two most raging appetites play upon each other to soothe, satisfy and seduce. Dishing out gobbets of gastronomic history candied with sweet-tart musings, Crumpacker slices into provisions from apples to wedding cake as symbols beyond mere sustenance. In her gloss, both what and how we eat are expressions of the psyche, unremitting quests to fulfill our most primal urges. She takes particular pleasure in teasing out food's more piquant associations (such as "dripping, fleshy mouthfuls" of fruit). Parsing the subtexts of American chow, she considers fast food (wolfed down in bites, it reflects our aggressive, anxious national temperament), ethnic food (oozing with "a rich, fatty kind of love") and salad bars (delighting with array and abundance), and also makes a case for the restorative intimacy of cooking. The obligatory list of aphrodisiacs appears, though Crumpacker debunks their mystique, sticking to her thesis that "we are all beautiful when we are well loved and... well fed." Though seasoned haphazardly with purple prose, Crumpacker's clever insights and lyrical aphorisms blend into an indulgent read. (Feb. 7)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Eating and sex have always coexisted, and Crumpacker makes perfectly plain the connections between consumption and procreative activity. By their shapes, smells, and cultural associations, certain foods, such as mushrooms, reflect sexual imagery. In pure Freudian terms, obsessions with foods and obsessions with sex begin in infancy and childhood and come to full flower in adult hungers. Comfort foods and hunger for human intimacy work together to bring pleasure. Thus, macaroni and cheese offers for many people a surrogate mating opportunity. Eating in bed carries many different implications. Even restaurant design has sexual aspects, such as the choice of colors used in the decor and the layout of the seating, be it close-spaced or distant. Crumpacker takes the food-sex relationship about as far as it can go in her discussion of cannibalism as the most intimate form of eating, and she remarks on its relationship to the Christian sacrament. In a curious aside, Crumpacker relates the role of vegetarianism in the life of Adolf Hitler. Mark Knoblauch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books (January 24, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312342071
• ISBN-13: 978-0312342074
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,431,938 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Surprisingly Addictive Book, February 4, 2006

By 

Notnadia (Currently upstairs.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Sex Life of Food: When Body and Soul Meet to Eat (Hardcover)

Author Bunny (yes, really) Crumpacker takes a novel idea and expands it into one of the strangest and most interesting books that have come down the highway in many a moon. In the provocatively titled The Sex Life of Food: When Body and Soul Meet to Eat, an odd correlation is spun between the gratification present in the act of eating and the act of sex. I'm completely serious, that's what this is largely about. Not only are these two topics constantly intertwined in this bizarre book, but by the time you finish reading its 270 pages, a sort of subliminal trick will have been played on you whereby you'll start thinking of the two as relative to one another and wondering how you avoided heretofore seeing this connection! But there's more to this lovingly quirky and exhaustively researched book than that. There are also endless discussions (all wrapping back to the food/sex theme) about food throughout history, the dining preferences of the famous and infamous (including Hitler, a committed vegetarian sickened by the sight of raw meat, and Lizzie Borden force-fed mutton in the three days before her parents' gruesome murders). Bunny also draws us into the realization of how important comfort food is to people. She mentions that during the 1977 Manhattan blackout, guests at a famous hotel ate through stocks of sweets that would otherwise have lasted weeks. She also points out how when we're meeting socially, be it with friends or for business, food, or at least coffee or alcohol--in short the consumption of SOMETHING--is nearly always present. After reading about food in all its erotic, exotic, sensual, sensuous, neurotic, sinful, innocent and masterful glory, I felt like I'd just discovered that someone I'd known my entire life had a secret existence I knew nothing about. This book is really more about human psychology and culture than it is about foodstuffs, and what it tells about us all is more than a little shocking. A fun book with a great cover. Check it out sometime!

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Explains things that I think I already kind of knew, April 10, 2006

By 

John Matlock "Gunny" (Winnemucca, NV) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Sex Life of Food: When Body and Soul Meet to Eat (Hardcover)

If anyone doubts the connection between food and sex they should go watch the old 1963 movie 'Tom Jones.' Or, of course, they could read this book. It's not a highbrow intellectual text on the psychological connection between the two. It is, instead, a series of stories, facts, quotations, and other tidbits. Inbetween it is witty, light, and on occassion downright funny (especially the chapter on the heating habits of selected politicians). One thing the book is not, is that it is definitely not a cookbook. There are no recipies guaranteed to turn the other person on (or off).

Strangely enough, as I read through the book, it seemed almost like all of this was known. A deja vu of the mind so to speak. But I had never consciencely though through what she was saying. I found the book totally enjoyable, informative as well as entertaining. It would be a good choice for an airplane ride, or maybe just one of the dreary, rainy spring weekends.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars titillating title, superficial treatment, March 15, 2006

By 

Joan Claire (upstate NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Sex Life of Food: When Body and Soul Meet to Eat (Hardcover)

Perhaps I was hoping for something in the vein of Diane Ackerman's Natural History of the Senses or Michael Pollan's Botany of Desire; works that, while not scholarly, have a bit of depth and are at the same time engaging and entertaining.
The Sex Life of Food is not in that category. To me, it read like a collection of superficial factoids punctuated with rather obvious observations and conclusions.