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February 11, 2025

Historian of sexuality Rachel Hope Cleves sinks her teeth into gastronomic delights from eighteenth-century French dining rooms to online “food porn” videos of the 2020s in her latest book, Lustful Appetites: An Intimate History of Good Food and Wicked Sex (Polity 2025). Why do we connect indulging in food—from chocolate-covered strawberries to oysters on the half shell—with sexual appetites? Where did our narratives around gastronomic and sexual appetites come from, and how do these histories impact us today?

Your previous books have focused particularly on sexual morality. What first prompted you to connect sexual appetites with gastronomical appetites in this research?

Initially, I planned to write a book about Americans learning to cook in Paris. I had finished two books, one on the history of violence and the second on the history of sexuality, so I wanted to write about food history and then I would have addressed the trifecta of human existence: sex, food, and death. But as I began researching Americans cooking in Paris, I kept discovering sex and sexuality in the sources. I began wondering about the history of these linked appetites. And ten years later: voilà, a book!

Throughout Lustful Appetites, you identify religious leaders developing a link between sinful appetites, gastronomic and sexual. How do these religious connections become mainstreamed to permeate secular cultures? 

Moral concerns that indulging in good food would heat up the sexual appetites developed simultaneously in religious and medical literature dating back to ancient Greece and Rome and the classical period. Some early sources combined these two strains of thought. John Wesley, the eighteenth-century founder of Methodism, wrote a diet book advising people not to eat pickled or smoked or highly-flavoured foods. Sylvester Graham (of the Graham cracker) was a nineteenth-century minister who promoted a vegetarian diet to stop people from masturbating. John Harvey Kellogg, inventor of the corn flake, also combined religious and medical thought when he recommended an abstemious diet would restrain the perverted appetites. As Anglo-American culture became more secular, the overt religious content of diet recommendations faded. But I would argue that wellness culture is still steeped in moral ideas today.

You focus on spaces outside the home, like restaurants. What particular anxieties do these public or semi-public spaces provoke around appetite? Does this differ when compared to discussions of food consumed in domestic spaces?

Restaurants stoked anxieties about food and sex because they were highly erotic places in the early years, following their invention in Paris in the 1770s. The word restaurant originated as a word for a restorative broth that was meant to reinvigorate drooping men. Early restaurants were overseen by attractive dames de comptoirs, or cashiers, and they often had cabinets particuliers, or private rooms, where men could meet women for sex. Then in the mid-1800s, restaurants started using waitresses to serve food, and waitresses were highly eroticized from the outset. That said, anxieties about food and sex also shaped the domestic setting. Women and girls were discouraged from eating heartily at their own tables because their alimentary appetites were interpreted as a sign of their sexual appetites. There are lots of accounts of women gorging in private, or only around other women, in texts well into the late twentieth century.

Your book brings us all the way from 18^th-century France to modern day “food porn.” What role does the internet and social media play in the eroticization of gastronomic appetite?

Food and sex continue to combine in new ways as culture shifts. I argue in the book that in the twenty-first century our ideas about food and sex have flipped. In previous centuries, ministers and physicians advised eating an abstemious diet to control the lusts. Now, wellness influencers on the internet say that eating an abstemious diet (vegetarian, low fat, etc.) is the key to a robust sex life—good erections, a strong libido, and, critically, a slim body, which is seen as essential for sexual attractiveness. Another interesting shift that’s taking place is toward the eroticization of male cooks on platforms like TikTok. I’m told there are lots of clips of shirtless men making phallic foods like eggplant on that platform.

Stigma around food and sex still exists in different forms, including on the same platforms that popularize food porn content. How do you see this historical research as timely, or able to inform our understanding of today’s narratives of stigma around our appetites?

Absolutely, I think that moral ideas about food and sex continue to stigmatize our appetites. In the twenty-first century I think we’ve become more restrictive and moralizing about our alimentary appetites. Students in my food history classes often express a high level of anxiety about “clean” food vs. “dirty” food, as well as anxieties about meeting unrealistic body standards, all of which can lead to disordered eating.

What do you hope readers take away from Lustful Appetites?

By exposing the long history of moralizing about food and sex, I hope to give readers the tools to take a more critical view of some of the messaging that circulates today, and ultimately defang some of the more harmful messaging out there. I’d like people to take away from the book more license to eat and have sex in the ways that bring them pleasure without suffering from so much guilt.

Lustful Appetites: An Intimate History of Good Food and Wicked Sex is available from .