Seeing a partner lay nude before you like a Thanksgiving meal is a heavenly sight — especially if there is actually a Thanksgiving meal smothered across their body. In my case, it was a generous layer of honey, whipped cream and peanut butter. Synesthesia ran rampant as the sensations of sustenance and sensuous touch were blurred. With every kiss came a taste of sweetness and when we’d roll around it was like two pieces of bread being slapped together to make a slippery sandwich. When I slouched I felt like that vine of the peanut butter baby and my sheets looked like Willy Wonka and all his Oompa Loompas collectively combusted, but it was somehow still hot, like a sriracha-drenched jalapeño popper.
Primal instincts drive our desires for sex and food to the point of becoming one. For example, there is something innately erotic about consuming an entire box of fried oreos. From the ooze of the filling to the delicate crunch of the cookie, we tense up as the cuisine slides down our throats in harmonious bliss. I frequently find myself overwhelmed by raging foodgasms, especially when frying up a pan of bacon. My anticipation bubbles up like the simmering oil until I can finally sink my teeth into the juicy meat. Perhaps you have not fully lived if you have never thrown your head back in earth-shattering climax at the taste of your favorite dish.
Why not unite the two best parts of being alive: Food and sex? It has the potential to be the singular most hedonistic hunger. George Costanza on Seinfeld did it. In the middle of bumping around under the sheets, he routinely rolled over and pulled a pastrami sandwich from the bedside table drawer to heighten his pleasure. He combined sex and cooking so frequently, he pavloved himself into getting horny with every good meal. The desires of the mouth and the naughty bits can become one uncontrollable urge.
Food and lovemaking are conjoined within the limbic system of our brains. This connection gives rise to media depictions of sexuality expressed through meals, prompting the gendered puritan rejection of edible pleasures. For example, Gaston in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast boasts about eating four dozen eggs every morning to get large while Belle eats a meager spoonful of porridge across from the Beast snarfing down an entire bowl. When characters are depicted with a massive appetite in media, it alludes to their hedonistic taste for fornication. Food is also a replacement for sex, as seen in the movie trope of “my boyfriend broke up with me so now I am going to eat an entire tub of ice cream.”
Media representation aside, morsels can be used to spice up the bedroom in as many ways as there are spices in the spice cabinet. You can take inspiration from traditional kitchen practices such as Nyotaimori, the Japanese art of eating sushi off of a naked body. The idea is that the culinary experience is heightened by its intimacy with a living person.
Cuisine can also be an easy way to explore temperature play, the arousal of high and low temperatures. Dripping a popsicle over someone can make their nipples hard, and then you can lick off the high-fructose-corn-syrup-goodness. Kissing with chile peppers provides a slow masochistic burn shared between partners. Or you can experiment with laying hot slabs of steak on your partner.
If you struggle with the bodily tastes of giving head, you can use the power of food. Grapefruits became a sex toy after Auntie Angel’s grapefruit blowjob technique went viral. She demonstrates how to slide a grapefruit up and down the penis in tandem with the mouth to increase pleasure for both parties. The giver experiences a pleasant citrus taste; the receiver, a new sensation. Miracle fruit tablets also help to improve the flavor of your partner’s body. These tablets turn sour flavors sweet by inhibiting taste receptors so a rancid snatch becomes a candied cupcake. Cunnilingus doesn’t always have to taste like pickled herring if you become the Gordon Ramsay of pussy eating.
You have the ability to make sex as exciting as drunk-ordering a gooey platter from Insomnia Cookies. The wall between kitchen and bedroom is all that separates you from abundant foodgasm. It doesn’t have to be as extreme as turning yourself into an adult peanut butter baby as I did. It can be as simple as filling your diet with aphrodisiacs or increasing awareness of the ways eating gives you sensual pleasure. We are all just a bunch of mammals seeking out our evolutionary appetites, so make love like Guy Fieri and send yourself to Flavortown.
Anya Neeze is a student at Cornell University. Comments can be sent to [email protected]. Boink! runs every other Thursday throughout the summer.