Saturday 14 February, 2009Chili today, hot tamale

Okay, it's an o-o-old joke. But have you considered that chili peppers can get you—and, not coincidentally, your honey—hot, in more ways than one?

The relationship between sex and food is complex and intimate. Both are objects of appetite, and we use our mouths to sustain our bodies and to consume our lovers. Both acts are fundamentally physical, supremely sensual, and fraught with emotional implications.

Undernourishment can diminish desire and disfavor fertility. And, of course, good food sustains and even empowers good sex (as well as healthy babies). It's no wonder, then, that for thousands of years, people have linked food and sex.

The most obvious connection is with foodstuffs that are inherently part of the reproductive process: eggs, both fish and fowl, and sometimes reptile; bulbs, such as onion, garlic, fennel; seeda and nuts; milk; fruit. Some cultures—and some individuals—include certain animal parts (in particular, the dangly bits) from species as diverse as tigers and roosters and sheep—oh my! Not to mention the mouse and the bull.

Even foods that merely resemble human genetalia are thought to provoke desire and encourage prowess. Oysters and clams; zucchini, asparagus, carrots, bananas, and cucumbers; and many fruits and berries. Male and female correspondences are pretty obvious . . . you think? But to each his own; The lovely, uterine-shaped avocado, with its silken flesh hiding a large round seed, grows on a tree that the Aztecs called ahuacuatl, "testicle tree."

This is, in fact, magic—what anthropologists call sympathetic magic, and psychologists call magical thinking. Sympathetic magic assumes that "like produces like." Also known as imitative magic, it's based on imitation and correspondence. A tiger penis can turn a man into a tiger in bed. Mouse testicles or raw turtle eggs can make a woman fertile. Powdered rhinoceros horns and deer antlers are supposed to . . . well, you get the picture.

Don't you believe it? Not to worry. You can still find a multitude of foods that indeed influence physiological response. Those chili peppers, for example, and spicy dishes in general, have fired up sexual appetites for centuries. Fact is, peppers get their heat from capsaicin, the active component in cayenne. It can increase your heart rate and metabolism, make you sweat—kind of like sex.

Wine works, too, by relaxing the body and releasing inhibitions. Coffee is energizing and stimulating. Either one in excess, however, can have a reverse effect: alcohol depresses the central nervous system, and caffeine constricts the blood vessels.

Nutrition matters, naturally. In general, robust energy is way sexier than pallid fatigue. But some foods are specifically helpful. Oysters and pine nuts have been used to stimulate desire since Roman and medieval times; turns out both are rich in zinc, which is essential for male potency.

But some foods are simply, stimulatingly sensual. The inside of a fig—a fruit long considered to be an aphrodisiac—looks something like the female sex organs. You can see that a man who breaks open a fig and enjoys it in front of his lover sends a powerful erotic message.

The sensuous possibilities of honey and chocolate hardly need mentioning. The delicious scent of vanilla essence and the musky odor of rare truffles are both supposed to stimulate lust. Certainly, asparagus spears, one by one, or a banana carefully peeled, held in the fingers and eaten slowly . . .

The list of erotic foods is as long and varied as the world is full of cooks and lovers. Whether any food has a direct physiological effect on the libido is debatable, if not disprovable. But the connection is undeniable all the same: old as time and tasty as . . . well, you fill in the blank.

And if anybody doubts it, think about this: Are edible panties an aphrodisiac?