In the Devil's Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food Read Online Free PDF

During both we allow a warm (or at least reheated) creature to enter our bodies. Before we begin a feast, our mouths produce thick saliva without which our taste buds would be unable to function, just as before beginning sex, a female produces a rush of mucus that facilitates her having, or at least enjoying, intercourse. During the act itself—of eating, that is—our lips flush and swell with blood in much the same way the clitoris and penis do during sex. All three, along with the tongue, are classified as “specific erogenous zones” because of their mucocutaneous nature and the density and sensitivity of their nerve endings.
    So it’s really no surprise that we’re constantly muddling together the acts of sex and eating. What’s interesting is the way the different genders go about it. Where Mr. Gogol makes the kitchen into an arena of bawdy adultery, Willa Cather makes it the “heart and center of the house” full of “the fragrance of old friendships, the glow of early memories.” Kitchens, to Cather, are temples of domestic love, “like a tight little boat in a winter sea.” Her famous novels set during the American pioneer era are fine examples of how female authors tend to write about eating as an act of sharing that is also quite sexual. In
One of
Ours
, an old German widow feeds a man with an excitement that is deliciously lascivious.
    “I been lookin’ for you every day,” said Mrs. Voigt when she brought his plate. “I put plenty good gravy on dem sweet per-taters, ja.”
    “Thank you. You must be popular with your boarders.”
    She giggled. “Ja, all de train-men is friends mit me . . . I ain’t got no boys mein own self, so I got to fix up liddle tings for dem boys, eh?”
    She stood nursing her stumpy hands under her apron, watching every mouthful he ate so eagerly that she might have been tasting it herself. . . .
    Even when being raunchy most women authors have a different tone than their male peers. In Dorothy Allison’s collection
Trash
, the writer remembers her lovers not only by what they ate, but also by the sex they performed using ingredients from the evening meal. Eggplants dominate this lewd yarn, but it’s still all about soul love. “I remember women by what we ate together,” she writes, “by what they dug out of the freezer after we’d made love for hours. I only had one lover who didn’t want to eat at all. We didn’t last long.”
    It seems a woman’s take on eating is the same as sex—a shared experience that tends to fill you up. In a study comparing 489 food stories told by children between three and five years of age, sociologist Carole Counihan found that girls were twice as likely to describe eating in terms of a shared experience. Boys tended to see it as an act of killing and devouring. No wonder they later seem to find the whole thing less than satisfying when they grow up. In
The Gift of an Apple
, Tennessee Williams compares eating to “an act of love . . . draw out the final sweet moment. But it can’t be held at that point . . . it has to be finished. And then you feel cheated somehow.” Ernest Hemingway agreed. In
A Moveable Feast
the ultimate macho says writing reminds him of sex because both leave him “empty.” His cure for this depletion, an aphrodisiacal plate of oysters washed down with a good white wine, helps. “As I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and make plans.”
    This sense of emptiness Hemingway and Williams kvetch about might have something to do with the male tendency to eat one’s mate. “No, on thy flesh I will feed,” wrote one Elizabethan poet, setting the stage for centuries of skin-like-whipped-cream, cheeks-like-peaches, lips-like-cherries metaphors, a genre Margaret Atwood spoofed in
The Edible Woman
when she had the housewife character bake a cake shaped like her body so her husband could more conveniently