We Are How We Eat?

In her elegantly-written tome ‘The Sex Life of Food: When Body and Soul Meet to Eat’, Bunny Crumpacker (I kid you not) examines the close association between two enduringly fascinating, everyday (or every year, depending on your circumstances) activities: food and sex. It’s a cracking bedtime read for gastroporn junkies – until, that is, a supersized portion of reality sets in somewhere around chapter three. For it’s at this point that Bunny urges us to sneak a peek at fellow diners next time we eat out to witness her theories – unconscious foreplay, subtle references to sexual persuasion, etc - in action. So I did. And this is what I saw:

A pot-bellied, 40-something buffoon wearing massive shorts and a t-shirt bearing the legend ‘I’m With Stupid’ (well, you’d have to be) loudly boasting that he once ate a triple cheeseburger in one bite. A tiny, uptight, pallid woman wearing what appeared to be a nylon overall having a very lengthy argument on her mobile phone while the woman sitting opposite her reapplied her lipstick after every forkful of salad. A stylish, attractive young couple who exchanged not one single word between them throughout the entire duration of the meal. A smartly dressed older man boorishly lecturing a woman I assumed to be his daughter on why “being faithful” (his quotation marks) is “a ridiculous concept” (ditto). And in the middle of it all, me – a loudmouthed Harpie so preoccupied with writing about food that when bedtime comes, I’m often too exhausted to do anything other than dream about my next meal.

Crikey! What, I wonder, would Ms Crumpacker make of all that? “We are all at our most beautiful, sensual best when well fed,” she says, at the book’s finish. It’s a tasty theory, but I beg to differ.