by D. Kearney Sparano

Created on: June 14, 2009

Not too long ago I was watching video of Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain discussing the relationship between food and sex. Batali capsulized the relationship beautifully by saying "They are the only two times you put something into some and it gives them pleasure."

One could say that we live for food because we need it to live. That idea though isn't very appealing. Although true that we need food to live, if that was as far as our relationship with the plate went then all we would ever see on it is a cooked protein and raw vegetables. Our relationship with food is so much more then that. Human beings have a romance with food. It is not only nourishing but sensuous and alluring. Food is extremely pleasurable in so many ways.

It is a universal human experience to yearn or food. To obsess on a dish to the point you can almost taste it. Many years ago I ate at a restaurant in Brooklyn on their dessert menu was a chocolate souffle. I only found that dessert at that particular restaurant and I have not eaten there in some time, but when I think about it I can still practically taste it; the sweet molten chocolate mixing with cold vanilla ice cream. The way the warmth of the souffle would balance the cold of the ice cream in the same way the flavors balanced each other. It was a divine dessert.

Food has amazing drawing power, for example, while in Florence I ate very well but the best meals I ever had there though were at a restaurant called Bucca Mario. So good was the food I ate there 3 times in one trip and once again on another. The food was so good that people had to experience it from the ravings I and my companies gave upon each return. This is no easy task since almost every place in Florence is a gastronomical marvel, with the exception of MacDonald's. Upon my last visit to that restaurant I and a friend, as well as several others, waited outside eagerly until it opened at 7.

To sum up food and humanities obsession is a difficult task. In some it seems that 400 words is too many and in others a book would not do it justice. Food is emotion, it is feeling. It is a blissful state in which the eyes roll back and the moth salivates. It can be both a religious experience as well as sinful, and a restaurant is a temple to all things base and carnal. Food like sex is when humanity takes the most pleasure from one of our basest need and that is why we live for it.

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