Are chefs sexy?

Posted on April 27, 2012 by Lena Llis

You’ve heard of the national dish, or flower, or many other kinds of symbol, but what doesn’t make it onto touristy postcards quite so much is the national fetish. If you live in a culture for long enough, you are bound to spot some kinky inclination sooner or later. It doesn’t have to be just one either. In Britain I think the longest standing national fetishes have been cross dressing, and female domination. Just watch a ‘Carry on’ movie and you’ll see what I mean! But what’s more interesting, I think, is a new national fetish which has emerged over the last decade or so; Sexy Chefs.

Whether it is Delia Smith with her firm grasp on kitchen utensils, Gordon Ramsay’s rough and rude approach, or just Nigella Lawson’s breasts, we Brits have a definite thing for sex appeal in the kitchen. You could argue that all celebrities sell their looks and sexiness to make it onto television, and that this isn’t a phenomenon which is unique to cooking shows at all. This is true to a certain extent, but the raw sexuality of the UKs tv cooks by far outstrips other presenters. It is also far more noticeable than in other countries (it must be a very strange little minority who tune into Paula Deen’s US cooking show for anything but literal sauciness!). British celebrity chefs have become the nation’s new rock stars, and I bet there are fans flinging underwear at them when they emerge from the studio.

But why on earth have chefs become such sex symbols? If you’ve been in a restaurant kitchen, you certainly wouldn’t have made the association between the sweaty, smelly, red-faced men and women working hard, and kink. With intense work hours spent on their feet, in a very high stress environment, chefs don’t make for obvious candidates of bedroom wildness. Even at home, cooking isn’t really very sexy. It involves un-sexy smells, hard work, and definitely un-attractive clothing (unless you want your sexy outfit splattered with food). Certainly there are plenty of kitchen fantasies, most notably involving the kitchen table, but those tend to fit into the post-cooking part of a sexy evening, once the cook has had a chance to spruce themself up.

But the link between food, and therefore cooking, and sex is pretty clear. You’ve probably seen the term ‘food porn’ in the media; meaning the kinds of tempting images of food you get in advertising, in magazines, or on blogs designed to make you salivate and really want it (the food, I mean). Just like porn itself, food porn is all about titillation, and stirring up desires. It is also all about guilty pleasure, because the real food porn worthy dishes are hardly good for you. You watch a thick, heavy, rich chocolate sauce roll slowly down the surface of a moist, glistening cake… You know you shouldn’t look, you know you shouldn’t let yourself be tempted, you’d feel ashamed if anyone caught you, but you just can’t tear your eyes away. You can almost taste it. Food erection anyone?

The jump from food porn to sexy chefs is not hard to make. And celebrity chefs don’t have to appear realistically, with steamy sweaty faces, bad skin, smelling like everything they just peeled and chopped… they get to appear as dressed up as the dishes themselves. They have pristine kitchens, with professional lighting and makeup, and the camera pans and zooms at all the right moments. Just like real porn, a lot of work goes into to showing the act in the best possible light – in this case the act just happens to be cooking.

Just in case you really don’t know what I’m on about, I suggest pouring yourself a glass of wine, locking the door and switching off your phone, getting into a bathrobe, and putting on a British cooking show. Just make sure the neighbours don’t overhear.

(Editors note: You could also just skip most of the cooking and skip to the juicier bits with this link: TV chefs talk dirty)

The pineapple sex test

Posted on February 3, 2012 by John Pope

About three years before this website existed, I wrote an article on another website about strange pineapple facts. What I didn’t expect was that it would become more viewed than every other article on that site combined, and that one of the facts in particular would spark plenty of comment debate over whether it was true or not.

You can find the original article now moved here: Strange pineapple facts

What follows is a (vaguely) scientific and completely serious test.

The contention

That eating large amounts of pineapple dramatically changes the way that our seminal and vaginal fluids taste.

We took six willing couples and got them to eat lots of pineapple, before asking them to have oral sex.

The methodology

Rather than give both halves of each couple pineapple to eat, we decided that only one of them should change their eating habits. The logic behind this being that we have no idea whether or not eating lots of pineapple (or otherwise changing your diet drastically) will have an impact on the way that you perceive the taste of other things.

Since my contention is that large amounts of pineapple affects the taste of both vaginal and seminal fluids, we divided our guinea pigs couples into two separate groups, with the men in one half eating the pineapple and the women in the other half.

The sample group is far too small to measure further details, like how age affects the results, but we deliberately picked volunteers to cover a wider age spectrum.

We also wanted to make sure that there was nothing geographic or societal influencing the results (though it is hard to imagine how it would), so we picked participants that were spread across Europe. Two couples each from London, Paris and Barcelona.

The lucky pineapple eaters were to receive oral sex from their loving partners on the evening of each day for a week, with the person giving the oral pleasure making notes on the taste of their partners sticky stuff.

The first day should see no changes to the participants normal diet, to set a baseline for their taste. From the second day onwards however they should eat 200 grams of pineapple each day for the rest of the week.

Names may have been changed, but everything else is exactly as reported from the field.

The participants

We gave each willing couple a scorecard to fill in two separate marks daily, one for overall taste and the second for sweetness. Filling in our scorecards were:

Sophie, age 24,
is eating pineapple

and

Liam, age 25,
is tasting Sophie

Andrew, age 53,
is eating pineapple

and

Sandra, age 51,
is tasting Andrew

Clara, age 19,
is eating pineapple

and

Thierry, age 19,
is tasting Clara

Daniel, age 26,
is eating pineapple

and

Louise, age 27,
is tasting Daniel

Gabriela, age 31,
is eating pineapple

and

David, age 32,
is tasting Gabriela

Cesc, age 23,
is eating pineapple

and

Nuria, age 41,
is tasting Cesc

The results

We took the scores for both taste and sweetness and calculated, the overall average. As you can see in the pretty green graphs, imbibing a decent amount of tropical fruit goodness really does seem to make a difference.

Overall flavour graph Sweetness graph

Things get even more interesting when we break the results down into the averages for the separate sexes.

How girls taste

graph of girls overall taste Graph of girls sweetness

How boys taste

Graph of boys overall taste Graph of boys sweetness

Conclusions

The graphs above make it pretty obvious, in this test, which we will admit was limited, eating a lot of pineapple does make a significant difference to both the overall taste and the sweetness of your ‘sex wee’.

It also makes it quite clear that men seem to like the taste of women more than women like the taste of men, either with or without pineapple.

There are probably plenty more conclusions to be drawn, and we’ll be putting up some more pretty little graphs as soon as we work out what they are.

10 strange pineapple facts

Posted on January 17, 2012 by John Pope

Pineapples are really very strange things. It would probably be reasonably easy to write a whole book, albeit a small one, containing things that most people don’t know about the spiky topped fruit. Partially because I’m not sure that anyone would buy the book, but mostly because I just can’t be bothered, I am instead going to just keep it down to these 10 interesting (I think) facts.

There are a lot of foods that affect the taste of your seminal or vaginal fluids, but pineapple is one of the strongest. Eating a lot of pineapple makes you taste sweeter, and less ‘fishy’.
When you cut up a pineapple at home, you normally chuck the skin, core and ends in the bin. The pineapple canning industry doesn’t though, these bits are used for making alcohol, vinegar and animal feed.
Each pineapple plant only produces just one pineapple per year.
Unripe pineapples don’t just taste vile, but can actually be quite poisonous. Eating it causes serious throat irritation and it has a strong laxative effect.
Pineapples grow slowly, and can take up to two years to reach full size, so we pick and eat them when they are much smaller, but if they are left to their own devices they can reach up to 9kg (20lbs).
If you want to speed up the ripening of a pineapple, so that you can eat it faster, then you can do it by standing it upside down (on the leafy end).
Traditionally pineapple juice was used as a diuretic and to induce labour.
The Bromelain enzyme in pineapples breaks down proteins. This means that you can use pineapple or pineapple juice as a meat tenderiser.
The same Bromelain enzyme means that you can’t put fresh pineapple in jelly, because it breaks down the gelatine. You can stop this from happening by boiling the chunks of pineapple in their juice or in water for a few minutes, or you can use canned pineapple.
In case you find yourself on a sailing trip in the tropics without any Ajax, you might like to know that pineapple juice mixed with sand is very good for cleaning boat decks and machete blades.