New Craze on Left Coast: Food Pornography

(El Lay — Eats Beat — December  7,  2016)

Connecting food to sexuality is certainly nothing new although the secondary phases of naughty grub are sure to unclog those arteries. Sensual foodies here in Southern California have gone beyond the traditional impish elf or wayward nymph, blending fantasies like whipped cream and chains with champagne, caviar and even pineapple upside down cake.

Karma Sutra take note. Murals and billboards offer delicious cuisine with a sexual overtone: If you eat this…Depictions of naked persons in Jell-O molds are passé when one considers to options open by combining simple erotic play with the diversions of the surreal. Dreams about chocolate cake. Dreams about that attractive man or woman at the grocery. Dreams about many chocolate cakes and that attractive person in bed?

Peeks through these doors, inadvertently left open in a rush to the boudoir or the kitchen table. A tenderloin bed of passion. The throes of bondage, airbrushed and served aflame on skewers over wild rice. That second helping of shimmering gelatin. A salmon on ice. Broiled zucchini in its kinky, phallic state. Vodka martinis striped down to pure buff.

These are the images that leading chefs don’t want you to see.

Just last night at Sarah Finn’s Cafe (in the hills of Oakland)  diners marveled at the nightly specials. Seafood displaying brash, slutty behavior, served in a sea of tepid and provocative hollandaise sauce, dripping with low fat yet corporeal glamour, doting on the asparagus spears.

(If this amorous appetizer did not arouse the desire of those already in their seats, the dancing caramelized sweet grass did the trick. Seedy, semi-literate, food bloggers recorded their own particular perversions all over the bathroom walls).

Now the debauchery threatens to spill out into the streets of Los Angeles. Decadent Serrano hams in the window, cleavage evident, enticing the passerby, cobblestoned on the aromas, stairways up to Never Mind land in the upstairs hideaways…al fresco or under the sheets?

“It’s all the way it looks on the plate,” said one chef wearing no more than his mother gave him. Mashed or whipped? Succotash on the first date? Look at them poke chops! Pardon me but with another glass of wine your cherished rice pilaf may be in a compromised position. And then there is the food sculpture. Young and innocent rhubarb bore for all to see, indecent cutlets, racy rye muffins, beaten eggs, twice baked…More later as we find more adjectives.

– Melvin Toolini

“Why then are we soft in the middle when the rest of our lives are so hard?”    –  Paul Simon