Sweet Like Honey: A Beginner’s Guide to Food Sex
illustration from Honey Simatupang
Welcome food lovers to your beginner's guide on how to wine, dine and sixty-nine – minus the yeast infection. I'm here to help you satisfy your sweet tooth and satiate some deep-seated sexual hunger. I can't be the only one who, when faced with a banoffee pie, strawberries, and cream, or anything-with-custard, is overcome with the urge to do a lot more than just eat it. Because there really are more ways than one to enjoy your favourite desserts.
Until one fateful homemade banoffee pie, I hadn't considered food to be a fetish at all. Something about the condensed milk I was tending stirred something inside of me that certainly did not come from the same place as hunger. Having third-wheeled the condensed milk and I, my friend recommended I watch Poppy Sanchez’s Tease Cake (2018), a beautifully stylised sapphic porno that shows four women destroying cakes iced with patriarchal sentiments using their bare arses. If you’re interested in ethical wlw porn shot on 16mm and have always taken “food porn” more literally than most, then it’s 100% for you.
Don't be mistaken in thinking I don't see the humour in this; my friends love to joke about my food fetish and we frequently giggle over pudding whilst I take a little extra enjoyment from my salted caramel cheesecake or gooey brownie. This fetish has sparked some experiences that are far from sexy but very very funny.
One such experience – which came prior to my banoffee revelation but should have been a clear sign – was a gravy fight I got into with a boy I was seeing in a cobbled backstreet of Oxford coming back from the kebab van. I can't remember who started it, or what caused it, but I do remember the bizarre thrill of rubbing gravy all over one another in a backlit alleyway where Oxford's majesty juxtaposed our misuse of northern cuisine. I wouldn't call the experience sexy, particularly as I had to traipse home the following morning covered head-to-toe in gravy – but it made me reconsider the role food might play in sex. There is something liberating, even a little strange, in taking something as non-sexual as gravy and granting it sensual opportunities that it never would have experienced had it stayed in its rightful polystyrene place.
Since then, I have experimented with food in the bedroom and, having had some successful and some less successful food-sex, am ready to help others make a meal of themselves and their partner/s.
For starters, here's a shopping list of items you may want to invest in before you start lathering whipped cream and honey all over yourself and your partner:
Towel
This one is probably THE most important on this shopping list (maybe second to the food itself). Nothing kills the mood more than finding whipped cream encrusted into your sheets, or chocolate sauce smeared across your favourite pillow. I'd recommend purchasing something cheap but large; you don't want to be worried about 'ruining' something you splashed out on, given that ruin will be inevitable.
Cheap bed sheet
If you're wanting to go really wild – with something that more closely resembles a food fight – then consider investing in some cheap bedding which you won't mind getting splattered with the contents of your pantry.
Food
Personally, I have more of a sweet than a savoury tooth when it comes to sex. But here's a list of potential foods for you to peruse at leisure (and see what sparks some interest):
Whipped cream (good for precision as well as squirting into each other's mouths)
Honey
Custard (have it cold or warm it up for some temperature play)
Strawberries/blueberries/raspberries; any fruit can be a fun utensil if you don't want to get your hands too dirty.
Cloth
Anything you can wet with warm water so that you can wash your hands/clean up the unwanted mess just to keep genitalia clean and yeast free. I would recommend keeping a bowl of soapy warm water close by and, if you're sleeping with someone with a vagina, it's on you to keep those hands (and face) clean when you're going down there!
Pro-Tip
This is not a purchasable item, but a warm room (not too warm) should be another item on your list. There’s nothing worse than lying stark naked on a towel in a cold room whilst other cold substances are deposited onto your body; it’s hard to feel sexy when you’re freezing your tits off. Alternatively, you don’t want it so hot that the whipped cream melts before making contact with your skin.
Now, the main event consists initially of letting go and allowing yourself a giggle at how ridiculous it feels to be engaging in a food fight that's more than a child's game. Once any nervous embarrassment has been dispelled with some laughter, you'll be surprised by how quickly things get heated; a quiet simmer can quickly escalate into a frantic boil as drips and drops become generous helpings of your chosen ingredient. I think the key to enjoying food sex is to really let go of your inhibitions – but to do so slowly (otherwise it will just feel like a naked food fight with an extensive clean-up operation). Feel free to squirt cream, lick honey, rub whatever over parts of the body that would never make an appearance at the dinner table. Forget the knives and forks, forget the napkins, and – most importantly – forget the table manners.