Sexual and physical hunger intertwine. Endearments are often food-related, such as mon petit chou (“my little cabbage”) or “cookie.”

Many foods have been considered aphrodisiacs for their phallic shape (carrots, asparagus), resemblance to female genitalia (oysters, figs), or exoticism (rhinoceros horn). Ackerman asserts that imagination is the most powerful aphrodisiac, suggesting that any efficacy in these folk medicines may be a result of the placebo effect.

The link between food and sex stems from fertility rituals; Venus figures with exaggerated breasts symbolized life-giving force. Physically, lips, tongue, and genitals contain the same Krause’s end bulbs. Sensual restaurant meals become foreplay.

Humans evolved as omnivores and opportunists, and this vast and varied diet led to constant safety anxiety. Unlike koalas eating only eucalyptus, humans adapt anywhere. This flexibility aids survival through catastrophes but requires experimentation, risking poisoning. Through such experimentation, we have acquired tastes for chili peppers, coffee, and alcohol, flavors that repel other animals. Our teeth reflect the variety of our diet: incisors for fruit, molars for seeds, canines for meat.

Ackerman stages a fictional picnic. A French friend brings croissants, originally a Viennese pastry created to celebrate Austria’s victory over the Ottoman Turks. An Amazonian friend offers roasted leaf-cutter ants and piranha. A German friend contributes pumpernickel, whose name humorously references digestive effects. Tastes are cultural as much as biological.

Ackerman discusses the degree to which cultural taboos shape diets. For instance, Judaism and Islam both forbid the eating of pork, and most Americans won’t eat horse meat or grasshoppers, though these foods are prized elsewhere in the world. 

Anthropologist Marvin Harris argues that there are unspoken ecological and economic reasons for the Hindu prohibition against eating beef—raising cattle for meat wastes grain calories in a densely populated country. Vegetarianism in Hinduism and Buddhism evolved from scarcity and was later codified into religious law.

The gravest taboo is cannibalism. Human flesh is protein that’s forbidden almost universally, yet cannibalism was practiced ritually by Iron Age Celts and some Indigenous peoples. In 1487, the Aztecs reportedly sacrificed and ate 80,000 prisoners during a four-night celebration. Joseph Campbell described a New Guinea ritual where a couple was killed and eaten, enacting a myth of death and rebirth. Ackerman cites Harris’s question: Why does a society that wastes bodies on battlefields find humans “good to kill but bad to eat” (138)?

Ten thousand taste buds detect four primary tastes, with receptors concentrated in specific sections of the tongue: sweet at the tip, bitter at the back, sour at the sides, and salty at the front. The center tastes little. Buds also exist on the palate, pharynx, and tonsils. Bitterness at the back triggers a gag reflex against poison. Buds regenerate, though this slows after age 45—hence “jaded” palates.

Saliva dissolves food molecules. All flavors combine primary tastes. Though monosodium glutamate (MSG) contains more sodium than table salt, the glutamate blocks perception of its high sodium content. Toothpaste detergents strip protective fats, making orange juice taste bitter.

Genetics affect perception—for example, saccharin tastes bitter to some people but not to others. Perceptions of flavor are influenced by smell, texture, temperature, color, and sound as well as taste. Food engineers, as David Bodanis explains, design potato chips for maximum crunch.

Wealthy Romans hosted extravagant all-night dinners with animals stuffed inside animals, disguised foods, rose petal floors, and mechanical devices lowering acrobats or courses.

Indulgence veered into cruelty, a phenomenon Ackerman attributes to the German concept of Schadenfreude—pleasure derived from someone else’s suffering. Deformed people performed; Caligula had gladiators fight on his table, splashing diners with blood.

Christianity, emerging among slaves, promoted asceticism against Roman excess. Jerome instructed rejecting all agreeable sensations, including taste and smell, as sinful. Pleasure became guilt. This tension between indulgence and restraint influenced Western culture for centuries.

Medieval European tastes evolved with the spread of the Roman Empire, as Roman colonizers brought spicy, sweet-and-sour dishes. Crusaders introduced cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves. As flavors spread through war and conquest, Ackerman suggests, an association developed between gustatory pleasure and violence. By the 18th century in England, a fascination with culinary sadism emerged.

A belief arose that torturing animals before killing them improved the meat. Kitchens became charnel houses: chopping live fish to firm flesh, whipping pigs to death for tenderness, slowly bleeding poultry.

Ackerman cites Dr. William Kitchiner’s recipe in The Cook’s Oracle (1822) for cooking a live goose within a circle of fire, forcing it to run in panic while being basted. The live goose crying out as it was carved was “mighty pleasant to behold” (147).

Cravings express “body wisdom”—the body’s innate knowledge of its needs. On a cattle ranch, Mexican American cowhands ate high-protein breakfasts, hot peppers to sweat and cool, carbohydrate dinners to replenish.

Ethiopian cuisine’s spices inhibit bacteria. The English custom of putting milk in tea binds toxic tannins. In Mexico, the practice of soaking maize in limestone fortifies the maize with calcium; the African practice of wrapping fish in acidic banana leaves achieves the same effect by dissolving the calcium-rich bones into the flesh.

People with Addison’s disease crave salt due to a hormonal deficiency. Pregnant women crave dairy for calcium, salt for sodium balance, sweets possibly for serotonin to ease pain. Modern neurobiology links cravings to neurotransmitters like endorphins. Biochemist Judith Wurtman’s research suggests deep links between food, brain chemistry, and equilibrium.

Chocolate inspires uniquely intense cravings. Aztecs called it xocoatl, a divine gift served only to rulers and soldiers; Toltecs sacrificed chocolate-colored dogs. The colonizer Hernan Cortés brought chocolate to Europe in the 16th century, and it rapidly became woven into the fabric of European life. 

Psychopharmacologists Michael Liebowitz and Donald Klein suggested that lovesick people crave chocolate because it contains phenylethylamine (PEA), an amphetamine-like chemical the brain produces during love’s rush. Ackerman doubts this theory, since other foods, like salami and cheese, contain more PEA, and ingested PEA breaks down too quickly to produce any discernible psychoactive effect.

Judith Wurtman posits chocolate as a desirable carbohydrate boosting serotonin, explaining premenstrual cravings. Ackerman is unconvinced—pasta would suffice. Chocoholics want chocolate specifically. She concludes it’s a chemical mystery tied to theobromine, sensory properties, and associations with love, luxury, and reward.

Real vanilla differs from artificial vanillin, often derived from paper manufacturing by-products. Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan, in Understanding Media (1964), warned that people had begun preferring artificiality. Most no longer know what real vanilla tastes like.

Genuine vanilla comes from a climbing orchid pod and is one of the most labor-intensive crops. Flowers bloom for only one day and must be hand pollinated. The familiar scent develops through a six-to-nine-month curing process.

Aztecs called it tlilxochitl (“black flower”) and used it to flavor chocolate. Hernán Cortés brought it to Europe as an aphrodisiac. Spaniards called it vainilla (“small sheath”), from Latin vagina, for its elongated slit shape. Vanilla grew only in Mexico until 1836, when a Belgian saw the Melipone bee at work; the French then devised hand-pollination.

Truffles have been considered aphrodisiacs, with a biological basis. Revered by belle-epoque literary figures including Honoré de Balzac, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and Colette, their aroma has been likened to “the muskiness of a rumpled bed after an afternoon of love” (162).

Truffle hunters use sows, whose powerful sense of smell allows them to locate the truffles underground. German researchers at the Technical University of Munich and Lübeck School of Medicine found that truffles contain twice as much androstenol as male pigs. The sow thinks she’s chasing a virile boar.

The compound relates to human male hormones. When androstenol is sprayed in a room, women rate men’s photographs as more attractive. The aphrodisiac effect may be genuinely physiological. Ackerman closes by imagining the sow’s frustration at smelling the presence of the most desirable males but being unable to find them.

Many foods are medicinal. Ginger has long been used in China for colds and seasickness. Studies confirm that ginger is a cough suppressant, a pain reliever, and an anti-nausea agent more effective than Dramamine. It lowers cholesterol, stimulates immunity, and kills salmonella.

Today, Ackerman says, people are nutritionally confused: Fats cause heart disease, but fish oils are praised; fiber is essential but harmful in excess; fruit is essential but coated in pesticides.

In his 1825 book titled The Physiology of Taste, French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin wrote, “Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you what you are” (164). Humanity follows this aphorism through a biochemical lens, viewing bodies as factories and therapeutically prescribing foods on the ever-changing, often-contradictory advice of experts, all while ignoring or suppressing the body’s innate understanding of what is good for it.

Human ingenuity adapts cooking to any environment. Survival manuals like Bradford Angier’s How to Stay Alive in the Woods offer resourceful techniques. Ackerman cites a recipe for making moose soup by digging a hole, lining it with hide, and cooking with hot stones. A watch crystal can start a fire by focusing sunlight.

Food eaten in space may taste less flavorful because smell relies on evaporating molecules diminished in weightlessness. NASA’s freeze-dried peaches taste like “sweetly citric wasp’s nest” (167).

Belème, a French company co-owned by an astronaut and three-star chef, designs orbital menus—artichoke chips, chicken in Dijon sauce—packaged in tubes. As on Earth, unique cuisines emerge, and the wonder of space travel may make unenticing foods more palatable.

People sometimes seek thrill and the illusion of danger in food as in other aspects of life. Spicy foods thrill through pain. Coca-Cola’s success involves carbonation’s prickly refreshment; first marketed as mouthwash in 1888, it contained cocaine until 1903.

Japanese fugu puffer fish contains tetrodotoxin—hundreds of times more lethal than cyanide. The thrill arises from the possibility of death; skilled chefs leave just enough poison to make the diner’s lips tingle.

Ackerman cites Jean Cocteau’s film Beauty and the Beast, in which the Beast is anguished by having to kill to survive. This reflects the human paradox: We must kill to live. Taste makes “horror palatable,” transforming brutal necessity into a “jungle of sweet temptations” (172).