When we think about food porn, we tend to think in visual terms. But for readers of romance novels and erotica, "food porn" is an actual genre. To give us the lowdown on this polymorphously perverse literary endeavor, we turned to Rachel Kramer Bussel an expert on the world of erotic and romantic literature. Food and sex go hand in hand , or in some cases, mouth to mouth—or

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For many years, shoppers emerged blinking from Oxford Circus underground station to the sight of a small man parading around under a large sandwich board. Mad as he seemed, the sandwich board man was in a long line of ascetics who have set themselves against food and sex. There is a proud tradition, stretching back to the Garden of Eden, of associating the two principal bodily pleasures and, very often, disapproving of them. It was forbidden fruit that brought sin into the world, and the severest punishments for that apple-eating, according to Peter Garnsey in Food and Society in Classical Antiquity, 'could only be avoided by suppression of the appetites, specifically, sexual desires and the diet that fuelled them, especially meat and wine'.