My sexual awakening came when I was fifteen. We were in a Morris Minor at the Drive-In movies and it was pouring with rain outside, steaming up all the windows.

I would have welcomed the privacy at any other time, but I had read in an American movie magazine about Tom Jones and neither rain nor sleet nor snow was going to prevent me from seeing the movie, or missing that scene. Albert Finney as Tom and Joyce Redman as Mrs Waters devouring each other across a dining table with their eyes. That exquisite banana, those beautiful pears. Rich juices running down their chins, glistening oil dripping onto her décolletage, his braces. I swooned in anticipation. That’s it, I decided. I wanted what she was having. I would spend my life eating for a living, and writing about it. If food be the catalyst of lurve, stir on.

Food is seduction. And sexual inferences and allusions litter the bedsheets of gastronomy. Via the stomach it’s not to the heart we go, but to the more lascivious region of his anatomy. Unless you give him steak and chips, we’re talking provocative cuisine – also the title of local food writer Braam Kruger’s book, printed on black paper. Kruger (aka Kitchenboy) is the master of metaphorical mastication. Just recently Braam wrote in the spanky new Weekender newspaper something that had me shivering in anticipation. Of the mussel, the second cousin to the oyster - the orchestrator of the orgasm - he says, “even good chefs fail to get it right: mussels on the shell, barely opened and still quivering in their gasping eroticism”.

Food writers have an absolute romp. Our own Jenny Morris got it right when she published her book, Rude Food, Nude Food, Good Food. Known for her sexual innuendos, the Giggling Gourmet’s book sales keep rising. More power to her, I say. She’s cashed in on a trend.

Cookbooks have become the new erotica. Sex sells, and clearly luscious designs promise that there might be more to come. And the misconception is thinking that the people queuing at Exclusive Books can’t wait to get home and try the recipes. The fact is that the kitchen goddess imagines herself sans clothes, wearing an apron only, licking that spoon a la Nigella Lawson. Imagine the possibilities.

Chefs have become hot property. Not that any of the males do it for me, except, possibly our own celebrity chefs like Frank Dangereux at the superlative La Colombe in Cape Town and Pete Goffe-Wood, master of the cookery school, Kitchen Cowboys and Women on Top (see what I mean?) and in Johannesburg, Marc Guebert of Bistro 277 on Main. The subliminal link to the sublime automatically leads me to imagining these chefs inviting a particularly, well, delicious morsel up to his studio – not to view his etchings but to possibly to have a nibble of his banana surprise.

One wonder’s about the award-winning masters of deconstructed cuisine, Heston Blumenthal and Ferran Adria (and locally, that brilliant Richard Carstens of Lynton Hall in KwaZulu Natal). Apart from the fact that they’re into frothy things, I cannot imagine their clinical approach to food making anyone want to see what’s on the slab

I cannot imagine most Brits roaming or romping. I mean, look at their food. And I’m not talking the new trumped-up BBC Food eye candy variety. I’m talking the great unwashed masses with their grey roasts and mushy peas. That’s about a sexy as a piece of sausage from yesterday’s barbeque. I rest my case about the English.

The French, of course, have a hand in all of this sexy food stuff. Think stodgy fish pie in a pub in mid-England. Now think of poisson en croute avec a few lovingly caressed cep with a lick-your-fingers jus. That’s knee-trembling stuff.

Speaking of BBC Food, they’ve come up with pinups like that woman who licks her spoon, practically begging the viewer to slaver over her neckline. On AskMen.com: ‘why we like Nigella Lawson: she looks more like a model than Julia Child and can cook up a storm in the kitchen and light a fire in our loins’. Although I should imagine Lawson is not only a nice person, but – and I know this - also a good writer, Child does it for me in a big way.

Off the subject for a moment, I never did get the point of smearing your partner with chocolate then devouring both. But then, I’m not into chocolate. But it does give having a midnight snack a whole new meaning.

To invite a special someone to dinner is in itself tittilating. Remember when you were eyeing a particularly tasty morsel? Somehow ‘let’s go bicycle riding’ just doesn’t hold the same promise as an invitation to copy Tom Jones.

To paraphrase that brilliant New York social commentator and author Fran Lebowitz, contrary to popular opinion, the hustle is not a new dance step, or a business procedure, it’s a dinner date with intention.

But remember a first dinner date is not a meal, it’s a menu.