Sex and bacon: why I love things that are very, very bad for me

Product Description It’s said that how we eat is reflective of our appetite in bed. Food and sex: two universal experiences that can easily become addictive and all consuming. You don’t need to look far—The Food Network, billboards, TV spots to name just a few—to witness firsthand the explosive combination of food and sex.In Sex and Bacon: Why I Love Things That Are Very, Very Bad for Me, Sarah Katherine Lewis is a seductress whose observations about the interplay between food and sex are unusually delightful, sometimes raunchy, and always absorbing. Sex and Bacon is a unique type of lovefest, and Lewis is not your run-of-the-mill food writer.A lusty eater who’s spent the better part of her adult life as a sex worker, Lewis is as reckless as she is adventurous. She writes of eating whale and bone marrow as challenges she was incapable of resisting. With chapters that hone in on the categorically simple—fat, sugar, meat—Lewis infuses even the most quotidian meals and food memories with sensual observations and decadence worthy of savoring. Sex and Bacon is exuberant—a celebration that honors the rawness and base needs that are central to our experiences of both food and sex. From Publishers Weekly Lewis's first book, Indecent: How I Make It and Fake It as a Girl for Hire, focused on her career in the sex industry; her latest offering includes some sex stories but marries them to a new theme: eating for pleasure. As Lewis points out, we're so obsessed with needing to lose weight that we eat pseudo-food, which offers little satisfaction. Lewis suggests, instead, frying up some chicken or corncakes for your dinner date, and then taking him or her to bed for some great sex. Lewis can't stop herself from speculating on whether his body fluids or her cooch will taste garlicky, which is in keeping with her penchant for considering a lover's body as a sort of naked lunch. Her explicit rejection of condom use may outrage or upset some readers, but—in the same way that she celebrates bacon, sausage, whale meat and other politically incorrect food—Lewis is not interested in pleasing everyone. While her food discourses—particularly the how-to chapters—are often inspired, and her politics delightfully pleasure-positive, the many raunchy sex passages, though written with a joyful sensuality and a dash of humor, are not for everyone. (May) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist Lewis, a former sex worker, has a lusty appetite for both food and sex. In these short essays, she offers raunchy tales from the front lines of the sex industry along with some of her favorite recipes and experiences in adventurous eating. One piece discusses the happy outcome of her personal ad requesting the services of a female dominatrix, while another offers directions for preparing a romantic dinner of mussels and shallots. She also roams further afield, offering a spirited defense of Britney Spears as a woman condemned for indulging her appetites for bad boys and junk food, an interesting take on the tyranny of body image, and a painfully candid but poignant piece on breaking up with her boyfriend. If the pieces don’t always mesh well—it’s a tad disconcerting to segue from the fetish of pee drinking to the drudgery of office work—Lewis certainly makes for thought-provoking reading. She’s very frank—some would label her crude—about all aspects of sexuality, and she displays an open contempt for her former customers, though not for her former coworkers. Provocative reading. --Joanne Wilkinson Review Hanging out with the insatiable Lewis will inspire you to keep eating, loving, and making a mess until you're truly full. That she's struggled to follow her own advice -- "I haven't been laid in a month and I can't afford groceries," she confesses in a concluding chapter -- doesn't make this any less true. Seriously. Someone give this woman a cooking show. -- Bookslut