

Rachel Hope Cleves Author Talk • Lustful Appetites: An Intimate History of Good Food and Wicked Sex
A note about our in-store events:
We offer first come, first served seating in our shop. There will be overflow room outside if needed and the author will be mic'd. Everyone is welcome to attend.
You can pre-order a copy below for pick-up at the event or purchase copies on-site.
Rachel Hope Cleves is a historian of sexuality and food, and professor at the University of Victoria, in British Columbia. Her newest work is Lustful Appetites: An Intimate History of Good Food and Wicked Sex. She is the author of the award-winning books Charity and Sylvia, Unspeakable, and The Reign of Terror in America. She also writes fiction and is the author of A Second Chance for Yesterday, co-authored with her brother, the futurist Aram Sinnreich, and published under the pen-name R. A. Sinn.
Marcia Gagliardi is a San Francisco–based culinary personality and restaurant columnist, well-known for her groundbreaking, 18-year-old tablehopper newsletter, an established insider resource for the latest SF Bay Area restaurant and bar news, events, and more. Her weekly column (and Instagram feed: @tablehopper) are avidly read by a loyal following of both food-obsessed consumers and the food and beverage industry. Marcia is a published author, freelance writer, event host, emcee, content creator, and has appeared on numerous television and radio shows (including her own podcast, On the Fly). She is a proud San Franciscan, 30 years and counting.
Lustful Appetites — In this enticing new book, historian Rachel Hope Cleves explores the long association between indulging in good food and an appetite for immoral sex. From the Parisian invention of the restaurant (which soon became a popular place for men to meet with prostitutes and mistresses) to the intersection of culinary and erotic tourism, she reveals how these anxieties coloured cultural norms of respectability and gender. However, the link between gourmet food and disreputable sex enabled bohemians, new women, lesbians and gay men to embrace epicureanism as a sign of their rejection of bourgeois sexual morality. A taste for good food became central to queer culture in the twentieth century; only after the sexual revolution did straight men and women reclaim eating for pleasure as respectable through the archetype of the ‘foodie’.
Taking readers on a gastronomic journey from Paris and London to New York, Chicago and San Francisco, Lustful Appetites reveals how this preoccupation changed the ways we eat and the ways we are intimate—as well as how stigmas persist well into our own twenty-first century.
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available for pick-up at the event or shipping worldwide