When Did Shows and Movies About Food Get So Horny?

There’s a lot of sexy things happening in Tran Anh Hung’s latest film The Taste of Things, a romance between Eugenie (a luminous Juliette Binoche), a chef, and Dodin (Benoît Magimel), the gourmand she works for. Their chemistry is crackling (perhaps since the two actors were a couple decades ago) in every scene they share. And if you’ve ever wanted to see Binoche sponge-bathe herself, this is the film for you. But perhaps the sexiest moment in the film, and maybe of the year, is after Eugenie falls ill, Dodin cooks for the woman who has kept him nourished for so long. It’s a lavish, thoughtful meal. When Dodin asks a glowing Eugenie if he can watch her eat—it raises the temperature at least 10 degrees.

In the last several months, there’s been a swell in food-related media from television and film, books and theater, and even fashion. What sets these projects apart from the usual buffet of food-themed pop culture is that, well, many of these things are downright horny.

What kicked off this delicious trend? Jeremy Allen White’s sad boy chef Carmy Berzatto in FX’s The Bear might have been the initial lynchpin. While Season 1 was both critically and commercially lauded, Season 2, which premiered this summer, is a nearly perfect season of television. That second run of episodes also managed to somehow make everyone thirstier for Allen White’s tatted-up, emotionally broken Carm, which Allen White certainly helped with his parade of shirtless workout photos during the SAG-AFTRA strike.

But it’s gone beyond just really hot actors playing crush-worthy characters. What is it about the food that’s become so… hot?

Food is a vessel that so much can be grafted upon. On a base level, it’s about satiating the senses because a meal can do all of that—arouse sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch. Experiencing food through a visual medium can be tantalizing because you’re literally able to see the gorgeous dishes, but there is also a certain amount of voyeurism in seeing how the preparation happens and how others consume it. For Anh Hung, whose The Taste of Things will have an Oscar qualifying run in theaters in December, the visual medium is the gateway to all of the senses. “I think that if the visual is vivid enough, precise enough, your brain would create what is missing like taste and smell,” he told The Daily Beast’s Obsessed. “That was my thinking and also a challenge when I decided to make this movie.”

Introducing food to a story can transform it into a visual feast—the flambeed baked Alaska in The Taste of Things, Julia Child’s iconic bœuf bourguignon in Max’s Julia—all become centerpieces on their own. Novelist Bryan Washington accomplishes the same, albeit in the written word, in his latest novel Family Meal, about a man named Cam, a bartender and reluctant cook who returns to his hometown of Houston after the death of his partner Kai.

Much like Anh Hung does with his depiction of cooking in The Taste of Things, Washington’s prose invokes all the senses when he’s writing about food in Family Meal. “The smell of chicken turnovers woke me up in the morning,” he writes. “Cam leaned across the counter, crimping more pastry folds with his fingertips. I thought about how, when I was a kid, the smell of grits and eggs on the stove stirred the same electricity in my head.” His novel is peppered with gorgeous scenes like these, which Washington says can also be a gateway to conversation about topics like socioeconomic circumstances or community issues that one might not associate with food.

“If we’re talking about food and sustenance, we’re also talking about how people relate to their own bodies [and] the way they relate to the bodies around them,” he says. “Food, in a lot of ways, is primarily a vehicle to access those other conversations. It makes the segue smoother.”

There’s obvious food envy and immediate cravings when you watch a food-centric TV show or movie, like watching The Bear and desperately wanting to try Sydney’s (Ayo Edebiri) potato chip omelet. Drooling over the delicious-looking dish is inherently erotic. But there’s still an innate sensuality when you’re watching something focused on food even if the narrative itself is not particularly romantic or sexy.

Menus-Plaisirs - Troisgros, legendary director Frederick Wiseman’s new documentary, explores the delicate ecosystem of Troisgros, the Michelin restaurant at the heart of Wiseman’s documentary, focusing on the generational stories of the three Troisgros chefs. Sons Cesar and Leo are incredibly hot, but that on its own isn’t what’s arousing about the film’s depiction of cooking. Wiseman portrays an intimacy that flows throughout the film, which is especially palpable in the surprisingly calm preparation of the ornate meals served at Troisgros and its sibling restaurants.

“I don’t think I’ve ever watched a restaurant movie, but my friends have told me that there’s often a lot of yelling and screaming, but it didn’t happen here,” Wiseman told The Daily Beast Obsessed. “Michel and Cesar were very calm. Everybody knew what their task was and they did it. And Michel says at one point that the communication is often a shrug and that’s it, because it’s a crew and they have the experience of working together. It’s a bit like dance. I mean, the movement isn't as formal, but the fact that they don’t talk and they're moving around each other and working together silently and getting the job done, it is not choreographed like a dance might be, but it nevertheless has its own choreography,”

Unlike the clamor and sweat of the kitchen in The Bear, the kitchen of Troisgros is lithe and fluid. The chefs (again, many of who are very hot) move wordlessly around one another, and the way Wiseman films the preparation of the meals feels like watching a ballet. There’s a precision to the movements as the chefs go back and forth to their stations. Of course, the physical nature of the preparation is inherent, but the way the whole team operates beyond verbal communication feels like we’re watching something that’s almost too intimate to be shown.

That intimacy that the preparation of a meal can create is just gasoline to throw on top of an already lit fire. Think about all the shipping of Sydney and Carmy in this season of The Bear. The colleagues have great chemistry, and perhaps a Thom Browne chef coat is basically a marriage proposal for many of us. At least on the surface of season two, there’s nothing that’s screaming romance. But watching the two characters in a high stakes environment where they are wordlessly bonding over food, it’s hard to not want to imprint romance on them because of this unspeakable thing that they are sharing and that we are witnessing. An electric connection can carry an extra jolt when food is involved.

Washington, whose romances in Family Meal circle around food, waxes about how, while sex is an important part of his novel’s narrative (his sexy biscuit making scene is a horny delight), a lot of the action in those sequences are about something deeper than just getting down.

“There are many different degrees of pleasure and of intimacy and of knowing a person,” Washington says. “So I think that insofar as sex is useful … in Family Meal specifically, or in other things that I've written fiction wise, it’s the ways in which characters let themselves to be known [that is more profound]. The ways in which they’re willing to reveal parts of themselves to know someone else. I think that those different degrees and those different layers of intimacy differ from character to character, in the same way that they differ from person to person. And I don’t think that that’s entirely divorced from how pleasure is intaken or conceived from a culinary standpoint.”

That is certainly true of the relationship between Eugenie and Dodin in The Taste of Things. They’ve been romantically entangled for years, but Eugenie has constantly rebuffed Dodin’s marriage proposals, insisting on maintaining a certain amount of autonomy. When she’s ill, and after Dodin’s lavish meal with another proposal, something shifts.

We never see Eugenie and Dodin consummate their relationship, although his stolen bedtime visits suggest that they’re sleeping together. But that lack of seeing their sexual relationship is precisely what makes Dodin’s cooking for Eugenie so erotic—and that’s exactly what Anh Hung wanted.

“It’s almost a sex scene,” he says. “For instance, sometimes when you talk to someone and somehow you are more attracted [to] his lips than the eyes. Then you look at the lips, you look at the mouth, and suddenly you realize that you are not looking at his eyes. Then you feel a little bit embarrassed because it’s more intimate. It’s more about attraction than just normal conversation. I think that watching [and] looking at someone eating is very sexy. I think that the line, ‘Can I look at you eating?’—it’s very intimate.”

One of the most intimate, horny portrayals of a relationship on television currently is Julia Child (Sarah Lancashire) and Paul Child (David Hyde Pierce) on Julia, which just started its second season. In Season 1, while sexual innuendo abounded, Julia’s menopause and the beginning of her television program The French Chef extinguished some of the flames. But in Season 2, Julia and Paul are again on a roll of innuendo-laden jokes, PDA, and cozy intimacy.

Creators Daniel Goldfarb and Chris Keyser’s television exploration of Child’s rockstar culinary journey is primarily based on the lived life and experience of Child, so the joyful, horny nature of Child isn’t something that’s just come out of thin air. “When you read the Julia books, especially when she's in her own voice, she was a deep sensualist,” Goldfarb says. “And that sensuality is such a huge part of her, such a huge part of her marriage, such a huge part of how she cooks, of how she feeds people, of how she fills a plate.”

And that core aura of Child is something that Goldfarb and Keyser wanted to infuse into the show. “You want something that makes you happy and watching these people cook for each other and love each other and have chances when you think no one's going to have a chance,” Keyser says. “And to set it in the kitchen and the bedroom is a pretty good place to demonstrate human desire and happiness.”

What all these things ultimately come down to is the idea that food is a form of care. “In order to get to that question and that conversation surrounding care, food felt like one vehicle to do that,” Washington says, about his novel. “In the same way that physical intimacy feels like another vehicle to do that. In the same way that just occupying or sharing a physical space, whether it's an explicitly queer space or an implicitly queer space, feels like another way of figuring out how to accept care, how to distribute care.”

The types of care that are seen range on a wide spectrum: Sydney talking down Carmy’s panic attacks, the food sourcing that the Troisgros family does for their restaurants, Paul’s support of Julia’s growing television career, Kai and Cam’s casual at-home cooking, or Dodin’s admiration for Eugenie’s free spirit. Ultimately, the idea of connection, joy and care seem to be at the center of the inspired horniness of food in the media of late. Who would have ever guessed the horniest thing someone could do without taking their clothes off is caring?