I love feeding my friends. For a recent dinner for eight, I prepared one of my favorite starters, roasted beets and goat cheese, followed by Boeuf Bourguignon with papparadelle noodles, and dessert of individual warm chocolate cake and ice cream. When I mention to married girlfriends with children that cooking relaxes me, they stare at me blankly, as if I’m speaking in a foreign tongue. I’ve never had to fix meals for a husband and family, so I don’t see it as a chore, but rather a pleasure, more in line with a hobby. And I’ve wondered if there’s a similar mindset at play, when it comes to sex.
Cooking and sex go way back, according to Richard Wrangham in his new book, Catching Fire, How Cooking Made Us Human [1]. In the chapter, “The Married Cook,” Wrangham traces the relationship between cooking and mating in primitive societies, and how it happened, anthropologically speaking, that women got stuck over a hot stove.
Wrangham also describes courtship and marriage rites of hunter-gatherer societies such as the Mbuti Pygmies of the Congo and the Bonerif tribe of New Guinea.
Among the Mbuti Pygmies, an unmarried woman who offers food to a man is effectively flirting, if not offering betrothal. Male anthropologists have to be aware of this to avoid embarrassment in such societies. Co-feeding is often the only marriage ceremony, such that if an unmarried pair are seen eating together, they are henceforward regarded as married. In New Guinea, Bonerif hunter-gatherers rely on the sago palm tree for their staple food year-round. If a woman prepares her own sago meal and gives it to a man, she is considered wed to him.
Just for the record, the lavish meal I described earlier was served to some married couples and a few single gay men, so I don’t think my skill will result in a wedding. At least not my own.