According to Kama Sutra a big, heavy meal before sex is not a good idea – all the energy of the body gets channeled into the digestive process and leaves none for sexual arousal. The body needs a great deal of steam to digest the meal as well as raise sexual energy and, unfortunately, it will automatically pick the digestion process—you don’t get to decide.
Food should be had after sex. The Kama Sutra recommends that after sex the man should offer the beloved a beautifully presented gourmet meal, with varied flavours to satisfy her taste buds. Before sex one should stick to light savoury snacks and a couple of drinks—literally two drinks because being drunk reduces the erection and is not conducive to great sex.
Sex needs energy, good sex needs a lot of energy, fabulous sex needs huge amounts of energy. Food and drink should help in the process, not distract from it.
In the time of the Kama Sutra the social norm was to eat during the mid-afternoon. Whether one was preparing for sex or not, eating later in the evening (our dinner time) was not generally recommended.
Sex and Food
Ideally, if the couple had a date for sex (and both partners were aware of it), the man would feed the beloved a few light snacks before they made love. Something warm—because it takes less energy to digest. Not fatty meat—this gives sweat and sexual fluids an unpleasant odour during sex. Nuts were often included—the good fatty acids in nuts give extra blood flow to the genitals and raise the sexual energy properly.
After sex was the time to spoil her with every kind of delicacy to please her taste buds. The aprés sex meal was to include mutton soup (courtesans had to be fed mutton soup and chicken broth to recoup their energies after an exhausting night), kebabs, grilled food, vegetables, fragrant rice, walnuts, mangoes, candied oranges and other sweets.
And, the Kama Sutra says, it was not just what you offered her to eat but how you offered it. The lover was to pick up each item of food, bite into it first and then offer it to her, telling her ‘this one is sweet, this one is salty’. He must offer her a variety of juices and sherbets, holding the cup to her lips with his hands.
If, however, food before sex was unavoidable – you had invited her to a party and heavy food and drink was consumed—then a couple of hours gap and some physical activity was necessary. The Kama Sutra stipulates that after dinner, guests should be entertained with cock and quail fights, singing games and other activities. Digestives and mouth fresheners should also be offered. All this would give the digestive process time to settle down and make the body ‘love’ ready again.
The passage of time and wishful thinking have developed a long list of the ‘right’ kind of foods—aphrodisiacs – to eat to become virile and sexy.
The Kama Sutra (and all the love texts of the ancient East) insists that the foods you eat make all the difference to your sexual prowess, not because they have magical properties but because they work with the organs in individual ways to release energy and increase blood flow.
The best kind of aphrodisiac was simply right eating! Good sex needed a lot of energy. Eating right meant good digestion, good digestion meant good metabolism and good metabolism meant lots of energy – if your body was lacking in energy you were not going to be any good at sex! If you were going to flop into a breathless heap after a few minutes then all skills of seduction and all knowledge of the erotic arts were pointless.
