Sex & Food Conundrum

By Kasun Kamaladasa –APRIL 16, 2018

Kasun Kamaladasa

It’s quite fascinating how ones need for both food and sex can be described by the same words (Appetite, Hunger, Crave, Thirst, Desire etc.). It’s as if people just unknowingly brought these seemingly unrelated activities together due to the similar importance they play in our lives.

What surprised me for a long time is that although our attitude towards food has been changing to accepting of diversity, our attitude towards sex has been changing towards rejecting diversity. Both being basic human physiological needs, how it has happened is rather tragic.

Food & Sex – 101

Last year, I had some opportunities to visit villages and other groups of people in Sri Lanka, who would talk about their attitude towards food. That is when I realized that even though schools, hospitals, food industry and media all heavily invested time and money to teach people the value of diverse nutrition and healthy food habits, our economy and policies have not yet done a good enough job to reinforce it. I’ll elaborate on that little later.

First let’s take a short journey through time of how our modern cuisines came to be.

Everyone knows that we used to be hunter gatherers, then we learned how to domesticate animals, then we became farmers, then we moved to processed foods and today sometimes it’s even hard to say where all the food comes from. (But this change didn’t happen simultaneously everywhere in the world, there are still millions of people who die of hunger, millions more who are poorly fed, some eating the same thing every day, billions who don’t eat correctly to receive the required nutrition)

Since sex-education is still a taboo and not so many people know how sex changed throughout the ages, explaining it is little tricky. Lack of it in school history lessons and its change being much less consistent throughout the world ads up to the confusion.

Similar to how our cuisines evolved interaction of sex started from the hunter gatherer tribes that had their own practices that suited their tribes (or the tribe leaders). When some groups started establishing villages they came up with concepts of marriage. Marriage between two people was set in some tribes while in others it was more dynamic. When farming required fighting for huge chunks of land, concept of marriage was modified as means of sharing land. When Industries allowed people free time and freedom to travel a concept of dating was formed. Diverse forms of brothels and institutions coexisted throughout history and finally some parts of the world came to re-acknowledging sexual liberation (in some communities the story might be slightly different).

Similar to how in some parts of the world, people continued to take insects (Around 2 billion people regularly eat insects as part of their diet, and over 1,900 species are edible) and other animals that we normally do not see in our restaurant menus, people in certain parts of the world have very different tastes, when it came to sex and sexuality.  

Just as important it is to know how these industries and environments changed, it’s also important to understand how we ourselves and our attitudes changed, in Sri Lanka. 

It’s kind of fishy

Long ago eating a fish from sea would mean that you would have to live in the coastal area; you either have to have something valuable to trade or go fishing by yourself in a boat (with no one to warn you about storms and tsunamis); you would have to come back home and try to clean the fish (without any of the fancy knifes we have now); you’d have to be a person with a good immunity to not get sick after long days/hours of sailing in sea or after eating unpreserved/unprocessed fish. 

Today, with societies that have relatively better systems in place you might be able to enjoy the same fish and receive its nutrients. You might even find other foods that supply some of the same nutrients that you would otherwise receive only from fish (If you were allergic to fish or simply intolerant to fish this would be amazing). You could eat it every single day without waiting for a fisherman or a merchant to come to where you live.

Why is eating fish so important? People who have met a nutritionist would never have to ask this but in case you do this is it. Fish that come from the sea contain omega-3 fatty acids and vitamins such as D and B2. Fish is rich in calcium and phosphorus and a great source of minerals, such as iron, zinc, iodine, magnesium, and potassium. Omega-3 fatty acids especially do not come from other sources of our normal day-to-day food, which is not only responsible for brain development but brings benefits to your heart health as well (some researches shows up to 50 percent lower risk of dying from a sudden cardiac event if you have fish 2-3 times a week).

Finally, you could certainly live without eating fish but studies shows that people who have regular fish in their diet have better brain development than those who do not. Sure you don’t have to have a developed brain (relatively) or a healthy heart, plenty of people don’t, but wouldn’t you rather have those advantages than not?

Read More