Small wonder that they prefer to write about sex: it's so much easier to dramatize the relationship between a woman and her lover than a man and his dinner. Writers face the harder task of having to use words to evoke the colors and tastes and smells and textures of food, and of making these descriptions compelling.

With little effort, food becomes a striking presence, almost a character, in the story. In a movie, the camera does all the work: just point it in the direction of a well-prepared meal and our appetites will be stimulated. It isn't hard to understand why filmmakers have found it easier than writers to tell stories which focus on the experience of eating. (There are exceptions, such as The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, which makes eating a metaphor for our base appetites.) These films are almost inevitably humanist in intent, perhaps because sharing a fine meal tends to bring out the best in people. Both of these stories have been adapted into movies, and, indeed, in the cinema there is a thriving sub-genre of gastronomic films, including such remarkable works as Tampopo, Eat Drink Man Woman, and Big Night. Isak Dinesen's classic 'Babette's Feast' and Joanne Harris' novel Chocolat are two popular examples. There is no great literary tradition of writing about the pleasures of eating that I know of, although such works exist. However, good writing about sex is comparatively rare the subject lends itself all too easily to cliché and to the modesty of the ellipsis and the paragraph break. Thus, there are countless works exploring the pleasures of physical love. Sex provides the writer with the basic ingredients of compelling drama: two people, emotional complexities, action. Food and sex are life's two great physical passions, but for writers of fiction, the latter has always been a much more popular subject than the former.

Devils Larder by Jim Crace