I grew up in a very basic (in the colloquial sense) meat-and-potatoes household, all-American, conservative, Christian, and incredibly repressed. I definitely didn’t learn about sex or cooking from my mother. The most exotic thing we ever ate was Chinese food, and that wasn’t until I was in junior high, when my parents started to branch out a little. Food was probably the only pleasure not considered suspect, and even then our tastes ran to Hamburger Helper.

It was my unsaved school friends who corrupted me, with trips to Indian and Portuguese restaurants in the city and all kinds of secular ideas and viewpoints foreign to my own. I lost my taste for the homogenous and admittedly bland fodder I’d been fed. “No man will ever satisfy you,” my mother pronounced upon my departure for college, meant as a last-ditch re-conversion attempt, but sounding like a curse. Erotic satisfactions were, purportedly, a mirage – unless they were of the St. Teresa of Avila variety. Rick Warren wrote a whole fevered book about Jesus as the only worthy object of eros, which Mom dispatched to me forthwith.

My entire adulthood has been, in some ways, an attempt to reclaim what Audre Lorde and other feminist writers have called “the erotic,” that sensual joy-in-aliveness, from the Puritanism of my youth. I could never have started this blog while my mother was alive. But I’d like to think she’s proud of me now. Even for taking extremely cheeky photos of fruits and vegetables.