I’ll have what she’s having: What food can teach us about pleasure

“Orgasm scene.” When Harry Met Sally.

A turkey sandwich on white bread.

This is what Meg Ryan eats at Katz’s Delicatessen in the most famous scene of When Harry Met Sally. Ryan, as Sally, talks about orgasms while she removes slices of turkey from her sandwich one at a time. She takes a bite. Billy Crystal, as Harry, says that no woman has “faked it” during sex with him. How does he know?

“Because I know,” he says. Then Sally fakes an orgasm so loudly and wildly that the American film industry would never be the same again.

“I’ll have what she’s having,” says the elderly woman at the next table.

What the hell kind of incredible sandwich could inspire such a reaction? Of course, it didn’t. Sally thrashes at the table to prove a point, but who’s to say it couldn’t?

At Katz’s, Harry and Sally’s table is now marked by a sign. The sandwich in question is a menu staple. When in Rome, do as the Romans do, this real sandwich has inspired many tourists to disrupt the peace and loudly fake an orgasm themselves.

This routine event is probably one of the world’s most frequent displays of cuisine-related ecstasy. But I’m sure many of us feel the same way, much more quietly, on other occasions. Who hasn’t let out an mmm after a hearty pasta or a well-timed Kit Kat?

Food provides sustenance, but that’s only a part of it. Cooking and eating are deeply pleasurable acts. Food cravings are not unlike sexual ones, it’s the body telling us what it wants.

Sonia Waters is a somatic sexologist and bodyworker based in Wanaka. She describes her work, “I invite people to be in their bodies. So, embodied practices to find their pleasure through the felt sense, as opposed to any narratives or discourses about what we should feel.”

She says that people of all genders can lose touch with their bodies but can certainly regain that connection. She works with both couples and individuals and enjoys seeing relationships develop over time. When I ask what her favourite part of bodywork is, she says, “Laughing!”

“Taking people on journeys that allow them to feel that freedom of what their body has to offer. And out of that often comes laughter!”

Sonia says that food and sex can both be erotic. “The word ‘eros’, now often conjures sexual pleasure in people’s minds, but the original meaning of the word is more that joyous life-energy pleasure. So, when we think of food that way, it really can be that erotic nature.”

Food and sex can hold similar meanings for people, Sonia says. “We have all sorts of hangups around both, and we have all sorts of pleasures and delights around both.”

“And if we think of food and the genitals, you know, our oesophagus is one tube, so we put food in, we shit food out. And the anus is the kind of ‘dirty’ end of sex, or of the body, the part that we ignore; and it’s the part of great pleasure, for many people.”

I ask how food can influence our sexual selves. She says that to improve our experience of sex, “we can be well-nourished, hungry, hangry and sex don’t mix.”

Food can also function as a part of the sex act. “It can be an erotic toy, or plaything. We can play with food on the body, or in the body, or between the bodies. Chocolate, or honey. When you conjure up images like honey, some people love it, and other people hate it. I kinda cringe!”

I ask Sonia if sex qualifies as a necessity in a similar way as food. “I do think that not sex, but pleasure is equally as important. Obviously, it’s not, sort of, quite as dominant on the hierarchy of needs, but pleasure and our sense of satisfaction in life and wellbeing, they are very connected.”

Joy, sexual or not, is key to a fulfilled and contented experience of life. We all know the happiness that can abound when we grab a sweet treat on the way home from uni.

“I think we can open our language around pleasure, we can say. So, we’re not actually just talking about sexual pleasure here now, we’re talking about food pleasure, feeling the wind on your skin pleasure, going for a swim and what does the water feel like on your body? Eating food, what does that feel like in your mouth, going down into your body?”

“There’s pleasure in every aspect of the body and of being on the planet.”

So, it kind of is about the sandwich. The sandwich allows us to break free and express ourselves, very loudly, in an extremely busy delicatessen. The sandwich brings Harry and Sally closer. It makes us laugh. It makes us smile. It makes us scream. We’re having what she’s having.