Foodplay

What is foodplay?

Foodplay (clinically sitophilia) is using food as play material during sex: smearing, feeding, eating off the body, spilling. It is about taste, temperature and texture on the skin, not about nutrition. Foodplay has no fixed role division and fits an ordinary evening just as well as a BDSM scene.

What foodplay looks like in practice

Usually small and domestic: a blindfold on, something sweet on the tongue, guessing what it is. The best-known example goes a good deal further. Nyotaimori is the Japanese practice of eating sushi off a naked body; the name literally means “food served on the female body”. According to the encyclopedic description, the food rests on sterilized leaves, precisely to keep skin and fish from touching, the model stays still and does not talk to the guests. China banned nyotaimori in 2005, citing public health and public morals.

That ban is more instructive than it sounds. In a restaurant there is a barrier between skin and food, and a regulator still drew a line. Reach for a can of whipped cream at home and you are working without that barrier.

The home version is smaller. An old sheet, four things on a plate (honey, strawberries, ice cubes, something spicy), and someone who does not know what is coming.

Where the appeal comes from

From the senses and the taboo at once. Food hits taste, smell, temperature and touch in one move. Exactly the channels that are already open during sex. On top of that sits a learned rule everyone knows: you do not play with food. Breaking that rule gives you a small transgression without anything having to hurt.

The encyclopedia places foodplay as a form of sexual fetishism, overlapping with wet-and-messy play, feederism and nyotaimori, and separates it sharply from vorarephilia. With foodplay the food is the object; with vore it is being eaten. The word sploshing for the wet, sticky variant comes from the British magazine Splosh!.

What foodplay gives, and to whom

Mostly a low threshold. Foodplay asks for no rope and no gear, and no role either. That makes it one of the few kinds of play through which people who otherwise have nothing to do with kink still try something new.

• For the person receiving it the effect is usually relaxation rather than tension. There is nothing to perform; you lie there and wait for what lands on your skin.
• For the person doing it the payoff is in the pace. Foodplay forces slowness, because spilled food cannot be rushed.
• For a couple the laugh is the point. Foodplay almost always goes wrong, and catching that together does more for an evening than a perfectly executed scene.

Foodplay does not remove tension. Use it because a conversation has been stuck for months and afterward you are left with a sticky sheet and the same conversation. And for some people the mess is not a pleasure but an irritation; that is taste, not prudishness.

How people do it

In four forms, rarely all at once. Eating off the body is the most photographed form and in practice the calmest. Feeding, usually blindfolded, turns it into a guessing game. Smearing and spilling is the territory of sploshing and calls for thinking ahead about where you lie. Temperature play with ice or something warm leans up against temperature play with candle wax, with one difference: food you can heat without any gear, and so you can also heat it too far.

What separates the careful version from the sloppy one is not the amount but the preparation: allergies discussed, a marked-off surface, and deciding in advance what stays away from any body opening.

What foodplay is not

“Foodplay is BDSM.” No. There is no power exchange baked into it. Feeding can be colored as service-oriented submission, but that is a choice and not a property of the practice.

“Edible means safe.” Edible says something about your stomach, not about your vagina. According to Miao and colleagues in mBio, Candida albicans causes 85 to 95 percent of all vulvovaginal yeast infections, and the same study describes how that yeast uses the sugar supply on the vaginal mucosa to survive. Bringing sugar inside is therefore not a neutral act.

“Whipped cream makes a fine lubricant.” It does not. Dairy, oil and sugar are not lubricant and do not belong inside. Thuisarts.nl, the public site of the Dutch College of General Practitioners among others, keeps it to one rule: wash your vagina with water only. That is the floor foodplay has to stay well clear of.

“Sploshing and foodplay are the same thing.” Sploshing is broader: it also includes mud and slime, and substances you do not eat at all.

What I see of it myself

I am Victor, a gigolo, at home in BDSM for more than twenty-five years and trained as a psychotherapist. Foodplay is the subject women tell me is “not really kinky”, as if that needs an excuse. That is exactly why it works: nobody is frightened by it.

In practice it almost always goes wrong in the aftermath. The scene lasts twenty minutes, the cleanup an hour, and nobody plans for that. Decide in advance where you lie and what happens afterward and it stays light; skip that and you end up irritated and blame the play itself.

What you can do yourself

• Ask about allergies before you unpack anything, and count on them lingering for hours. McKibbin and colleagues described in Allergy, Asthma & Clinical Immunology a severe peanut anaphylaxis transmitted solely through oral sex, and note that the peanut protein Ara h 1 is still in the saliva of up to ten percent of people hours after eating. Brushing your teeth does not fix that.
• Keep food out of the vagina and the anus. Sugar feeds yeast, and a piece of food that stays behind is a foreign object in a place that does not empty itself.
• Test every warm substance first on the inside of your own wrist. Chocolate sauce and honey hold heat far longer than you expect.
• Lay down whatever you do not want to clean. An old sheet, a bathroom floor, or a shower beforehand decides whether the play stays fun.
• Agree when it is over and who cleans up. Otherwise the cleanup becomes part of the scene without anyone choosing that.

More about foodplay

On this site the broader sensation play sits in the sensual section, where slowness and touch are the thread, and fetish explains when a preference gets a name and when a diagnosis.

Off this site, Thuisarts.nl on vaginal yeast infections is the shortest reliable explanation of what the mucosa does and does not tolerate, and the article by McKibbin and colleagues gives the reason an allergy question here is not overcautious.

Where this fits on this site

Foodplay is not on my list of options under that name, and I make no promises about things that are not on it. What is on it is that everything is open to discussion and nothing is required. If you want to know whether something like this fits inside an evening, the page on intimate togetherness shows how such an evening is put together.

Sources

• Glycogen Metabolism in Candida albicans Impacts Fitness and Virulence during Vulvovaginal and Invasive Candidiasis. Miao, Regan, Cai, Palmer, Williams, Kruppa & Peters, mBio 14(2), 2023 (DOI 10.1128/mbio.00046-23). Establishes that 85 to 95 percent of vulvovaginal candidiasis is caused by Candida albicans, and that the vaginal mucosa is a sugar-rich environment where free glycogen can exceed the glucose level roughly tenfold, the reason sugar is no neutral substance there.
• Fatal anaphylaxis due to peanut exposure from oral intercourse. McKibbin, Siu, Roberts, Shkrum & Jeimy, Allergy, Asthma and Clinical Immunology 17, article 110, 2021 (DOI 10.1186/s13223-021-00611-9). Establishes that a peanut allergy can trigger a severe reaction through saliva during oral sex, that the peanut protein Ara h 1 remains detectable in the saliva of up to ten percent of people hours after eating, and the advice that anyone getting intimate should raise their allergies.
• Ik heb een vaginale schimmelinfectie. Thuisarts.nl, published by the Dutch College of General Practitioners with the Federation of Medical Specialists and the Dutch Patients Federation. Provides the symptoms (itching, white discharge, pain when urinating and during sex) and the hygiene advice “wash your vagina with water only”.
• Food play. Wikipedia. Provides the definition of foodplay as a form of sexual fetishism where arousal comes from erotic situations involving food, the name sitophilia, the overlap with wet-and-messy fetishism, feederism and nyotaimori, and the distinction from vorarephilia. The article itself carries the notice that it needs more sources; it is used here only for the terminology, not for a factual or medical claim.
• Nyotaimori. Wikipedia. Provides the meaning “food served on the female body”, the use of sterilized leaves to keep skin and fish from touching, the model staying still and silent, and the 2005 Chinese ban on grounds of public health and morals.
• Wet and messy fetishism. Wikipedia. Provides that sploshing is the broader category, which also fits mud and water, that the substances can be edible or not, that bodily fluids fall outside it, and that the word comes from the British magazine Splosh!.

Related terms

• Fetish. The category foodplay falls under once the food itself carries the charge.
• Food control. The other food term, but about who decides what gets eaten.
• Blindfold. The object that turns foodplay from a meal into a guessing game.
• Biting. The mouth used with no food in between.
• Figging. The other practice where something from the kitchen ends up on the skin, with a very different effect.
• Ginger play. The same kitchen cupboard, but to set off a chemical sting.