Looking for love potions

I always hear celebrity chefs and my grandmother saying that food has the power to bring people together. This has always made me curious.

How close together can it bring people? Can food alone make us get really close? Inappropriately close?

Culinary conquistador that I am, I decided to test it out and see if aphrodisiacs really worked. The first thing I learned was that most aphrodisiacs are obscure and expensive, and at this stage in my life, I just can’t afford to splash out on caterpillar fungus and tiger penis. There are, however, a few more reasonable options that you can find right here in St Andrews. The question then became: could I make a potently aphrodisiac meal using the limited resources available to me?

I have something to admit: I am definitely not a scientist. If you want a peer reviewed, double-blind study on the effectiveness of various aphrodisiacs, this is not going to be it. I just threw everything I could find together and saw if it created a stirring in people’s loins.

My first stop was Morrisons, where I picked up a head of lettuce, rocket, and condensed milk. The Egyptians thought that lettuce was an aphrodisiac because it was eaten by Set, the sexually potent god of chaos. If it worked for Set, I assumed it would work for me. Rocket was apparently considered an aphrodisiac by the ancient Romans. I was sceptical of the notion that your run-of-the-mill vegetation increased virility; surely if these ingredients had such arousing properties, everyone would start going at it after eating a salad. I supposed I’d just have to use tons of it to make sure. The condensed milk was for dulce de leche, which was by far the most appealing item on my list.

Next, I picked up some ginseng from the health food store. They only had it in capsule form, so I guessed that would have to do. Finally, the pièce de résistance: oysters from the fishmonger. I hoped I’d get a lot of bang for my buck out of those. Now, the test. I invited two couples and my girlfriend over to act as guinea pigs. I also plastic-wrapped the couch, just in case my meal was a little too potent. Calling it a meal is a stretch though. It was more of a giant salad with a raw oyster on top and a pill on the side. We dug in.

The result? I don’t know about everyone else, but all that greenery only made me feel healthy, not lusty. The ginseng pill made me feel like we were completing a suicide pact – for all that my friends knew, they were; I only told them I’d feed them, not force them to swallow mysterious pills. I said it was some new type of experimental gastronomy, and I think they mostly bought it.

The oysters were decidedly unsexy, just salty expensive snot you shoot back like tequila. I won’t lie though, I did feel a little tingly after finishing mine. Maybe it was the exhilaration of having a living bivalve hanging out in my stomach. The dulce de leche was the tastiest (no suprises there), but afterwards I didn’t feel particularly libidinous.

After everyone had finished, I observed closely as they made small talk. At any moment my covert aphrodisiac cocktail could kick in… A half-hour passed without anyone, including myself, forcefully putting their tongue down anyone else’s throat. I had failed.

I came clean and informed them all that they were part of my shady experiment. They were a little weirded out, but it’s not like I went and did something completely out of character. I decided to drown my failure with a night on the town. As I observed our handsome student body laugh and flirt with one another, I realised that there are only two real aphrodisiacs: a lot of booze and the money to buy it.

Written by Mark Kersteen, understand writer