Eating is like sex-- but not how you imagine it.

Suppose someone gave you, for Christmas or whenever, a box of chocolate-covered cherries. We all know those, right? They're cheap but always welcome, especially if we have a sweet tooth. We wouldn't buy them for ourselves but are grateful for them.

Okay, now suppose you pop one into your mouth.

The first sensation is the hard, but not too-hard, outer coating of chocolate. We mash it between tongue and upper palate, releasing all that sugary nougat. We enter a dream state, knowing what's coming.

But wait. What is really happening?

First, the flavor is sensed on the front of our tongue: sweet, right? But it's not really registered until the sweetness spreads throughout the mouth, engulfing the taste buds that aren't in the front of the mouth but toward the middle. Soon we have an over-powering desire to chew that sweet thing, to break it down into its component particles.

Once that happens, once the jaw teeth are engaged -- and the taste buds located there -- there is no way you're not going to swallow that tasty morsel.

And when that happens, there do seem to be taste buds down the throat that complete the act.

That's where the simile with sex comes in.

Consider the first chewing as foreplay: we taste, we determine this is something we want; we keep the process going. The more we taste and start to chew -- the more we get into the act of sex -- the more we move along toward that point we can't stop because we enjoy it so much.
Think of those jaw teeth chewing that wonderful morsel, unleashing taste buds whose only purpose is to make us swallow, and you have the whole picture.

When we swallow, we climax.

It's done. We can sleep.

But you know as well I do that the taste lingers in the mouth and makes us want more, makes us want to do it again.

What to do? Rinse your mouth and put those candies away for another day.

Go to sleep and resolve to exercise more tomorrow.

I suspect that this natural instinct to swallow what tastes good comes from our earliest days of being human, when we had to recognize what was good for our survival or not by taste alone. Unfortunately, we've evolved to the point that we can have anything we want to eat by a simple trip to the grocery store or our favorite restaurant, whether we need the nourishment or not.

We're so lucky to be living in a time of plenty, in this country anyway. In fact, we have to be sure that we don't eat too much. Most societies before us, and many today, don't get enough to eat. But that's a topic for another day.

Back to this one: Eating is like sex.

If I'm right, and of course I think I am, what we need to do to avoid over-eating and obesity is to interrupt the process of taste before it gets going to the point of swallowing. Wine-tasters have done this for years: they sip the wine, swirl it in their mouths, and then spit it out. I'm not convinced that they get the full flavor of the wine this way -- since they don't swallow, they lose some dimension of taste -- but maybe this is a way for food addicts to sample what they want but not suffer the consequences of actual digestion and weight gain.

The problem, again, is that the "satisfaction" comes in swallowing. You can toss that Caesar salad around in your mouth, savoring its varied flavors and textures (even the anchovies), but something in your brain and your mouth want you to swallow it to get the real and final taste.

Try it yourself. Melt a chocolate-covered cherry (or any other food you truly love) in your mouth for a moment, let it slide toward the back of your mouth. Don't you feel different taste buds kicking in? Don't you feel the urge to chew? And once you've chewed this wonderful item, don't you feel an overpowering need to swallow? And doesn't that complete the act?

Nature is so insidious this way and so efficient. Can you really think this is all an accident?

I bow my hat to a system I could not, in my wildest dreams, have invented.

And yes, I will have another chocolate-covered cherry. And maybe a snifter of that Cognac.

I promise not to swallow. Yeah, right.