Food is love. Human sustainability is determined by our appetites, desires and primal instincts for warmth, pleasure and affection. It can be easy to forget just how sensual something as prosaic as fruit salad can be. Lust and longing — like food and love — are enmeshed with the very words we use to describe them: hunger, need, spice, heat ...

For some, food — and love, for that matter — are a source of dysfunction. For others, they are a lifelong source of satisfaction. And though this might be a stretch, I submit that those who consider eating merely a mechanical function are also likely to lack passion in other, shall we say, pertinent departments.

Separating the topics of food and sex can be tricky, and most discussions are laden with pitfalls. It's easy to see how so many of us are conflicted on the subject of intimacy. But food is highly sensual, and food and love are tightly connected. We are driven to feed our loved ones; we are stimulated by how food looks. We smell it; we put in our mouths and taste it. And when we are lucky, it satisfies an instinctual need at a deep, emotional level.

There is no scientific evidence proving the efficacy of aphrodisiacs. Despite their foundations being rooted in folklore, people spend millions of dollars a year on herbal, edible and lifestyle passion aids, revealing a strong desire to be rewarded with positive results — at what can sometimes be a tremendous expense. But "considering all the uncertainty of modern life," writes Katie Gallagher of the blog Cooking Little, "there is something perverse about attempting to quantify romance. Take aphrodisiacs. Why try so hard to debunk pleasant myths thousands of years old?"

If there is any truth to the notion that chile, chocolate, cilantro and avocados are powerful aphrodisiacs, then it would make New Mexico a very sexy state indeed. The book of The Arabian Nights includes a tale of a merchant whose 40 years of sterility were cured by an elixir that included coriander, once known as a prominent stimulant of the appetite. Avocado was called ahuacatl, or "testicle tree", by the Aztecs, and chile has been referenced suggestively in Mexican song, as in "La Llorona:" "I am like the green chile, hot but tasty." And damiana, an herbal liqueur, which was recently made available in Santa Fe liquor stores, is sold in a bottle shaped like a pregnant Venus of Willendorf — leaving little to the imagination as to what its contents are capable of inciting.

Casanova's legendary prowess was purportedly sustained by his love of chocolate, though his consumption couldn't beat that of Aztec ruler Montezuma, who is said to have drunk 50 goblets of hot chocolate spiked with chile every day in order to charge his libidinous escapades with his harem of 600 gorgeous concubines. (If chiles and chocolate have aphrodisiac qualities, what does that make mole poblano?)

The seratonin and phenylethylamine in chocolate are mood-lifters shown to have a stronger effect on women than on men — not that Casanova or Montezuma needed any luck with the ladies. On the other hand, it was the recently separated Mel Gibson who said on the topic of what women want, "after about 20 years of marriage, I'm finally starting to scratch the surface of that one. And I think the answer lies somewhere between conversation and chocolate."

An upbringing punctuated by the regular presence of pomegranate seeds keeps pomegranates, for me, squarely in the realm of platonic fruit. We grew them locally and ate them throughout the day, making it simultaneously difficult for me to swallow Santa Fe prices and resist buying them. In the Greek myth of Persephone, Hades tricked the goddess into eating pomegranate seeds, which forced her to retreat to the underworld for one season each year. The pomegranate is a passion fruit, also called the fruit of love, because of its abundance of seeds. Despite the pomegranate's reputation, it is actually the tomato, formerly believed to have aphrodisiacal powers, that was called the Apple of Love: pomme d'amour, from the Italian pomodoro. Pomme d'amour is also what French Renaissance humanist and doctor François Rabelais called women's breasts.

Many people who believe the Garden of Eden was located somewhere in the Near East suggest that the true forbidden fruit was not an apple, but a pomegranate. Others believe it was a tomato. Some Muslims believe that it was a banana. "As for the apple being the fruit in Paradise," writes Bron Hendrixson in his apple-happy manifesto, Apple, The Real Adam's Apple, "St. Jerome was the first to make this claim in the fourth century A.D." Hendrixson goes on to quote Sappho, claiming that apples were exchanged as tokens of love in ancient Greece and Rome, and that a German superstition describes the ultimate act of seduction as eating an apple soaked in the perspiration of your lover's armpit.

If the Placebo Effect works in medicine, then why shouldn't it work in romance? I approach the topic of aphrodisiacs with skeptical optimism, preferring to forgo formulaic platitudes like candles and chocolates in favor of openness, honesty and a handful of gold stars for effort. But what resonates most is
Dr. Ruth Westheimer's reminder: The number one aphrodisiac is respect.

Contact Nouf Al-Qasimi at food@q.com.