Before Jennifer Beals was Bette, the elegant, assertive philanderer we've grown to know and love on The L Word, she played an angsty young welder/dancer in 1983's epic drama, Flashdance. By day, the sweaty seductress strapped on a headlamp whilst toiling in work boots. By night, the glitzy nymph dumped buckets of water on her writhing body at a Pittsburgh club for loot.

One evening she catches the attention of Nick Hurley, her older, curly-haired boss, who ends up taking her to dinner at some fancy lobster joint. Aside from the fact that she showed up in a bow tie and sleeveless tuxedo shirt (looking more like a male Chippendale than the fox that she is), she emanates sex for the duration of the meal. How does she do this? By sucking on tiny mounds of lobster meat while making banal conversaion with her tongue-tied employer. Make no bones about it: it was hot. You could tell that when they got back home, they totally did it, and it was awesome (mostly because of the lobster). Lobster is one of many foods that's acceptable to be seen eating in the presence of someone you hope to seduce.

Other foods, however, are to be avoided at all costs.

There's this scene in Fast Times at Ridgemont High where Ron Johnson, a hunky stereo salesman (way out of high school) hits on high school freshman Stacy Hamilton (Jennifer Jason Leigh) at her place of work, a pizza restaurant in the mall food court. Dapper Ron also works in the mall and immediately takes a liking to the doughy-cheeked waitress. After slinging his arm across the back of the booth to seem casual, he orders the following thing from dorky blouse-clad Stacy: "I'll take a meatball sandwich, a medium coke [slight pause]... and your phone number."

Okay. No. Not hot. Not hot for the following reasons: a) It's cheesy; b) She's underage (He doesn't know that, but whatever); and c) He ordered a meatball sandwich. A MEATBALL SANDWICH. He expected to eat balls of mall-grade meat encased in a sauce-drenched roll in plain view of his newfound crush, and still hoped to have sex with her.

Lucky for Ron Johnson, Stacy's a freshman and wants to rid herself of her virgin reputation (and impress older, more experienced friend Linda Barrett, played by half-naked Phoebe Cates), so she's unfazed by his atrociously uncomely food choice. Just as certain jobs can qualify a person's hotness quotient, the same can be said of the things they opt to publicly put in their mouths. If Ron Johnson had tried to pull that meatball shit with an age-appropriate individual (and not just an eager-to-please teen), there's no way he could have then lured her to the dugout and stuck it in. Gross.

A couple weeks ago I was standing outside a dyke bar in Chicago with my friend Jackie when I decided it was time to hightail it to the gas station next door for a snack. After perusing the sparsely stocked aisles, I encouraged her to get a Tabasco-flavored Slim Jim. That's what I wanted, that's what I had already started eating before having purchased it and, in a drunken stupor, thought it would be cute if we had matching snacks. We teetered crookedly out the glass doors and toward our respective girlfriends who were smoking cigarettes outside the bar. Suddenly Jackie yanked me back and crouched behind a gas pump.

"We can't let them see us eating this!"

"What? A Slim Jim?" I asked.

"Yes! It's nasty!"

I stood there, perplexed and annoyed, watching her tear into the well-spiced tube of meat as she squatted near a littered curb. "But beef jerky is hot," I argued, and she shook her head in disagreement. I think I have a fairly firm grasp on food that's not sexy to be seen eating (quiche, ham, borscht, pudding, cottage cheese, roast beef, cream of wheat, egg salad, whole yams or Bit O' Honey) in public — I personally think that beef jerky is hot. It screams "I'm primal and like to have sex!" in a way that few other foods do.

There are sexier foods, but still. I recently had to break it to my girlfriend, who frequently rants and raves about baklava, that baklava is really unhot, but not because of the food itself. Much like moussaka, chimichangas or baba ghanoush, it's the name that kills it.

Do you guys think there's such thing as sexy food? It seems no one I've talked to about this can reach a consensus on the topic. (Note: Whipped cream and chocolate are trite so they don't count.)