Sex Work, Culture and the Supermarket Sandwich

My Twitter feed, as always, is awash with discourse. This week a SWERF has broken containment. Her post about how sex workers can’t really be enjoying sex with clients is flooding my phone from all angles. Plenty of colleagues are commenting back, but I stay largely silent.  

Observing moments like these offer valuable insights into how the current moment perceives sex workers. What struck me from the SWERF’s post was the confident assertion that we could never enjoy sex with clients. The implication to me is that an onlooker can confidently know what we think, and what we feel in our bodies. SWERFs see us as robotic receptacles for clients’ desires. Ironically, in doing so they make us receptacles for their thoughts and desires too. We’re Schroedinger’s cat; we exist too much, and somehow, we don’t exist at all. 

When Tryst asked me to write for their new food column, I immediately thought of how there’s no better way to prove that we do in fact exist than by looking at the food sex workers eat. We live and work in neighbourhoods. We travel through cities. We cross borders, and settle into places we call home. Along all these journeys, we have to eat. Eating is a pure corporeal act - it connects the money we earn with our bodies, to the food we use to nourish those bodies. We leave traces of ourselves by eating, and our food leaves traces on us. Tracing our food traces us; our food is our proof of life. 

If there’s any encapsulation of how food can take and give life, it’s the British supermarket sandwich. To me, it doesn’t matter if it’s from a budget chain or a high end one. The two slices of dry bread, sparse filling, and cold aura - no matter how warm the weather is - suck all the joy out of any mealtime I hope to enjoy. These were the sandwiches I was eating regularly while studying and working a dead-end job before I started sex work. These were the sandwiches that kept me going, until one day they weren’t enough anymore. 

We leave traces of ourselves by eating, and our food leaves traces on us. Tracing our food traces us; our food is our proof of life. 

In my first ever booking, I dressed up in all black and made a sub crawl around while oinking like a pig. Watching him shuffle on his hands and knees while trying to hold on to a dog toy in his mouth was a surreal experience. I enjoyed it; I also felt like I was floating. On the way home, I dug my hand into my handbag, perhaps looking for my purse, or phone. Having not yet mastered the science of arranging my money in neat envelopes, what my fingers grasped against was loose cash. Notes and notes of cash. Cash that I held in my fist; cash that felt firm and real. 

Fruit was the first ever thing I bought with that cash. When I bought fruit before, it was a few staples thrown into my regular shopping basket. That night, I took my time choosing oranges, plums, grapes, and so many more. There was no particular reason I did this, other than I was craving fruit, and I had real cash to spend on great fruit. Everything about the fruit I bought with my cash tasted sharper and sweeter. When I bit into my navel orange, I felt a moment of pure presence that I hadn’t previously felt with food in years. It was a presence earned by knowing I’d earned all this cash for myself, by myself. To this day, fruit I buy with my cash tastes just as sweet. 

As I transitioned from domming to escorting, I started touring cities in the UK. This took me to living out of hotel rooms with no kitchen. On hunts for nourishing, tasty food between clients, I came to understand the tyranny of urban food. I was ostensibly surrounded by places to buy food, but most establishments were designed to make the working day smoother for office workers on quick lunch breaks. Ie, whether chain, independent, or high-end, these venues offered the same insipid nourishment I’d once stared down in my supermarket sandwiches. 

Everything about the fruit I bought with my cash tasted sharper and sweeter.

Crucially, these food venues were designed for workers who ate during the day. I almost never found anywhere to eat healthy, well prepared food in the evenings or nights. I noted the irony. These cities’ food spots were structured around men, but not the sex workers who kept those men company. Eating as a sex worker on tour was a lonely experience; I often craved to share my food with a colleague, or friend. Food in the city became a lens through which I understood sex workers’ position more generally in the urban landscape—vital, yet hidden.

Touring was inevitably temporary. Eventually, I took a different turn within escorting, towards companionship. I started accompanying clients to high end restaurants as part of our bookings, and this is largely what I still do now. I’ve transformed from being an eater who does sex work, to a sex worker who eats. 

There are some absolutely beautiful Michelin star restaurants I’ve had the pleasure of visiting. The food has been seasonal, local, and carefully crafted for genuinely good dining. There have also been some venues not worth their hype at all. I’ve sometimes looked up at my client from a plate of something I find particularly unappetising, wondering if it would be wonderfully authentic, or irreparably transgressive, to say, “I don’t like this, do you?”

Luxury food is designed to inspire awe. Consumption of the brand becomes the sustenance; amidst the stars, reviews, and glitter, the food becomes almost incidental. Disappointment feels transgressive when the image of the food becomes more important than the essence of the food. The role of the sex worker in these high end contexts becomes to reify this image of the food, by swallowing the food. To reify the image of luxury by disappearing into the luxury. 

Ever since my cash-bought fruit, I’ve known what real food tastes like. So sometimes, I take my clients from high end venues to local hotspots known only in London. We sit opposite each other on plastic chairs, munching into dishes we can’t find on Google reviews - Soho’s ramen, Camden’s donuts. We slow down in each other’s company, truly eating. We transform from playing roles to really existing, in the presence of good food, and good company. 

Often, I take this food home. Late at night, I’ll taste it all again, straight from the fridge. This is the food that comes straight from the city I know, to the body I own, every nourishing drop brokered by sex work. My mouth fills with flavour, and I come alive. 

Recipe: Cash-bought fruit salad

Visit your local market or greengrocers, and select the best fruit you can find. It should be firm and ripe. You can test the ripeness by smelling the top, where the stem is. It should smell sweet and ready. 

In my fruit salad, I use peaches, plums, red grapes, purple tomatoes, and navel oranges. I like how the colours run from orange to purple. You can use any fruit you enjoy, but I don’t recommend using bananas, as these go brown and unappetising very fast. 

Slice your fruit, bearing in mind that the shape of the fruit will change its taste and texture. I like to slice my grapes into halves, tomatoes into thin half slices, plums and peaches into thick whole slices, and oranges into big chunks. The smaller you cut your fruit, the more watery your fruit will be, which you may want in hot weather. 

Sprinkle a little sea salt on your fruit. You can also add a dash of red wine vinegar here. If you want to take your fruit salad in a different direction, you can also add mozzarella pearls and freshly torn basil leaves. 

Serve on a bed of thick, strained Greek yoghurt. 

Best eaten fresh.

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