Why men love my food, by Nigella

She's tired of her 'gastro-porn' image, but the domestic goddess can't ignore the link between food and se

Nigella Lawson yesterday revealed the secret of her success: that men become "lascivious" while watching women eat.

Lawson said that she has grown weary of her image as the ultimate "gastro-porn" pin-up, but she admitted that food and sex are intimately linked.

"The notion of women eating makes men lascivious. It's the male fantasy of the mother and the lover in one," she said. "It is not what I intend. I'm uncomfortable having it projected on me. I don't want to be some blow-up sex doll in the kitchen in my 50s."

She also told of the stability and happiness of her life five years after the death from throat cancer of her first husband, the journalist John Diamond.

"It took a long time to get used not to feeling as if I was living under siege. You find it normal to live in a state of emergency when you have lost people close to you," she said.

Now married to the art dealer Charles Saatchi, Lawson, 46, is the original domestic goddess. Her cookery books have sold two million copies and her new TV series, Nigella's Christmas Kitchen, starts on Wednesday on BBC2.

But success came after years of personal tragedy: Her first husband's death came after Lawson had already lost her mother and younger sister to cancer.

In an interview published yesterday in the Daily Mail, Lawson described how the rituals of cooking and eating helped her to fight her way through grief. "Eating is a way of saying I accept that I carry on living. If in doubt - stuff a turkey."