A Cookbook of Condoms, Served Without Irony

The first recipe I noticed was the condom sushi. Then the stuffed condoms. Then the condoms on rice. Kyosuke Kagami’s book, titled 作ってあげたいコンドームごはん—roughly "Condom Dishes I Want to Make for You"—is a cookbook in the full sense: there are recipes, there are plated photographs, there are presumably test runs in an actual kitchen. The ingredient that unifies everything happens to be contraception.

Kagami frames the project as public health advocacy. The book is meant to open conversations about sexually transmitted infections and unintended pregnancy—the kind of conversations that tend to die in brochures and laminated classroom posters. His approach is to wrap the subject in something domestic and followable, on the theory that people who won’t read a pamphlet might flip through a recipe collection. It’s not the stupidest bet in the history of health communication.

What gets me is the earnestness. There’s no wink at the camera, no ironic distance. Someone tested these recipes. Someone plated the dishes for photographs and approved the shots. Someone looked at a condom on rice and thought: yes, good, that goes in the book. The commitment to the premise is total, and that’s exactly what makes it land differently than a stunt would.

Sex ed has been reaching for the disarming and the absurd for decades—anything to talk about bodies without making everyone leave the room. The usual results are sad. A cookbook operates differently. You follow a recipe in someone’s kitchen, you make it for someone, the whole domestic frame does something to the subject that a pamphlet never could. There’s intimacy built into the format that no brochure designer has figured out how to replicate.

Most cookbooks are novelty items to most of the people who buy them—purchased for the fantasy of the cooking, not the cooking itself. Kagami’s just offers a stranger fantasy than most, and a more useful one.