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Actually, according to various Internet sources, the "big" zucchini is actually a small summer squash.

And also, not just because of its phallic shape, but really and truly an aphrodisiac (see below)!

Some zucchini facts:

Zucchini is really a fruit, not it is treated as a vegetable in the culinary world. It is the swollen ovary (yes, a female part, despite its phallic shape) of the plant it comes from.

The indigenous peoples of Central and South America had been eating zucchini for thousands of years, but the zucchini we eat (and it really didn't become popular in the United States until as recent as thirty years ago) was developed in Italy. Zucchino in Italian means “small squash.”

Now, here's the connection with sex. Apparently the roots that zucchini grows on absorb minerals that build both red and white blood cells, enhancing the circulation of oxygen in the blood. Thus, if one eats this vegetable before sex, your performance will improve markedly. I haven't found case studies that prove this yet, but check out the aphrodisiac blogspot for much more detailed information.

And, for men who suffer from health issues related to the prostate, nutrients in zucchini also reduce the symptoms of benign prostatic hypertrophy (BOH), a condition in which the prostate gland enlarges and leads to complications with urination and sexual functions in men.

There's even a recipe for an aphrodisiac salad which features chopped zucchini and that other vegetable associated with strength and virility and Popeye, spinach. Yes, they call it the sex salad.

And by the way, I made a bunch of zucchini bread which I distributed to several people over the holidays. That activity didn't snare me a husband. Maybe I need to forget about the bread and just focus on the zucchini. Because before you know it, summer will be cummin' in …

For more men and sex (and sex involving vegetables, literally), check out some of these classic porn films, available both on DVD at bijouworld.com and streaming instantly at bijougayporn.com!

In the 1970s, a youngish housewife in the west suburbs of Chicago dances to this tune on the green shag carpet. She gets her toddler to do it, swinging him by the arms. Her high school age son looks on with a combination of horror and embarrassment.

More than 40 years later, at her grandson's bar mitzvah in Buffalo Grove, Illinois, Bubby Ruth Goldstein (known for her get up and go) takes over the dance floor from her hip hop loving grandson and his friends when the band, in an effort to get everyone involved (an exhausting but necessary requirement for such functions), tries the nostalgia trick. It works.

Has this song become only a nostalgic camp crowd pleaser? Perhaps. I know the current Village People perform primarily on the nostalgia circuit (I saw them at gay Halsted Market Days and at “straight” Taste of Chicago because these popular commercialized festivals attract multiple ages and they need the “older crowd” of boomers with the spending power these days).

But there's a history behind and after it which, despite the campy appeal of the piece, is quite interesting because what we normally seem to think is true about this song ain't necessarily so.

According to Felipe Rose, the group's founder in an interview with the Huffington Post, "I don't think Jacques' intent (Jacques Morali, the original producer of the group) was, 'Oh, I'm just going to put together a group for the gay audience,'" says group member Eric Anzalone (the biker). "He knew the music industry and he knew if he had a hit in the clubs -- which, in the '70s, the gay, the Latin clubs -- that was the place to be." Thus, perhaps, the gay subtext was not meant originally.

Bananas have become pretty much a staple food in America (and also a source of much sexual innuendo, see below), but they are a comparatively recent addition to food culture in Western civilization.

It's obvious that before the opening up of the New World and global trade routes and technologies that bananas weren't easily accessible to Europeans. But even as late as the Victorian period, when one could buy them, they weren't exactly a popular food item. And not because of Victorian prudery. Many Victorians complained the fruit tasted like soap.

By 1910, however, bananas were consumed widely enough that slipping on a banana peel became a trope in Western physical comedy

According to Wikepedia, an American comedy recording from 1910 features a popular character of the time, "Uncle Josh", claiming to describe his own such incident:

Now I don't think much of the man that throws a banana peelin' on the sidewalk, and I don't think much of the banana peel that throws a man on the sidewalk neither ... my foot hit the bananer peelin' and I went up in the air, and I come down ker-plunk, jist as I was pickin' myself up a little boy come runnin' across the street ... he says, "Oh mister, won't you please do that agin? My little brother didn't see you do it."

The song “Yes, We Have No Bananas” was written by Frank Silver and Irving Cohn and originally released in 1923; for many decades, it was the best-selling sheet music in history. Since then then the song has been rerecorded several times and has been particularly popular during banana shortages.

Banana shortages occurred during WWII in England primarily because of the Japanese takeover of Malaysia; in America, which did not suffer such an involuntary shortage, they had become such a staple of cookery by the 1950s that bizarre concoctions such as the infamous ham and banana cassserole.

The Chiquita banana lady became iconic; in fact, she died recently. Her name was Monica Lewis; I remember her in a smaller part as a secretary who gets pushed out of an elevator in the movie Earthquake.

Bananas as aphrodisiacs tie into the old sympathetic magic idea that the the shape of an item ties into the physical and emotional qualities of similarly-shaped items (like the mandrake root, another reputed sexual energy source, which resembles a cock and balls). The shape resembles that of the penis; but interestingly enough, the symbolism may actually reflect reality, because they also contain bromelain, an enzyme which Dr. Oz says triggers testosterone production, and the fruit's potassium and vitamin B elevate energy levels.

The phallic allusions in bananas are ominipresent. In fact, the cover artwork for the debut album of The Velvet Underground features a banana made by Andy Warhol. On the original vinyl LP version, the design allowed the listener to "peel" this banana to find a pink, peeled phallic banana on the inside.

I think it's the act of peeling the fruit and having to basically hold the soft inside and swallow it as one long object (one only need maybe to cut it up when it gets too small to hold) that seems to evoke endless potentials for sexual innuendo.
 

However, this neighborhood is also gentrified as well, where the straight jocks and their girlfriends usually become stroller dads and soccer moms. Thus the ugly homophobia which associated anything gay as threatening to children is probably the main cause of such “concern.”

Those who live in glass houses should not throw stones. And in some cases, maybe they should also dress in the basement.