Mikey Robins on having your cake and seating it, too

Stop us if you've heard this one, food fetishists, but have you ever sat on a beautifully iced cake with no pants on? It's just one of the many, many quasi-sexy topics radio DJ, television personality and now author Mikey Robins explores in his book, Seven Deadly Sins and One Very Naughty Fruit, a juicy collection of food stories, factoids and anecdotes – some juicier than others.

"You know what? I'm 56 years old and I've been around," says Robins. "I had never heard that you could be aroused by a cake. I've always shied away from any sexual act that requires putting plastic down first. Also, it's a ruination of a perfectly good cake."

Robins, who famously had gastric banding surgery more than a decade ago (he once claimed to have "lost a whole Minogue" through the process), has always entertained a fraught relationship with food. Growing up in Newcastle in a strict Catholic family, he was made to practice Lent, with mixed results. "As a kid I was told by my grandmother, if I didn't give up Paddle Pops for Lent I'd make the baby Jesus sad. And, unfortunately, I made the baby Jesus very sad."

The battle between soul and stomach is a common theme throughout the book. Robins reckons our age-old relationship with food and the resulting guilt is just human nature. "The moment we start enjoying ourselves we have to feel bad about it because we're deeply flawed creatures," he says. "But if we weren't we wouldn't have the songs, the theatre, the poetry and the movies."

He writes about Marlon Brando, whose love affair with dairy became legendary. This was the man who sat in a canoe in Bora Bora between shoots for Mutiny on the Bounty eating tubs of ice-cream. "I love the story of Francis Coppola telling [Brando] he had to lose weight for Apocalypse Now," says Robins. "His wife put a padlock on the fridge, came home and found the padlock broken and a whole wheel of brie eaten."

Robins spent three months buried in research material before he started writing. He finds quotes from Saint Thomas Aquinas ("the things that we love tell us who we are"). He digs up Plato's ancient Roman recipe for Gatorade. "It was a drink made out of ash and vinegar. Archaeologists found gladiator skeletons next to civilian skeletons and they realised that the gladiators had higher levels of electrolytes.") He finds (occasionally wildly unfounded) stories on the internet. But then, a lot of his material comes from friends' dinner party stories.

"They're stories I still find interesting and entertaining – and I like telling," says Robins. "Josephine Cochran, the woman who invented the dishwasher, is a wonderful story about engineering, sexism, politics, and commerce. And, as someone who was a professional dishwasher before I became a professional comedian, I just want to go back in time and say, 'Thank you'."

And that one naughty fruit? "I'm afraid there's no other way to describe the dirty pineapple other than to describe the dirty pineapple."

Seven Deadly Sins and One Very Naughty Fruit by Mikey Robins (Simon & Schuster Australia), RRP $35.