Food porn

A commercial-style photograph of a cheeseburger
Macro photography of a strawberry pie

Food porn (or foodporn) is a glamourized visual presentation of cooking or eating in advertisements, infomercials, blogs, cooking shows, and other visual media. Food porn often takes the form of food photography with styling that presents food provocatively, in a similar way to glamour photography or pornographic photography.

History

The practice of turning food into a visual spectacle can be traced back to 16th-century Europe. However, one of the earliest forms of the term "food porn" appeared in an article by Alexander Cockburn, published in December 1977 in The New York Review of Books. In it, Cockburn wrote, "True gastro-porn heightens the excitement and also the sense of the unattainable by proffering colored photographs of various completed recipes." Michael F. Jacobson used the term "food porn" in a 1979 newsletter of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. The term "food porn" was also used by the feminist critic Rosalind Coward in her 1984 book Female Desire, in which she wrote:

Cooking food and presenting it beautifully is an act of servitude. It is a way of expressing affection through a gift [...] That we should aspire to produce perfectly finished and presented food is a symbol of a willing and enjoyable participation in servicing others. Food pornography exactly sustains these meanings relating to the preparation of food. The kinds of picture used always repress the process of production of a meal. They are always beautifully lit, often touched up.

The term food porn does not strictly deal with the connection between food and sexuality. In the United States, food porn is a term applied when "food manufacturers are capitalising on a backlash against low-calorie and diet foods by marketing treats that boast a high fat content and good artery-clogging potential".

In the United Kingdom, the term became popular in the 1990s due to the TV cookery programme Two Fat Ladies, after the show's producer described the "pornographic joy" the pair took in using vast quantities of butter and cream.

Taking a photograph of food with a smartphone camera

Beginning in the early 2000s, the term saw increased use for food photography on social media. In May 2015, there were over 54 million Instagram posts using the food porn hashtag, with the market research company YPulse attributing this usage to the percentage of young people from age 13 to 32 posting pictures of their food to social media.

Pornographic metaphor

Contemporary literature and cinema consistently connect food and sexuality. Scholars note historical links between eating and sex, such as male and female humans coming together throughout evolution around food and creating offspring—two essential needs for survival. Today, a more obvious connection exists between the physical acts of eating and having sex in popular culture. In his book Food: The Key Concepts, Warren Belasco examines this particular resonance between kitchen and bedroom in modern-day vocabulary: "these intensely sexualized associations between eating and loving make it difficult to adopt the asceticism implied in eating responsibly. If pastry, sugar, fat, meat, and salt are so closely tied to life's most intimately pleasurable experiences, who would ever want to cut back on them?" When Alexander Cockburn defined the term gastro porn, he used the words excitement and unattainable, implying an element of fantasy that can be seen in both food porn and "traditional" pornography. With the rise of fad diets and exercise programs in the 1980s came a similar upward trend in food-related media and development of eating disorders. As people continued to restrict calories, food-related media increased in popularity due to its ability to provide the consumer with a voyeuristic indulgence of their food fantasies, similar to the voyeuristic indulgence that traditional pornography provides.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Probyn, Elspeth (1999). "Beyond Food/Sex: Eating and an Ethics of Existence". Theory, Culture & Society. 16 (2): 215–228. doi:10.1177/02632769922050485. S2CID 143485551.
  2. ↑ "Food Porn: Are You Ready To Take A Stand?". Rodriguez, Cecilia. Forbes. 10 March 2014. Archived from the original on 13 February 2021. Retrieved 20 September 2020.
  3. ↑ Chrisman-Campbell, Kimberly. "Instagramming Your Thanksgiving Dinner: A 16th-Century Tradition". The Atlantic. Archived from the original on 2015-12-01. Retrieved 2026-11-04.
  4. ↑ Cockburn, A. (1977, December 8). "Gastro-Porn". The New York Review of Books
  5. ↑ Food And Social Media — A Complicated Relationship
  6. 1 2 Romm, Cari (2015-04-20). "What 'Food Porn' Does to the Brain". The Atlantic. Archived from the original on 2015-12-20. Retrieved 2015-12-09.
  7. ↑ Coward, Rosalind (1984). Female Desire: Women's Sexuality Today. Paladin. ISBN 0-586-08447-9. (p. 103)
  8. ↑ "Unhealthy Eating is New Fad in US". Davis, Simon. The Telegraph. 10 May 2000. Retrieved 29 August 2019.[dead link] Alt URL Archived 2021-07-25 at the Wayback Machine
  9. ↑ "The Food Porn Phenomenon". Food Pocket Guide. Archived from the original on 2020-09-18. Retrieved 2019-07-18.
  10. ↑ "#FoodPorn: The Growing Influence Of Social Food". www.ypulse.com. Retrieved 2015-12-09.
  11. 1 2 Belasco, Warren (2008). Food: The Key Concepts. Oxford, United Kingdom: Berg. pp. 36–37.
  12. ↑ Cockburn, A. (1977, December 8). Gastro-Porn. The New York Review of Books
  13. ↑ Rousseau, S. (2014). Food "porn" in media. In Encyclopedia of Food and Agricultural Ethics. Springer.
  14. ↑ O'Neill, M. (2003, September 1). Food Porn. Retrieved March 31, 2019, from https://www.cjr.org/from_the_archives/food-writing-cookbook.php Archived 2021-01-08 at the Wayback Machine

Further reading