Food Porn?

David Chang's recent post on uber soigné meals raised a nagging point:

A few years back, in one of the kitchens I worked in before Momofuku, a soigné ticket for a tasting menu popped up and the kitchen went to work on it. We started the table with an über-amuse plate that included bite-size portions of raw fish, foie gras and charcuterie. We followed it up with a tour de force of special canapés – dishes from other parts of the menu transformed into tiny, composed bites that looked like airbrushed food porn.

Sounds nice. But "airbrushed food porn"? Pornography is representation, a spectacle rather than an experience. The whole point is that it represents sex the viewer is not personally having, or bodies the viewer cannot touch. Food porn, on the other hand is much more slippery in meaning.  There  is the peculiar formulation of  the Center for Science in the Public Interest (the movie popcorn is bad for you people, if memory serves):

CSPI is calling Hardee’s prehistoric line of Thickburgers “Food Porn.” The new burgers, which come in 1/3-pound, 1/2-pound, and 2/3-pound payloads, make Quarter Pounders, Big Macs, and even some Whoppers seem downright dainty by comparison, says CSPI.

“Hardee’s seems not only oblivious to America’s obesity epidemic, but also to the trend toward healthier fast food,” said CSPI executive director Michael F. Jacobson. “To those who say we don’t need calorie counts on menu boards, I say, ‘Have you met the Thickburger?’”

Absolutely. Bad stuff, but the only possible relation to porn would be that both porn and Thickburgers are bad. The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, which was bad, but it was a day which shall live in infamy, not "naval porn." Larry Barnett, for all his sins, did not commit an act of "umpiring porn." Florida in 2000 was not "electoral porn," and so on. Theoretically, a magazine featuring spreads of unfeasibly large  burgers could be "food porn," as it would offer thrills at the same vicarious level as regular pornography, but the problem with Thickburgers is precisely that they are a possible experience, rather than a spectacle -- an experience that will give you diabetes and stop your heart, but an actual experience for all that.

Conversely, Chang is using "food porn" to mean something good, not bad, but also available, at least to some, as an experience, not just as a spectacle. To review, "food porn" is either better or worse than regular food, and has nothing much to do with pornography. Hope this helps. This, on the other hand, may be the exception that proves the rule. (SFW, marginally.)

Comments

[Eater]

Here is Molly O'Neill's classic treatise on food porn. But the once-useful phrase seems to have been released into the abusive hands of the public.

Mr. Chang is validly saying that his soigné preparations looked like food porn, much as my beautiful girlfriend, artfully arranged, might occasionally look like classical porn herself, though thankfully she is not.

The CSPI usage is much less defensible -- they seem to mean "food lewdness."

[replica jewelry]

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