Look, it started out innocently enough.
Some time back, I noticed that "Domestic Goddess" Nigella Lawson's signature half-cardigans and cropped denim jackets (along perhaps with other of Nigella's features) defy the laws of gravity. Look closely at the picture above and see how on her left (your right) the cardi nips back in at the waist, where according to the rules of gravity it should just hang down. It's especially noticeable in her cooking shows when she bends forward over a bowl of something and the tails of the cardigan don't move at all.
So eventually I remembered this feat while sitting at my computer and put the question to the hive mind. The answer, apparently, is fashion tape. You can see the indentation or pucker from it an inch in from the edge on the right hand hem (your left) in the image above.
I just found it amusing that Nigella, who so conscientiously decries frippery, artifice and the new 'looks-first' attitude in food, cooking and all things domestic; and who overmore is one of the great bastions of healthy body image versus the ills of 'thinspiration' should come over so delicately contrived and self-conscious. True though, it does accentuate the fulsomeness of her chestal amplitude, and visually narrows the waist a bit, which is undoubtedly the point. It's not to keep the cardi out of the food though, I can tell, because she also (and who in their right mind would do this?) cooks on TV with a long-sleeved, large-cuffed white denim jacket. The director's assistant must be constantly Scotchgarding and sponging of the cuffs of that baby when she does one of her hands-in-the-mix Chocolate Christmas Cakes.
So anyway, thanks Nigella. It was while looking for this tit-tape information that I discovered that the term Food Porn is in common parlance these days, and not just something my wife and I have been using for years. As a term about food, not in the sense you just thought of. Nigella has naturally been referred to in the media as the Queen of Food Porn. By following this porny line of investigation I made some discoveries, which I shall share.
Here's one we made earlier.
Extreme close-up sandwich shot.
Here's an example of what I found for starters. You see, the sort of food porn I'm talking about is not the 9 1/2 Weeks sort, rather the glorification and fetishisation of food and food imagery. Glossy magazines have done it for ages, and now with the rise and rise of cooking shows and the like on TV, it's very much a mainstream thing. But there are tributaries and billabongs along this mainstream. There are websites explicitly devoted to images of food, for whatever reasons - check out FoodPornDaily.com for example.
So what is the fascination? What are we doing?
Meeta and I have a very longstanding relationship with Iron Chef. It started screening many years ago here in Australia, and initially I think we liked it for its zaniness and sheer entertainment value. But very soon, you fall for the characters and their food creations, and start critically analysing the dishes being prepared. For me, there is the beauty factor - the food looks so good, and I can easily imagine (rightly or wrongly) what most dishes will taste and feel like. Iron Chef is also very real about food's provenance, in a visceral sense. Many of the theme ingredients are alive, and are despatched on camera using a bewildering variety of techniques. Who knew you nailed eels to a board by their head? Makes them so much easier to skin, you see. Meeta often has to turn away at some points.
Tetsu-jin Hiroyuki Sakai, hard at it in Kitchen Stadium.
So I think of Iron Chef as being entertainment, yes, but very much about the realities of high-end luxury eating in Japan. Culturally, this is all about honouring the integrity of the 'theme ingredient'. Maybe I'm just justifying a vice here, but I think of this as a fairly healthy sort of food porn. It has a story, and is about more than just dishes. Like also reading the articles in Playboy, maybe.
But I'm not really on about chef porn either, or 'reality-TV-so-you-think-you-can-cook-and-play-games-on-camera-for-so-called-judges-Australia' type TV shows. I'm talking about food fetishisation.
Fetishism always has its dark side, no? So naturally, I went for a look.
Wikipedia's invisible author/s put it nicely: "In much the same way that pornography can be a vicarious substitute for actual sexual relations, "food porn" is seen as a substitute for actually cooking and eating the food in question. Similarly, in much the same way that pornography may display feats of performance that average people would not attempt, "food porn" sometimes features exotic ingredients and excessively elaborate recipes and preparation."
Sure, but troll around the blogosphere a little and you quickly come across sites specifically dedicated to quite narrowly-defined er, 'tastes' in food porn. There are the really simple ones - which I must admit I do rather like and have now saved a few of to my favourites - which just present a variety of foods photographed in a borderline erotic fashion, just like the best advertising shots would, for no discernible end other than to celebrate food and food photography. Nice.
Some of these get a little more culturally specific, like vegan or Japanese or Italian food sites, and this is cool too, for when you just really have that urge to look at sushi. I'm sure this happens for some people all the time and it's good they can get their fix I guess.
Then there are the murkier subcultures, where we get into more complex psychological and moral territory.
Like 'pro-ana' sites; those which aim to help anorexia nervosa sufferers stay anorexic. It seems there are two sorts of food porn for these folks who are trying not to see themselves as deluded or ill: the 'safe food sites' where you can view lists and images of foods that contain little or no caloric value, and the other sort, where it is hoped that by feasting their eyes on a sumptuous repast, and not being tempted to eat, they will strengthen their will and resolve to keep losing weight. Maybe this is a bit like priests in the seminary indulging in sinful viewing of titillating images to perversely add weight to their attempts to suppress their sexual expression.
I can't say as I've actually viewed these sites though, because I just couldn't bring myself to click the links beyond the search engine's descriptions. I can bear witness and clean this stuff without having to have the full horrors in my face.
By contrast, Bulimics have perhaps a better time with the food porn stuff, if only momentarily. Since bulimia and anorexia have some certain similarities and a crossover audience online, many 'support' sites have 'binge trigger warnings' prior to displaying foody pics. Again, some of the purpose is to strengthen resolve, but in this case, a more healthful resolve not to binge-eat and go through that whole cycle. Of course there is the converse motivation too - exactly what one might need to 'excuse' oneself for a binge session. There are lists and ratings of online restaurant menus and the 'tastiest' foodie sites to visit for titillation.
To round out (pun! - er, sorry) the eating disorder thing is the elephant (pun again! - I'll get my coat...) in the room, obesity and chronic overeating. Yes, there are sexual sites for the use of (mainly) men wanting to see very large ladies eating etc, but this is where the food porn stuff gets serious.
In all my examples above, the mechanisms and motivations are very clear, so there's some integrity of sorts. Not so in the matter of food sellers wanting to encourage custom. I did some survey work for a fast-food chain whose name should remain unrecorded but which starts with 'Mc' and ends with "Donalds". I had to do a quick survey of folks in the drive-thru (see, even their spelling is fast) queue and waiting in line inside the 'restaurant.' Clearly McD's were looking to open another outlet locally and wanted to crunch some numbers. We recorded postcodes, age groups (always easy to get a smile from a lady here by 'guessing') and a whole bunch of weird shit designed to make it look like a bona-fide survey. But at the end of the night, when tallying the results to be sent off, the order in which we put the data did not match the survey form. Right at the top were the responses for what postcode they were from, which main road they used to get here, and how many times a week they visited McDonald's. Turns out, that Maccy D's business case comes down to 'high-medium' and 'heavy' users. Their categories, not my pun. A high-medium user is there between 5 to 10 times a week, and a heavy user 14 or more times. I was there four days, and was frankly surprised to see just how many people didn't even balk at saying they were there "probably three times most days." And yes, with few exceptions, their cars sagged on the driver's side.
In case I wasn't clear: overweight people are the best customers. Food porn that makes them hungry for the real thing feeds (unhh, I've done it again) the obesity problem and contributes to ill-health for them and our society as a whole.
I can very confidently assert, that with almost no exceptions, overweight people do not truly wish to be that way. They are made to feel bad about it, to feel ostracized and unloved, and it becomes harder to be one of the gang - especially with those smaller than you. So like all of us with a problem, they do whatever they can individually to cope with this. Coping implies acceptance. Acceptance means, in this case, deciding you will, for whatever set of reasons you have used, be staying fat. This is not good for us, people.
The jolly fat person is a myth. It helps salve the moment for those who cannot face (or feel they can fix) the things that cause them to eat themselves into harm. That's cool, but it's no substitute for getting healthy, if you can.
McD's wins every time a fat person who may use their store sees a picture of a burger and thinks "mm, hungry time." In fact, the whole fast-food industry - for all that the players are in competition with each other - logically gain by working as a bloc, consciously or otherwise. Also by leeching from other food providers.
Fat people eat more. This is how they get fat (except in extremely rare cases of massive hormonal and metabolic disturbances). By sexualising the images and marketing of all food there has been created a new way of inculcating and sustaining a psychological food addiction. Maybe it's an inverse/perverse thing, whereby as we have gotten fatter we have begun to surround ourselves with images that say "food is lovely, healthful (go Macca's 'light choices!') and good for you in all ways" and subsuming our unhealthy desire to consume compulsively into some form of core, sacred, normal and healthy impulse like sex.
There is a growing divide in our society between the chronically overweight and others. There is a sense of justifiable resentment on both sides. The big guy who is incensed that he is made to buy two airline seats and those who are incensed that he should be so incensed. There is a looming food crisis on this planet. The best-fed (I should more properly say most-fed) large nations on this earth, America and Australia, together throw out more food in a year than would feed every person on earth who needs it badly, which is bad enough. But the 'globesity epidemic' as it has become known puts even more pressure on our food resources, and on our caring for one another. In an increasingly resource-scarce world, it is easy to understand the 'healthy' people's resentment of subsiding health care for those who are eating too much of everyone's food, giving themselves coronaries and diabetes, and taking the hospital bed of your sick grandmother. At least, so the media whips us up to considering.
Also worth considering is net effect on GDP. Gross Domestic Product is an accounting trick upon which the monetary institutions of the world judge nation's comparative worth. Food consumption helps a great deal, it all gets counted. Health care expenditure (yes, you read that right, expenditure) is counted also. One of the things the GOP was worried about in the States recently was what might happen if the gross overinflation of health costs (that's positives in GDP-speak) were redressed in the new heath care plan and flowed on to the GDP. Just a thought. At some point though, the real costs to a society in terms of productivity and emotional wellbeing do outweigh the net effect on GDP that obesity-related GDP boosting provides.
I do think though, that there is salvation to be found somewhere here in all this obscene consumerism.
With all this new-found love of food in the media a real shift is starting to occur. Those people eating healthy are eating healthier still. People are becoming more conscious of the provenance of their food. Questions are being asked - and answered - about the dominance of supermarket chains in our food supply (especially big topics in Australia). More questions still are being asked about the real environmental and social costs of how much of our food is produced. There is a growing (sorry about all these puns, really) trend towards not just cooking more at home but growing your own food as well. A vital component of this shift has been the inspired work of food stylists and the growth of food porn into our mainstream lives. For those with eating problems, real food is increasingly looking like the answer. And the definition of real food is coming into sharper focus all the time.
Now at the end, I should throw in my disclaimer. For those who've come in late, I can't eat or drink, so I don't. I get my sustenance through a PEG-tube. I have at times been tortured by longings for foods that I used to eat, and occasionally still ave a craving or two. But for the most part, I enjoy my new relationship with food, at this slight distance. Maybe I do feel a bit like an anorexic who imagines the wonderfulness of a dish by just looking, as my imaginary senses are better than ever, along with my sense of smell. I have wondered exactly why my enjoyment of foodie TV shows and the like has survived past my eating days, and whether it was just some sort of masochistic nostalgia. Well, no, it's because food is where we come from. It's still where I come from. And as our glorification of the chefly arts turns more and more into simple gratitude for whole, real ingredients, the closer we are to the source. Our source.
And that's a good thing, people.
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