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Tanja Starke
Gallatin Undergraduate Rationale

Food is Art is Food: When Sustenance Becomes Entertainment

It was the summer of 2011. I was at dinner with my parents and boyfriend,

Alan. As we were finishing up our main courses, he asked me what I was building.

Confused, I followed his gaze downwards to my plate. I hadn’t even noticed that I

was mashing up the leftovers, rearranging them into a 3D smiley face.

“She’s played with her food ever since she could sit at the dinner table.” My

mom rolled her eyes, unimpressed. My dad wasn’t even paying attention to the

conversation. The whole scene was pretty mundane, honestly. But inside my head,

fireworks were sparking: I had an epiphanic moment of clarity—I want to be a chef

and “play” for a living. My passion for food had been burrowed within me all along; it

just took me 19 years to become conscious of it.

I chose to transfer to Gallatin because, when asked about my major, I wanted

to be able to boldly and truthfully answer: “Food Porn”. I wanted to mold my

concentration around the intersections between food, anthropology, art, media and

culture—why do we obsess over food? How does food have varied meanings across

different groups of people? Do social, cultural, economic and political factors come

into play? My courses have pushed me to explore the full spectrum of food, from food

insecurity to gender roles to religion, and it became clear to me that food always has

some sort of significance, whether or not we are mindful of it. Being in Gallatin gave

me the opportunity to delve into Food Porn as a topic in and of itself, subsequently

allowing me to hone my investigation down into what has become my colloquium, in

which I examine the factors behind the progression of food from being an everyday

necessity into cultural entertainment.

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What is food pornography? Rosalind Coward coined the term in her 1984

book Female Desire, explaining that the appeal in provocatively photographed food

stems from the connection to female servitude and objectification that may be made

with the aesthetics and ideological associations that the pictures put forth. I believe

that in the last 20 years, however, since new media has gone mainstream and

exploded in accessibility, the notion of “food pornography” has evolved to encompass

the forbidden or unattainable nature of food that one can enjoy only voyeuristically

through tantalizing, high-resolution images. The 21st Century brought along with it a

new generation of proficient and professional food pornographers: people who style

and photograph food with such allure that audiences almost treat their viewing of

such pictures as a guilty pleasure to indulge in. As technology advanced, the media

through which food porn is shared have also expanded to include movies, GIFs,

journalism and even “real-life” presentations.

On the other hand, I contend that food pornography has existed long before

modernity: in Letters to Menoeceus, Epicurus follows in the philosophical footsteps

of Aristotle by asserting that happiness is the greatest good. Most human desires are

natural, yet only some are necessary; the wise are those who successfully balance

hedonism with temperance as they strive to maximize pleasure and avoid pain. The

appreciation of food does not stem from luxurious overindulgence, which merely

creates anguish in the fact that such pleasures cannot perpetually be fulfilled without

dire ramifications such as obesity or bankruptcy. By browsing “pornographic” images

of food, we appreciate not only its external appearance and the effort put into its

portrayal, but also the self-contained satisfaction in our ability to derive pleasure

purely through visual enjoyment and subdue our gluttonous desires for physical

ingestion and satiety.

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One of the indisputable differences between man and animal is the

competency of the former to exhibit restraint through self-meditation and evaluation

of the potential consequences of his actions. In The Inferno, the funnel shape of

Dante’s Hell emphasizes that the position of each circle is directly correlated to the

destitution of morality. By placing Lust and Gluttony in the second and third circles

respectively, he suggests that these two sins, although considered “lesser evils” in the

broader landscape of human nature, are closely related to one another in that both

are results of man’s subservience to carnal impulses. I argue that the determinants

behind human lust overlap with those behind gluttony: a combination of aesthetic

appearance, quality, authenticity, socioeconomic stature and cultural association

influence our perception of and attraction to objects, both mortal and culinary. This

leads me to wonder: how do we distinguish whether our targets of desire are

informed by necessity (intimacy and compatibility, or nourishment and subsistence)

or by delusion (infatuation and lasciviousness, or craving and appetite), and in what

ways do we decide which urges to act upon? Where can we draw the line between

right and wrong in the realm of food pornography? Or rather, is there such a line?

One of my least favorite things about living in New York City is the ease with

which its inhabitants can take their high standards of living for granted, with the

seemingly lack of concern about avoidable food waste on top of the continuous

materializations of new fine-dining establishments. I understood M. F. K. Fisher’s

How to Cook a Wolf as a celebration of simple and economical cooking amidst

discourse that frugality does not equate to tedious monotonousness. Apart from a

general improvement in financial security after WWII, what other factors may have

caused American society to diverge from this model of “honest food” conservation

into the acceptance of food waste as a tolerable, or even an obligatory sacrifice in the

name of creating culinary art?

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Beriss and Sutton’s The Restaurants Book: Ethnographies offers the idea that

the traditional practice of family meals within the privacy of one’s home has been

replaced with dining out at restaurants, bringing with it a slew of social, cultural and

political implications which include egocentrism, class discrimination, loss of

tradition and even malnutrition. Is it possible that the act of eating out, often

undergone due to its convenient and explorative nature, may have instilled in us the

supposition that “more is more”, and that in order to gain social commendation in

any arena of societal existence, we are expected to put on a façade of abundance and

superfluity, as well as of cosmopolitan cultivation? Although not explicitly stated and

most probably not intended as such, Hervé This demonstrates in his book, Building

a Meal, that the entire cuisine of molecular gastronomy is built upon the perception

that food is expendable, rather than a valuable means for sustenance. Especially for

those who have the resources and privilege of excess, the manipulation of food for

consumption does not necessarily have to take nutrition into account.

The ideology that identifies complex or aesthetically pleasing dishes with

prestige has managed to seep through the borders of the shared social space which

we call society into the private space which we call home. Jozeh Youssef penned

Molecular Gastronomy: Taking Culinary Physics out of the Lab and into Your

Kitchen, which teaches cooks with a basic level of experience the common techniques

used in molecular gastronomy that may viably be accomplished at home. This not

only presents the potential for further complications in American attitudes towards

nutrition, but also brings the tensions associated with food pornography into the

home-sanctuary space. Before the explosion of social media that strengthened global

connectivity and subsequently magnified competitiveness on an international scale,

such stressful burdens pertaining to culinary skills had only affected professionals in

the field. Now, these pressures inadvertently creep into the private lives of civilians
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who have had no formal culinary training, because they are easily able to compare

themselves with people across the world who have different skillsets and levels of

experience; such pressures include but are not limited to: failure to create a dish as

anticipated, a loved one not enjoying a dish, inability to comprehend recipe

instructions, lack of availability of ingredients or tools, and so on.

As well as this, food pornography may theoretically be used as a medium to

identify one’s position in the social hierarchy of the United States. First, it separates

those who do from those who do not have the means to project a front of financial

stability and savoir-faire to the world by sharing their food experiences. Then,

amongst those who do have said means, it is possible to further socially stratify

individuals by analyzing their food experiences according to a meter of

sophistication, based on criteria such as exoticism, taste, innovation, creativity,

aesthetics, expertise, and so on. Is this the type of community that food enthusiasts

genuinely endorse and strive to be a part of?

Signe Rousseau explores this concept further in Food Media: Celebrity Chefs.

Advances in mass communications have created a domain within popular media

pertaining solely to food, —food media—which has in turn produced a new celebrity

culture in the American nation from the surge in food-centric TV shows, magazines,

podcasts, films, and such. There’s now an added expectation to know of celebrity

chefs and their distinctive cooking styles to prove one’s passion for cooking and

dedication to food, in order to be taken seriously in the realm of food media. How do

celebrity chefs influence the food choices of Americans across the nation? In what

ways do food media encourage or even dictate food fads and, consequently, food

pornography? What are the implications?

I firmly believe that food pornography does not end at the pleasure derived

from capturing the aesthetically appealing appearance of food. In my interpretation

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of it, food porn includes the aspiration to propagate the concept that food is beautiful

and should not be taken, or rather eaten, for granted. Through my colloquium, I hope

to explore the many facets of food porn and be able to formulate my own theory in

regards to its actuality.