Chapter 5

Gluttonous Glamour: Gastro-Porn and the

Grotesque in Contemporary Fashion Photography

Jess Berry

1 Introduction

In his analysis of food mythology titled ‘Ornamental Cookery’, Roland Barthes

notes that food images in magazines are objects of fetishistic adoration, where
cooking is represented as aspirational – less about eating and nourishment,
than show, simulation and projection.1 Barthes’ brief discussion pre-empts the
increasing eroticisation of food in cookbooks, magazines and television cook-
ing shows where food has entered a realm of enhanced surface appearance,
popularly described as ‘gastro-porn’ or ‘foodporn’. The term ‘gastro-porn’ was
first used by journalist Alexander Cockburn in 1977, to describe the exciting
visual stimulation provided by emphasising the physical and textural qualities
of food in photographs.2 However, the food historian Abigail Dennis traces the
mainstream propagation of the idea to England’s celebrity chef Nigella Law-
son, who in 1999 overtly sexualised cooking through her sensual television de-
livery style.3 As the journalist Andrew Chan describes of the phenomenon in
which food imagery has seduced us to desire the virtual:

We are all hungry for love, comfort, passion, gusto …. We are curious
about forbidden pleasures – even if we don’t act out our curiosity. These
are all experiences and needs that can be vicariously acted out, fanta-
sised about via both cooking shows and porn.4

Of course the relationship between sex and food is of much longer stand-
ing, with obvious metaphoric similarities between certain types of food and

1 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Laver (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972), 77–80.
2 Anne McBride, ‘Food Porn’, Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture 10.1 (2010): 38–46.
3 Abigail Dennis, ‘From Apicius to Gastroporn: Form, Function, and Ideology in the History of
Cookery Books’, Studies in Popular Culture 31.1 (2008): 1–18.
4 Andrew Chan, ‘La Grande Bouffe: Cooking Shows as Pornography’, Gastronomica Fall (2003):
47–53.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004392250_007

114 Berry

sexual organs, as well as the similar sensuous pleasures that the body experi-
ences through touch, smell and taste. As the anthropologist Jeremy MacClancy
­observes, there are many cultures that explain eating and acts of copulation in
the same linguistic terms and often the two are connected as part of the court-
ing ritual.5 In Western society, the equation between food and sex has often
been represented to women as a form of desire, with advertising portraying the
pleasures of eating as sexually satisfying long before ‘gastro-porn’ became part
of the popular lexicon.
Feminist theorists such as Lorraine Gamman have argued that ‘food is often
far more erotic and dangerous to women than sex’.6 Chocolate, for example, is
frequently posed as an illicit lover or casual sexual encounter, a sinful desire to
be coveted and fantasised about, devoured and lamented later. However, for
many women these images set up a range of obsessions regarding temptation,
hunger, discipline and anxiety. The sexual metaphor of food is both pleasur-
able and frustrating, where on the one hand imagery encourages an indulgent
body and on the other a lack of discipline results in an aesthetically displeasing
figure. This ambivalence and tension becomes even more pronounced when
considering how food is represented in fashion editorial, where the underlying
understanding of readers is that fashion is incompatible with undisciplined
bodies.
As with representations of food, fashion magazines also operate within the
pornographic sphere. As the fashion theorist Elizabeth Wilson argues of this
comparison, ‘they indulge the desire of the “reader” who looks at the pictures,
and longs to be each perfect being reflected in the pages, while simultaneously
engaging erotically with femininity’.7 As such, it is unsurprising that when food
and fashion are portrayed in the same frame these images explore women’s
consumption as metaphorical of sexual appetite.
This chapter will examine recent fashion editorial by photographers Miles
Aldridge, Ellen von Unwerth, Terry Richardson and Sara Bahbah to consider
narratives of luxury and seduction, as well as carnal and abject desires through
the representation of food. Drawing on literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin’s the-
ory of the carnivalesque, I will argue that images of the gluttonous gamine
can be read within frameworks of burlesque humour and the grotesque body.
For Bakhtin, the grotesque body of the medieval and Renaissance carnival

5 Jeremy MacClancy, Consuming Culture (London: Chapman, 1992).

6 Lorraine Gamman, ‘Female Slenderness and the Case of Perverse Compliant Deception, or
why Size Matters’, Fashion Cultures Revisited, eds. Stella Bruzzi and Pamela Church Gibson
(London: Routledge, 2013), 296–297.
7 Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (London: Virago, 1985), 158.