Monday, January 10, 2011

Food Porn

The essential quality of pornography is not sex. The fact that is usually involves this is ultimately incidental.

No, porn involves more basic elements. It's ultimately a voyeuristic enjoyment of watching someone else carrying out a desirable activity that one fantasizes about. This then serves as a substitute for the (unavailable) option of doing it for one's self.

Seen from this perspective, plenty of porn doesn't involve sex at all. The most common one to me is cooking shows.

 
Porn

Cooking a great meal and enjoying both the tasty food and the satisfaction that you made it yourself is something deeply appealing to many people. It's also hard and time consuming. But it's easy to watch someone else do it and fantasise that you might do it yourself tomorrow.

The fiction of cooking shows is that they're teaching you how to cook. This is of course transparently false. How many people who watch cooking shows ever try out the recipes they see demonstrated? Even when they do, what's the relative proportion of time spent watching cooking versus doing cooking?

In food, as in sex, porn is usually a substitute for the real thing, not a complement. The people I know who are good cooks spend a lot of time cooking and trying out recipes, and basically no time watching cooking shows. The people who watch a lot of cooking shows seem to cook very little (The Hammer is one who comes to mind!).Of course, people need the fig leaf that it's about cooking skill - saying out loud 'I like watching other people make and eat food' seems absurd. 'I like learning how to cook' is however entirely respectable.

The principle goes much further. Many years ago, ADQL insightfully described the original Kill Bill as being 'blood porn', which got me thinking along these lines. (UFC and professional boxing are the same). It's all voyeurism and vicarious enjoyment - the only difference is the choice of sense pleasure.

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