Saturday, November 6, 2010

Food Porn

“The human body reacts in very similar ways when anticipating food and sex. Capillaries swell, lips and membranes become engorged, saliva thickens, and the pulse rises. It’s no accident that the two pleasures have become confused.”

–Anthony Bourdain 


Food and sex so easily go hand in hand. The desire for sex can be likened to one’s appetite for food. The acts of eating and sex both cause pleasure, but one can only be temporarily satiated. After the immediate satisfaction of a decadent meal or delicious orgasm, eventually you’re going to want more.

But somehow the enjoyment of food is not only a first person experience but has developed into a form of voyeurism. And when participating in a voyeuristic activity, it somehow seems less dirty to watch people eating on screen than to watch them screwing. Rather than watching sex porn and getting ideas for new sexual positions, instead we read about or watch people engage with food and get new ideas for the kitchen.

Food porn, as Bourdain defines it, is “the vicarious enjoyment of people doing things on screen or in books that you yourself are not likely to be doing anytime soon.” It can be people reading or writing about food in substitute of sex. It can be looking at sensual pictures of food or watching people on television cook, eat, and talk about food that you’re probably never going to eat or experience. Either way, food and sex meld together into one beautiful entity.

Perhaps we enjoy reading about and watching others enjoy food because we know that good food can often lead to good sex. Many foods that are considered aphrodisiacs have been proven to prime the body for sex, such as oysters and dark chocolate (two of my favorite foods by the way). And this is nothing new. History brims with the recognition of connections between food and sex.

Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony John Winthrop, writing in the early seventeenth century, wrote that “finding that the variety of meates drawes me on to eate more than standeth with my healthe, I have resolved not to eate of more then 2 dishes at any one meale, whither fish, flesh, fowle or fruit or whittmeat etc.” Because Winthrop found himself tempted to continue in pleasures of the flesh after a large meal he attempted to approach each meal with moderation. But what were the pleasures of the flesh that tempted him afterward? A good Puritan wouldn’t have written explicitly about sex, even in a personal journal, but it doesn’t take a big leap of the imagination to surmise what would be going on in the bedroom after Winthrop bolstered himself with a variety of meats.

Similarly, this scene from the film adaptation of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, written in 1749, shows how the enjoyment of food can quickly lead to sex:
 



Bringing it up to the modern day, we have an entire television network devoted just to food, and now several other networks have food-themed shows. The Food Network takes attractive (think Giada De Laurentiis) people and places them in shiny, perfect kitchens, provides them with props and toys (I mean utensils), and gives them a plethora of ingredients that they can do whatever they want with. While the cook prepares the food a series of up-close shots usually occur—yeah, get a shot of that ruby red meat, luscious strawberries, or sensual whipped cream. After it’s all prepared, here comes the climax. The excited cook raises a fork to his or her mouth, gushes with pleasure, perhaps even gives a little groan, and consumes the food. Oh yeah…that’s heavenly, she might exclaim, unable to control herself as her cheeks flush, eyes close, and a smile spreads across her face. It’s kind of a surprise there’s no bow-chica-bow-wow music in the background. 

Is this preoccupation with food reflective of our particular culture or is it just a part of human nature to seek out pleasure? Perhaps it is quite normal for people to seek out pleasure, but it manifests in our culture, not to be promiscuous but to eat and drink well. And when we can’t, we can turn to shows or writings on food to fill our appetite.

As someone who writes several times a week about food, it makes me wonder if my blog is nothing more than food porn. And if this blog is truly an exercise in food porn…does that make me a porn star?

1 comment:

  1. This is insightful. I think there should be more awareness about the common pleasure of food and sex. I mean our natural, primal, and deep rooted desires as complex organisms seek to do two things: 1. to sustain our individual lives by eating nutritious food and 2. to sustain our species via reproduction.

    It should be no surprise that food and sex are so deeply interrelated, given all of their shared language; fruit, sex, harvest, fertilization etc. They are almost inseparable. I would say that it is our own puritan values (just like Winthrop's) that creates an imaginary partition between the pleasure gained from eating food and from getting it on. When one pleasure becomes taboo (sex) the other is relied on even more heavily (food) to express our lustrous (but above all, human) desires for consuming, living, taking, and producing. Kudos

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