Meat by Alexis Disselkoen, meat_download.jpeg

46 Food-Porn by Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal

1

Rule #34: If it exists, there is porn of it.

2

The world of pornography is mythological and hyperbolic. It doesn’t and will never exist, but it does.

3

A Google search:

Porn: About 1,790,000,000 results

Earth-Porn: About 145,000,000 results

Food-Porn: About 84,400,000 results

Torture-Porn: About 25,100,000 results

Ruin-Porn: About 11,400,000 results

Mommy-Porn: About 42,400,000 results

4

Pornography (n): The explicit description or exhibition of sexual subjects or activity in literature, painting, films, etc., in a manner intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic feelings; printed or visual material containing this. 2. obs. A study of prostitution.

5

Pornography grabs us and doesn’t let go. Whether you’re revolted or enticed, shocked or titillated, these are flip sides of the same response: an intense, visceral engagement with what pornography has to say. And pornography has quite a lot to say. Pornography should interest us, because it’s intensely and relentlessly about us.

6

The Internet is for porn. But Reddit, the social news site? It’s for “porn.” That’s the community’s wry, mocking label for anything worth staring at. Enterprising redditors have reclaimed the word for their own purposes. It’s now a suffix, meaning big, gorgeous, and completely safe-for-work pictures of whatever precedes it. There’s earthporn, foodporn, waterporn, spaceporn and, yes, even animalporn and humanporn.

7

Porn (n) colloq. 1. = pornography. 2. fig. As the second element in compounds: denoting written or visual material that emphasizes the sensuous or sensational aspects of a non-sexual subject, appealing to its audience in a manner likened to the titillating effect of pornography.

8

I don’t want to write about the prick. I want to write the prick.

9

Porn, like poetry, envies the scene it is describing. The immediate, the un-mediated. Yet in its clawing to create full presence, to occupy the scene, porn manifests the obscene.

10

Ours is an era of phenomenological hell. Thesis: the academy responds with meta-modernism; pop responds with porn.

11

Although he did not specifically use the term, Roland Barthes discussed what is essentially food porn in his 1957 collection, Mythologies. Commenting on the food-related content in Elle magazine that offers fantasy to those who cannot afford to cook such meals, he writes: “[C]ooking according to Elle is meant for the eye alone, since sight is a genteel sense.”2 The actual words food porn first appeared in 1979, when Michael Jacobson, cofounder of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, opposed healthy and unhealthy foods—“Right Stuff” and “Food Porn”—in the Center’s newsletter, Nutrition Action Healthletter.3 Jacobson later explained that he “coined the term to connote a food that was so sensationally out of bounds of what a food should be that it deserved to be considered pornographic.” It is not known whether he knew of journalist Alexander Cockburn’s 1977 use of the term gastro-porn in the New York Review of Books: “Now it cannot escape attention that there are curious parallels between manuals on sexual techniques and manuals on the preparation of food; the same studious emphasis on leisurely technique, the same apostro-phes to the ultimate, heavenly delights. True gastro-porn heightens the excitement and also the sense of the unattainable by proffering colored photographs of various completed recipes.”

Lemons by Alexis Disselkoen, lemons_poster.jpeg

12

Eating and sex, we are told, both work to satiate appetite, both render the distinction between the inside and outside of the body complicated; and, most importantly, both produce sensations that are totally stubborn when it comes to language.

13

The endocentric compound consists of a head and a modifier. For example, dog house. (Even linguistics relies on bodily metaphors.) Yet with food-porn, torture-porn, or ruin-porn, it seems unclear which is the head, which one modifies. The two nouns seem to modify each other.

14

Selections from the Marilyn Minter’s oeuvre:

The Supremes. Trio of pink mouths poised open, accepting ropes of cum.

Juicier. A plump tan breast plopped on a gray slab.

Cherie. A tongue licks the corner of a gaping, lipsticked mouth.

Deep Throat. Diamonds all the way down.

Quail’s Egg. Egg cracked in mouth. White shell clings to pink lips. Yellow yoke drips down chin.

100 Food Porn #85 Woman’s long fingers, nails painted red, cracks an egg in half: yellow yolk gushes.

100 Food Porn #75 Woman’s long fingers, nails painted pink, wrapped around a head of asparagus.

Green Pink Caviar. Mouth and tongue laps up and spits out viscous neons.

Pop Rocks. Look into her nose while she leans her head back, opens her mouth wide to take that taco of black caviar, ready to burst.

15

So then it hit me: “What images have women never touched? What images have women never really explored? And does it change these images if they are explored by women and not men?”

16

Like the avant-garde’s, pornography’s transgressions are first of all aesthetic.

17

Painting has always been a metaphor for sex. And eating. And excrement. What did Freud say about painting? Artists are playing with their own excrement. Aestheticized shit.

18

As with other forms of culture to which we readily apply our interpretive capabilities, meanings don’t necessarily sit on the surface announcing “Here I am.” You may have to dig.

19

If one eats because one is hungry and needs to do so in a practical sense, the meal should be thought of as little more than the equivalent of a sexual act carried on in the name of procreation. Yet, once these fundamental needs are met, there is still a supplemental urge to perform the acts again, no longer as means to an end but, instead, means for mean’s sake alone. Barthes tells us: “the satisfaction of these two needs does not suffice man: he must bring, so to speak, the luxury of desire, erotic or gastronomic…a kind of ethnographic ceremony by which man celebrates his power, his freedom to consume his energy ‘for nothing.’”

20

But while “man” happily “celebrates his power,” he does so courtesy of woman, whether she is toggling his knob or cracking his oyster.

21

In food and in sex, woman is both muse and drudge.

22

The world of pornography is mythological and hyperbolic. It doesn’t and will never exist, but it does insist on fantasy.

23

If there were an accurate definition for food porn it would not be chefs on food tv creating delicious dinners, or reci-pes in food magazines augmented with sumptuous close-up photography. Instead, food porn would be the grainy, shaky, documentary images of slaughterhouses, behind-the-scenes fast-food workers spitting in their products, or dangerous chemicals being poured on farmland. If food porn did exist, the analogous shot to the all important “cum shot” in sex porn would be to graphically show the end result of eating—defecating—not the process of making a perfectly roasted chicken.

24

Julia Kristeva has pointed out that a subject is defined through boundaries –that is, between inside and outside, clean and unclean, proper and improper. This formation can never be complete, if only because biological functions invariably thwart those boundaries. To confront materials that cross from inside to outside of the body–feces, menstrual blood, semen, sweat, tears–triggers abjection, or an awareness of our imperfection and, ultimately, our mortality.

25

A well placed fork or a napkin of homey checkered gingham reminds us of our manners like a polite slap on the wrist. It puts the food into a recognizable context that, more often than not, is distinctly not pornographic. It’s the close crop, the absence of social context, that invites the mind to wander.

26

For Freud, synecdoche is the figure of the fetish.

27

The promise of cyberporn is one of immediate gratification, yet the technological systems of the Internet, as well as the interfaces of cyberporn sites, necessitate delay: the delay of logging on, the delay of finding a site, the delay of having the thumbnails load, and then, finally, the delay of waiting for the selected image, sequence of images, or video segment to appear.

28

To imagine the goal, then, is to project into a moment of perfect satisfaction—and the obtaining of a perfect image, once completely adequate to one’s desire. But in comparison to the imagined perfect image, every image will always remain inadequate.

29

Sexuality responds to the impossibility of immediate access to perfect union, to full presence, to ecstasy. Impossible, as even “ecstasy” connotes a being besides oneself.

30

I learned that there are no answers when it comes to talking about sexuality. It will spit in your eye.

31

The story, as the title makes evident, is the Eye, but the Eye finds itself (and is found) imperfectly (and thus expansively) mirrored in the testicles of a slain bull, in the runny yolk of an egg, in the streaming rays of yellow sun. In Bataille’s Story of the Eye, these globular objects share a trait beyond their roundness. Barthes finds that the link between them can be called “the mode of the moist,” a phrase that implies another level of instability, a material one in which all solids threaten to liquefy.

32

Glamour is itself a metonymic slide, whereby the promise of otherwise innate qualities (sensuality, pleasure) takes up residence in the glitter and twinkle of extreme accoutrement.

33

The parts of the body that we decorate, that we make beautiful, are sense organs: the skin that feels, the fingers and toes that touch, the eyes that see, the ears that hear, the mouths that taste and talk and kiss. The clusters of tissue that provide us with such uncertainty and anxiety and pleasure are the same ones that enable us to know the world.

34

True style appears effortless. Porn is a style that works overtime.

35

In 1989, Marilyn Minter bought 30-second commercial spots to show her “Food Porn Commercials” that aired during David Letterman, Arsenio Hall, and a Nightline interview with Ted Koppel and Henry Kissinger. (They were cheaper than art magazine ads.) The groundbreaking and unusual artwork/commercial featured quick clips of the artist at work in her studio without directly promoting anything. It caused so much confusion that Los Angeles TV stations added a disclaimer.

36

food porn (n) Food preparation intended to titillate an audience 1993 Jun 9 Vancouver Sun (DataTimes) Ever hungry for more viewers and thus more money, American TV food programming is out to titillate its audience. The Food Channel, a food industry newsletter, tells us that “food porn” is next on the menu. Designed to “arouse hunger or desire for food,” food porn is part of a larger trend dubbed The New Voyeurism. 1997 Oct 18 Kyla Wazana Globe & Mail D14/2 [Julia] Child initiated our current era of food porn, the virtual reality in which you don’t necessarily have to know how to cook, you just have to like looking at it and talking about it.

37

Like sex porn, food-porn addresses the most basic human needs and functions, idealizing and degrading them at the same time.

38

Like sex porn, we know food porn when we see it.

39

Its creators usually refer to it as “making beauties”—as in “Hey, Al, let’s do a beauty of those pecans.”

40

Food Porn Daily: Click. Drool. Repeat.

41

The descriptions hide in a white font in the background blur. Egg yolk always just cracked. Contents of overstuffed sandwiches splayed across a plate. Plates at gynecologically upturned angles. Mid-ooze. Parmesan just shaved and pepper just cracked, held forever pristine and on the precipice of being devoured by the sauce. Open faced sandwiches. A piece always cut out of the cake. Bay leaves erect from bodies of soup. Fillings revealed. The compulsion of clicking. Cheese clings to itself like saliva. Egg rolls cracked in half. Part of the plate always cropped out of the shot. Dribbles of honey from an unknown source. A fork rests for you. Sandwiches gape for you. And the saturated varnish of reflecting light made white marks the borders of what you can’t and most want to see.

42

There are sphincters in the pupils of the eyes and sphincters in the sexual organs. There are cervical sphincters, urethral sphincters, pyloric sphincters, anal sphincters, and the sphincter of Oddi, which controls secretions from the liver, pancreas, and gallbladder. Sphincters, it turns out, abound throughout our bodies, but we never have to think much about them.

43

The abdominal brain, involuntary and autonomic, fluctuating without subtlety between poles of stimulus and response, contraction and relaxation, excitement and satisfaction, the brain that controls sympathy and revulsion but not ratiocination, that is the brain of the wow.

44

Emeril Lagasse’s catchphrase? Oh Yeah.

45

When the inevitable sequence finally rolled, the editor kept looping their wet mouths and rapt faces as they pushed forkful after forkful of arroz con pollo past their lips, chewed, and swallowed—and pushed and chewed and swallowed again and again. Their only word: “wow.”

46

Was it good for you, too?

___

Oranges by Alexis Disselkoen, oranges_poster.jpeg

Crops

1. “The Rules of The Internet,” The Anonymous Manifesto, 4chan

2, 6. Laura Kipnis, Bound & Gagged

6. Kevin Morris, The Daily Dot

4, 7. OED

8. Wayne Koestembaum, “Darling’s Prick”

11. anne e. mcbride, Chris Consentino, Will Goldfarb, Frederick Kaufman, “Food Porn: A Conversation,” Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture

12. Johanna Burton, “Hard-Soft Core: The Work of Maryiln Minter”

13, 15, 17. Marilyn Minter, Interview

16, 18, 22. Bound & Gagged

19-20. “Hard-Soft Core”

23. “Food Porn: A Conversation”

24. Joshua Shirkey, “New Work: Marilyn Minter,” Exhibition Brochure SF MOMA

25. The Skinny Gourmet, “What is Food Porn”

27, 28. Zabet Patterson, “Going On-line: Consuming Pornography in the Digital Era,” Porn Studies

30. Marilyn Minter, Interview

31-33. “Hard-Soft Core”

35. “New Work”

36. Wayne Glowka, Brenda K. Lester, Amedeo Fedeli, Keith Hendrix, LIsa Jackson,Elijah Scott, John M. Sirmans, Traci P. Upton. “Among the New Words” American Dialect Society

37. Frederick Kaufman, “Debbie Does Salad: The Food Network at the Frontiers of Pornography,” Harpers

39. Bill Buford, “TV Dinners: The Rise of Food Television,” The New Yorker

42, 43, 45. “Debbie Does Salad.”

Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal is a pop culture parasite. Some of her writing is online. Some of it is stuck in fan mail to Rihanna or in hate mail to Lacan. Sometimes she lectures at galleries or does performances at conferences. She likes orange lilies.