Of the very first things Cambridge students check in the mornings, Facebook and Hermes webmail by necessity must feature fairly highly. But to my shock and horror, third on the list of my most visited websites of late has been www.foodporndaily.com – a site whose sole purpose is to upload pictures of delicious looking food for people to look at (perve over?). If dribbling at pictures of food wasn’t enough, the shelf above my desk is also heaving with recipe books that I will probably never use – the grease that adorns their pages is not a result of messy cooking but probably a combination of my greasy fingerprints and saliva. They are well thumbed not because I’m an amazing cook but because I like the pictures and like imagining myself eating the food on display. I’m not proud to admit that my relationship with food is bordering on sexual voyeurism. But am I the only one who feels this way?
When I compare food to sex, the image that comes to mind for me is not Nigella Lawson suggestively eyeing up a baguette and sucking chocolate off her fingers. It’s not even the idea of licking whipped cream of someone’s nipple. It is, pure and simply, the image of a golden toastie oozing cheese in a really provocative way, bordering on the obscene. I’m not talking about the juxtaposition of food and sex but of food as sex in itself. The old maxim of “I’d rather have a bar of chocolate than sex” has never held truer, especially
when that chocolate is oozing or bubbling out of a voluptuous muffin. The thrill I suppose people get from looking and thinking about food is in many ways comparable to any sensuous desire, especially when you know it’s naughty (should I really be eating cheese toasties and chocolate muffins considering my appalling attendance rate at the gym?).
Clearly, I am not alone in these feelings towards food. You only have to see Greg Wallace sweating and moaning on MasterChef to tell that he feels it too. Indeed ask yourself how often you buy a cookery book for the pictures rather than because there’s a realistic chance that you will follow the recipes? Or how often you torture yourself by watching food programmes when the only thing edible in your cupboard is the end of a sliced loaf? However, mysteriously it is only really in term time that I find myself spending a large amount of time on food related websites and thinking about food, perhaps indicative of the general food experience at Cambridge colleges or my own attempts to try and make microwave cookery work (it doesn’t). When good food becomes something that is not so easily gratified as at home, I feel as if it becomes more of a desire, the more gooey and cheesey the better.
But perhaps I’m reading too much in to the strange phenomena of food porn. It could just be pure unbridled greed and a lack of self control instilled by the boom in professional cookery programmes such as MasterChef and Michel Roux’s Classics, which show us a side of food that you probably couldn’t make yourself even if you tried, and which you definitely couldn’t afford as a paying customer at Le Gavroche. However, I am inclined to think that the popularity of food porn comes down to an expression of purely sensual desire, especially when you’re feeling deprived. Forget about sex, give in to food porn temptation.
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