If you were to scroll down Instagram or Facebook there is a good chance you'd happen upon at least one image, gif, or video of a delicious looking meal. Maybe it's a friend's post of two drool-worthy pieces of avocado toast. Or maybe it's a video posted by Buzzfeed's Tasty showing how to make the cheesiest, glutinous grilled cheese you've ever seen. In any case, all of these images fall under the term "food porn," the glamorized depiction of food on social media.
We think capturing images of our food to be a novel trend brought on by social media, but food porn is nothing new to us a as a society. Just as selfies are reinvented version of the self portrait painting popularized in the late 1400s, food porn is just another reinvented version of our depictions of food. Historically, we've been producing images of our food since we learned how to draw. If we think way back to original cave paintings, we see drawings of large wild animals fit for consumption. So, the original food porn, though lacking the modern theatrics, began thousands of years ago, not on Instagram or Food Network.
So food porn is nothing new, but how did we go from images like this...
...to images like this? And what does this evolution tell us about ourselves and our culture?
Something quite clear in the cave drawings is that it didn't embellish; they simply depicted food as close to reality as possible. Dinner was deer, so deer is what they drew. In comparison, our image of the sensuously stacked grilled cheese beneath a chalked stone stabbed by an ornate knife centered so as to create asymmetry, likely took more preparation to photograph than it did to cook the actual sandwich. I think what is most apparent in this difference is that in the cave drawings food was scarce and central for survival, whereas now, in most parts of the United States, food has become a means of ephemeral pleasure.
We now go to great lengths not to attain our food, but to make it appear better than reality. Cavemen exerted energy in attaining their food, now we exert energy into presenting our food in an appealing way. In a way, we've become preoccupied with presentation. And here is where I see food porn reflecting today's cultural values. We now go to great lengths to make ourselves to appear better than reality. Crafting our outfits to fit a certain aesthetic. Selecting filters to alter our appearance or even to alter how the weather looks. Posing for "candid" photos. Just as we entice people into hunger by our food porn, we entice others into taking interest in ourselves by engineering our image.
Now, this might seem like I'm going in the direction of condemnation of our misplaced values and shallowness, but I'm not. I think it's normal to care about others' opinion of one's self, especially when we've been given the power through social media to shape how others see us. It's when the time spent presenting our identity takes more time and energy than shaping and cultivating our identity through experiences that troubles me. If it took 20 minutes to make that sandwich and hours to present it in a delectable way and we do the same for ourselves on social media, then our presentation of our identity becomes further from our true identity. I think a lesson in authenticity comes from ancient cave drawings. The experience of hunting took far more time than the depiction of that experience. So, we find a balance between presentation and experience, to hold on to our identity and our presentation of it.
