The food network and porn

[chef koo]

found this quite interesting. won't spoil it for anyone.

food porn audio

[Gifted Gourmet]

The clever comparisons are actually enjoyably compelling ... "pornucopia" is an apt title! Sex is, indeed, an easy metaphor ...

The idea of Iron Chef as "fetish porn" with a dominator character taking a "submissive food" (squid) to prepare was hysterical!

Tyler as the "hero" rescuing the damsel in distress ...

By all means worth your time to listen ...

[Susan in FL]

VERY interesting, a well done piece.

By all means worth your time to listen ...

Yes, it is.

[Megan Blocker]

Agreed - this was definitely interesting. I'm glad they looped it back to his larger concern about the direction of the media (toward the trend of roping people in using their biological responses rather than their intellectual curiousity), because all I could think the whole time (even though I was definitely laughing) was that, duh, food is sensual. Old news. More interesting to him (and to me) is the idea that FN consciously plays to our "gut" reactions rather than our desire to learn more.

He briefly mentioned Julia Child, and seemed (to me, at least) to indicate that the media's fetishizing of food started with her. Do people agree with this? I'm not sure, myself - I feel like it's one thing to play on food's sensuality to pull people in, and then to teach them something (as Julia undoubtedly did), and another to play to our lowest common reaction and not go beyond it once you have our attention. Thoughts?

Great comparison of Tyler Florence to the pizza guy in many a porn flick.

[popover]

Very interesting but it rings very TRUE!

[Gifted Gourmet]

Great comparison of Tyler Florence to the pizza guy in many a porn flick. 

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Exactly which one?? (just in case I visit my local video outlet ....)

Actually, I happened to agree with your comment FN consciously plays to our "gut" reactions rather than our desire to learn more, Megan. I know they need viewership to remain viable but they seem to have done it at the cost of some of the more informational aspects of cooking.

And the sounds and music all make Giada more and more enticing ... and Emeril's "aw, yeah, babe" pseudo-moaning makes me feel positively dirty at times ...

[Megan Blocker]

Great comparison of Tyler Florence to the pizza guy in many a porn flick. 

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Exactly which one?? (just in case I visit my local video outlet ....)

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What are you implying, G.G.?

Great comparison of Tyler Florence to the pizza guy in many a porn flick. 

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And the sounds and music all make Giada more and more enticing ... and Emeril's "aw, yeah, babe" pseudo-moaning makes me feel positively dirty at times ...

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Emeril totally makes me feel dirty - always has. Ditto Giada's weird, over-eager diction and Rachael Ray's appreciative moans at the end of each episode!

[Gifted Gourmet]

Well, Megan, the Big O ain't about an omelet ... maybe to the aroused chicken ...

Nigella's lascivious finger licking, wanton nibbling, sloppy tastes of ingredients and her curvy, voluptuous good looks convey food and sensuality to the masses ...

more on the audio piece is here ...

“Like sex porn, gastroporn addresses the most basic human needs and functions, idealizing and degrading them at the same time,” Kaufman writes.

In order to explore “the histories of porn and gastroporn” together, he and Nitke watched porn tapes alongside Food Network programs in Nitke’s Manhattan apartment.

Looking at a closeup of a split raw chicken breast on the Tyler Florence show, Nitke says, “That is the quintessential p***y shot. The color of it, the texture of it, the camera lingering lovingly over it.”

Can one say that in mixed company?

the entire transcript of this interview can be found right here!

Nobody would confuse Julia herself with a porn star. However, that leg of lamb, that big chunk of steak, that was the star, and the fetishized focus on it was clearly a pornographic focus.

[zilla369]

What a great piece! I especially enjoyed the comment that Giada is the "Ginger" to Rachael Ray's "MaryAnne".

[Megan Blocker]

"Gastroporn." A new one for the OED, no?

[Tess]

I'm not so interested necessarily that, oh, it's like sex, oh, it is sex, oh, they're exploiting sex. I'm interested in a deeper structure of nervous response. And I'm concerned that media in general is starting to use this kind of automatic nervous response, as opposed to a more thoughtful process. And The Food Network is really paving the way. We're seeing a lot of news structured in an equivalent fashion. In other words, you know, as Van Gordon Sauter used to say to the CNN troops, "Get the emo." Where does the "emo" come from? The "emo" comes from the gut. What does the gut give you? The gut gives you the "wow!" And, of course, the "wow!" makes the money.

It seems to me like he could make most of this same argument while comparing the shows to advertising rather than porn. Except for the music part maybe, but advertising's got a big budget for music. And of course the camera is going to dwell on the stuff they are cooking. How would they show cooking more thoughtfully on TV? I feel as if this porn argument is less than the sum of its parts.

[srhcb]

Despite the commonality of the language used in both cases, I've always felt the food-porn connection to be rather strained.

Even the simplest back-of-the-box recipe or silliest travel-and-eat television show provides consumers with food related information above the level of mere sustinence.

Pornography, however, makes no (serious) representation that it's products are educational, enlightening, or even entertaining. The sexual representations intentionally appeal to our most basic nature.

As such, a better comparison for Food TV would be ESPN. Many people watch, read and talk about food topics entirely seperate from the acts of cooking or eating. Others, who may never have personally participated in competition, can never get enough sports. Both obsessions are socially acceptable and basicly harmless.

Besides, I'm a lot more comfortable thinking of Julia Child as the culinary equivalent of Howard Cosell than as a gastronomic version of Linda Lovelace!

SB

[Zach Holmes]

I agree, the more I listened, the more they seemed to be reaching for the connection

I would call something like Art culinare' food porn, pictures of almost unnatainable beauty, that most of us will never quite achieve, but still really fun to look at and fantasize

Edited October 15, 2005 by Zach Holmes (log)

[srhcb]

I agree, the more I listened, the more they seemed to be reaching for the connection

I would call something like Art culinare' food porn, pictures of almost unnatainable beauty, that most of us will never quite achieve, but still really fun to look at and fantasize

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I'd compare Art culinare' to Playboy Bunnies.

Neither is real porn.

SB (and both are virtually unattainable)

[MHarney]

food porn audio

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Thanks for this link -- great fun. Though some of his ideas are a tad stretchy, I decided Kaufman may have something there when I laughed out loud early on, after he spoke of the Food Network's "wacky, strange soundtracks" and they played something from FN that was straight out of the '70s wokachicka-wokachika-wokichicka genre.

FN makes it pretty easy for him to posit some of his connections. Examples abound every few hours. Once or twice, I've seen women on "Food 911" whose longing for Tyler Florence was so palpable you could almost see the hormones swirling around the kitchen. I particularly remember a transplanted Southern redhead living in NY who appeared to be flushed during the entire show. Rachael Ray mixed food and soft porn a year or so ago in Maxim magazine. (Soft? Okay, so what was that stuff on her face?!) Then there's Giada's upcoming "look, I've got three new kinds of cleavage" show, "Behind the Bash," sure to include plenty of Hollywood and Manhattan babes milling about. One can only hope they won't be shooting all of them with that wide-angle lens from a foot or so above, which is what gives her that giant-headed look on "Everyday Italian."

Megan Blocker He briefly mentioned Julia Child, and seemed (to me, at least) to indicate that the media's fetishizing of food started with her. Do people agree with this?

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well, let's talk a little bit about the history of food on TV. I mean, most of us can remember Julia Child on PBS. I can't think of a less pornographic host. But you say that's not the point - at least it wasn't in that show.

FREDERICK KAUFMAN: You know, in the old days of food television, if you talked to the producers, if you talked to the people who were involved, they were already making jokes about "it's food porn." The difference today is that the porniness has become more pervasive. Nobody would confuse Julia herself with a porn star. However, that leg of lamb, that big chunk of steak, that was the star, and the fetishized focus on it was clearly a pornographic focus.

While I think "clearly a pornographic focus" is a mite strong, I would agree that, in comparative terms, "The French Chef" was completely out of the ordinary in its time, and there were probably a lot of people wondering why they were salivating so much all of a sudden. Julia herself wasn't the focus and even the videography was usually fairly utilitarian (though "The French Chef" did invent many food camera techniques still in use today), but the whole concept at first must have been very odd and...well, exciting.

That being said, I refuse to discuss the possible ramifications of the framed pin...um, picture of Julia next to my range.

[BryanZ]

This made my day. But somehow, I'm a straight dude and I hate Giada but love Tyler. Oh man.

[Jennifer Iannolo]

Hmm. If I were to equate TVFN with porn in any way, I would liken it to really badly done porn, i.e. the "wotchika-wotchika" variety. Lots of plastic/silicone, no substance or storyline, too much makeup, etc.

I've downloaded this for a listen. Should be interesting.

[chefsteban]

I found the bit on food-porn worth a giggle or two, but mostly it was food fluff....much like a cheeto.

Thinking about it, I do believe that the first TV personality to connect food and sex had to be the original Galloping Gourment, Graham Kerr, during his drunk-as-a-lush days.

But then who wasn't excited and stimulated by the food orgy scene in the movie "Tom Jones"??????

[mizducky]

Some random observations:

I too had been calling TV food shows "food porn" for years now. In fact, a lot of my geeky friends (erm, that probably describes *all* my friends--geeks tend to attract other geeks ) have long had a tendency to call any special-interest magazine, TV show, etc. catering to the particular object of their geek-obsession [mumble]-porn, where "mumble" was the fetish-object in question. So, yeah, at first I too was going "duh, heard this before..." But on reflection I think that Kaufman is right to point a finger at the Food Network, because they seem to have consciously, deliberately intensified the porn-metaphor aspect of their shows to a degree hitherto unknown in that genre.

To follow the metaphor, Julia Child's original show might be thought of as the almost-amateur porn of the dawn of the movie industry, which to our modern jaded eyes looks really innocent and innocuous; but what we forget about both Julia and that early movie porn is how groundbreakingly daring, enticing, even startling the stuff looked to viewers of that era seeing such fare for the very first time. But since those early days, yes, things have gotten a lot less innocent and a lot more in-your-face: the camera and the mic have gotten a whole lot closer to the food, focusing much more intently on the sensuality of the sights and sounds--especially anything that glistens or makes wet smacking noises!

And then there are those danged chef-stars who actually make moaning noises on-camera. Okay, I distinctly remember Graham Kerr in his Galloping Gourmet days making some very provocative moany sounds on-air too ... but hey, he was so deliberately comedic that the whole thing could be laughed off as a big goof, including the moaning and his flirting with female guests. The new food-porn might include some humor, but it does not allow the humor to dilute or distract from the subject at hand. No horsing around when we zoom right in for that money shot, baby!

Now certainly food is a sensual experience by definition, but sensual does not automatically equate to sexual, and some types of sensuality are decidedly more erotic than others. I would submit that a clip of a photogenic host moaning while making wet smacking sounds with a wet glistening hunk o' food is playing a helluva lot harder on the erotic aspect of sensuality than a lot of other presentations the directors could have chosen.

Even in the past few years that I'd been watching Food Network, I'd noticed the porno-factor ramping up considerably, the shots and mic-ing getting tighter and tighter on the wetness and the smacking sounds. Actually I found it rather annoying--I preferred the longer shots where I could actually see what the chef was doing. As far as I was concerned, the more porno-y the shows got, the *less* useful learning I was getting out of them, because vital info was winding up on the (now virtual) cutting-room floor in preference to all those close shots of glisten-and-smack. This was one of many reasons why I once again stopped watching all TV about a year ago--Food Network, up to then one of my fave channels, was becoming less and less interesting to me the more it focused on food-porn, celebrities, and repetitive "clip" shows, rather than shows focusing on substantive info.

That a lot of advertising uses a lot of these same techniques only adds to the cogency of the argument IMO. In a certain sense, all commercial TV is advertising; even when they're not actually broadcasting a commercial, they're hooking you in so that you'll stay put for the commercials, or putting those damn animated bugs in the corners of the screen to ballyhoo the next show-ful of commercials. Hell, the way US public radio and TV have had to give ever-greater airtime to their corporate sponsors and fundraisers to make up for the increasing cuts in their government support, they're becoming more and more about advertising too. This in turn intensifies the increased porn-ification of a lot of different types of TV, not just food TV--the bottom line drives the networks' programming choices, such that sure-fire effortless viewer attractors such as this metaphorical porn will continue to have a distinct economic advantage over programming aimed more at the conscious mentality than that gut "I wanna!!!" reaction.

All this said, I have nothing against the erotic as such--heck, I think the erotic is a whole lotta fun (as anyone can determine from reading my blog recently ). But like I said, I do get annoyed when I'm trying to get other levels of info and entertainment out of my media, and I can't find it because it's all been replaced by cheep-o mindless types of porn. "Mindless" is the operative word here; there is such a thing as erotic that doesn't require one to check one's brains at the door. I'm just not holding my breath about finding such on my TV.

Oh, yeah, about the observations concerning Iron Chef: the S/M metaphor works for me, but I'd submit that IC adds the additional "kink", highly popular in certain corners of Euro-American/Caucasian porn, of fetishizing bits of Asian culture as exotic/decadent/erotic.

[Steven Blaski]

Some random observations:

I too had been calling TV food shows "food porn" for years now. In fact, a lot of my geeky friends (erm, that probably describes *all* my friends--geeks tend to attract other geeks ) have long had a tendency to call any special-interest magazine, TV show, etc. catering to the particular object of their geek-obsession [mumble]-porn, where "mumble" was the fetish-object in question. So, yeah, at first I too was going "duh, heard this before..." But on reflection I think that Kaufman is right to point a finger at the Food Network, because they seem to have consciously, deliberately intensified the porn-metaphor aspect of their shows to a degree hitherto unknown in that genre.

To follow the metaphor, Julia Child's original show might be thought of as the almost-amateur porn of the dawn of the movie industry, which to our modern jaded eyes looks really innocent and innocuous; but what we forget about both Julia and that early movie porn is how groundbreakingly daring, enticing, even startling the stuff looked to viewers of that era seeing such fare for the very first time. But since those early days, yes, things have gotten a lot less innocent and a lot more in-your-face: the camera and the mic have gotten a whole lot closer to the food, focusing much more intently on the sensuality of the sights and sounds--especially anything that glistens or makes wet smacking noises!

And then there are those danged chef-stars who actually make moaning noises on-camera. Okay, I distinctly remember Graham Kerr in his Galloping Gourmet days making some very provocative moany sounds on-air too ... but hey, he was so deliberately comedic that the whole thing could be laughed off as a big goof, including the moaning and his flirting with female guests. The new food-porn might include some humor, but it does not allow the humor to dilute or distract from the subject at hand. No horsing around when we zoom right in for that money shot, baby!

Now certainly food is a sensual experience by definition, but sensual does not automatically equate to sexual, and some types of sensuality are decidedly more erotic than others.  I would submit that a clip of a photogenic host moaning while making wet smacking sounds with a wet glistening hunk o' food is playing a helluva lot harder on the erotic aspect of sensuality than a lot of other presentations the directors could have chosen.

Even in the past few years that I'd been watching Food Network, I'd noticed the porno-factor ramping up considerably, the shots and mic-ing getting tighter and tighter on the wetness and the smacking sounds. Actually I found it rather annoying--I preferred the longer shots where I could actually see what the chef was doing. As far as I was concerned, the more porno-y the shows got, the *less* useful learning I was getting out of them, because vital info was winding up on the (now virtual) cutting-room floor in preference to all those close shots of glisten-and-smack. This was one of many reasons why I once again stopped watching all TV about a year ago--Food Network, up to then one of my fave channels, was becoming less and less interesting to me the more it focused on food-porn, celebrities, and repetitive "clip" shows, rather than shows focusing on substantive info.

That a lot of advertising uses a lot of these same techniques only adds to the cogency of the argument IMO. In a certain sense, all commercial TV is advertising; even when they're not actually broadcasting a commercial, they're hooking you in so that you'll stay put for the commercials, or putting those damn animated bugs in the corners of the screen to ballyhoo the next show-ful of commercials. Hell, the way US public radio and TV have had to give ever-greater airtime to their corporate sponsors and fundraisers to make up for the increasing cuts in their government support, they're becoming more and more about advertising too. This in turn intensifies the increased porn-ification of a lot of different types of TV, not just food TV--the bottom line drives the networks' programming choices, such that sure-fire effortless viewer attractors such as this  metaphorical porn will continue to have a distinct economic advantage over programming aimed more at the conscious mentality than that gut "I wanna!!!" reaction.

All this said, I have nothing against the erotic as such--heck, I think the erotic is a whole lotta fun (as anyone can determine from reading my blog recently ). But like I said, I do get annoyed when I'm trying to get other levels of info and entertainment out of my media, and I can't find it because it's all been replaced by cheep-o mindless types of porn. "Mindless" is the operative word here; there is such a thing as erotic that doesn't require one to check one's brains at the door. I'm just not holding my breath about finding such on my TV.

Oh, yeah, about the observations concerning Iron Chef: the S/M metaphor works for me, but I'd submit that IC adds the additional "kink", highly popular in certain corners of Euro-American/Caucasian porn, of fetishizing bits of Asian culture as exotic/decadent/erotic.

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Great post!

I think Kaufman's comments, while indeed funny (I, too, am waiting for "pizza guy" Tyler to stop by and help me with my cookies), do offer a lot more than just entertaining "fluff" as he uses the FN to underscore the porning of popular culture.

One of the FN taglines goes something like "We're way more than cooking." Yeah, and all that other stuff is why you suck.

[Megan Blocker]

One of the FN taglines goes something like "We're way more than cooking." Yeah, and all that other stuff is why you suck.

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I think it's "So much more than cooking." And I have to tell you - I heard it today, and I thought the exact same thing, Steven!

[Moopheus]

As such, a better comparison for Food TV would be ESPN.

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Well, he wasn't saying that Food TV IS porn, just that it's LIKE porn in emphasising the gut reaction instead of the extremely nominal "instructional" value, which isn't what people are watching for. It's been pretty obvious for some time that most of the shows on FTV have little or no instructional value. Sports viewing clearly relies on the same reactions. Have you ever listened closely to the way sports announcers talk? It's like listening to Sandra Lee after a few cocktails. Food TV, porn, ESPN, are all just different manifestations of the same basic phenomena. As Chauncy Gardner would say, "I like to watch."

[Shalmanese]

So if the food network is porn, does that mean that open kitchen restuarants are really strip clubs?

[M.X.Hassett]

So if the food network is porn, does that mean that open kitchen restuarants are really strip clubs?

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