Features > Food Fetish
Food Fetish
The naked truth of the gastroporn phenomenon
By Erik Helin (with illustrations by Matt Kuglitsch)
She cradles it in her hand just inches from her face. The camera zooms in as she slides it into her mouth. “Mmmm. Amazing,” she moans. “That’s so good!” Sandra Lee’s near orgasm is over a gooey slice of prosciutto and goat cheese pizza.
But that doesn’t mean the host of Semi-Home Cooking on the Food Network couldn’t be a porn star. Not only does she look the part—California blonde hair, tan skin and the body of a yoga-toned housewife —but her personal history mirrors the trajectory of many adult film actresses. She comes from a broken home with a history of abandonment and physical abuse. At 2, her mother left her at her grandmother’s, and at 16, her father was put in prison and she ended up on her own in Wisconsin. And judging by the way she eats pizza (“I love all this drippy cheese!”), it appears she could make the transition between chef and starlet pretty easily.
Not that Lee’s alone; today’s food stars, from the sensual Giada De Laurentis to the charismatic “Naked Chef” Jamie Oliver, would look just as natural behind a stove as they would on a porn set.
Today, parallels between food TV and pornography shoot up frequently in popular culture. The phenomenon has been dubbed “food porn” and “gastroporn.” New York advertising executive and trendspotter Marian Salzman (the woman who popularized the term “metrosexual”) describes how “preparing, cooking, tasting and eating food have become voyeuristic pleasures separated from physical reality and carried out by experts who go through the moves with practiced ease” in her 2007 book, Next Now: Trends for the Future.
Like porn, food programming feeds into our visceral, most basic biological desires. Michelle Lekas, a cultural studies lecturer at the University of Minnesota says the Food Network “turns a drive to eat into pure representation; and what better model to use than pornographic?” The way the camera caresses a sweating steak, or lingers on a rack of lamb is almost exactly the way we see parts of the body depicted in pornography.
A 2005 article in Harper’s Magazine by Frederick Kaufman entitled “Debbie Does Salad” addresses the phenomenon. As Kaufman and porn photographer Barbara Nitke sit and observe six hours of the Food Network, Nitke draws endless comparisons between the two fields, often equating different food practices, characters and actions to their pornographic counterparts. Nitke’s musings assert that Rachel Ray is the “girl next door,” Giada De Laurentis is the “exotic glamazon,” and streaming lemon juice stands in for watersports.
Representations of expert cooking techniques also mirror sexual technique. One of the main parallels drawn between the two industries is that unattainable skills are presented as attainable. When Bobby Flay rapidly dices an onion, we think, “I could do that!” in much the same way we see Ava Devine or Peter North getting their partner off with screaming professional precision. In actuality, there is a great amount of preparation and choreography involved in both porn movies and cooking shows.
“They’ll make an apple pie on stage, but in fact in the Food Network kitchens they’re making five or six or seven apple pies, and the one that looks the best is the one they’re going to use,” Kaufman told a National Public Radio reporter.
Some have found the gastroporn trend troubling. Anthony Bourdain, Food Network critic and host of the Travel Channel’s No Reservations, said in a 2007 public appearance, “I’m concerned. You watch someone cooking on TV, but are you actually doing it yourself? You don’t. I’m concerned that it’s like watching porn; you’re looking at people doing things that you’re not going to be doing yourself anytime soon.”
What’s interesting about Bourdain’s critical stance on food television is the fact that he comes from his own gastroporn niche. TV personalities like him and Andrew Zimmern, host of Bizarre Foods, present a fascination with the foreign and bizarre culinary practices of other countries that mirrors some of the more extreme fetishes in pornography—the truly guilty pleasures of sexual desire. We see Zimmern eat a rotting shark carcass and think, “That is disgusting,” but in the back of our minds we may wonder if we would actually enjoy it, in the same way we may be curious about anal beads or S&M.
Still, there is a crucial difference between porn and food TV. In pornography, the actors have to be having real sex, whereas a cooking show is more of a representation of cooking than actual cooking. Watching porn without an attractive presentation of sex is pointless. In order to satisfy the sexual desire, to ejaculate, you have to be able to vicariously have sex through the actors. On cooking shows we’re drawn in by the sexually aesthetic presentation of food, and the pleasure caused by preparing and consuming it. Of course, we can’t eat ourselves in the same way we masturbate to alleviate sexual urges, so the vicariousness of the eating and the preparation must be that much more compelling—which explains why we like our Food Network stars talented and arousing and their dishes mouth-watering. Porn is used to relieve sexual urges, something food programs can’t do unless they can engage you long enough for your hunger pangs to pass.
There are countless advertisements and popular representations of food as a means of sexual satisfaction, too. We’re constantly hit with a stream of TV spots equating food to sex, especially with women. As feminist philosopher Susan Bordo writes in her book Unbearable Weight, “When women are positively depicted as sensuously voracious about food, their hunger for food is employed solely as a metaphor for their sexual appetite.” This explains how a Carl’s Jr. ad featuring Paris Hilton, half-naked washing a car and eating a burger, can come into production. She breathes heavily and crawls on her knees as soap bubbles conform to her body, over-mouthed saxophone and hip-hop beats throbbing in the background. It’s pretty clear her desire is sexual, but the only thing put inside her is one melty bite of an oversized burger. “That’s hot,” the ad concludes.
There is something inherently sexual about food. We place great emphasis on the ripeness and size of vegetables, the most prime cut of beef and the potency of wasabi. It’s no surprise that the Food Network attempts to capture the sexual essence of these culinary objects. They tease us into gastronomic arousal, and for the money shot, they allow us to vicariously and orgasmically consume the end result.