Letters to the Editor
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gastroporn versus real life
It's refreshing to see a food writer who understands just how tiresome and tiring food writing has become. Most current restaurant reviews are nothing more than a crush of adjectives and bad metaphors. What's more, food writing has degenerated into a sort of cartoonish erotica.
The thing that bothers me most, though, is the fact that so little food writers seem to grasp the concept that food is much more than what's on the plate. Ann Bauer's observation that people relax and become gregarious over good food is an important and often overlooked element of dining. The very best food writers - M.F.K Fisher, Ruth Reichl, and Ernest Hemingway spring to mind - have an earthy, gut-level quality that is the polar opposite of the fussy, precious gastroporn that's currently in vogue. For them and others like them, food is inseparable from other basic pleasures: company, conversation, creativity, warmth, sustenance, comfort, memory.
The very term "food porn" is telling. Porn has less than nothing to do with real sex, doesn't it? It's a glossy imitation of reality. Porn has its place, but it's certainly no substitute for actual, messy, affectionate lovemaking between people who care for one another a great deal. Food porn is to food what porn is to sex: a slick, stylized, empty version of something meant to be vital and sensual and filling.
Bauer's article reminded me of something I read years ago by C.S. Lewis. From Mere Christianity:
You can get a large audience together for a striptease act--that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage. Now suppose you come to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that in that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food? And would not anyone who had grown up in a different world think there was something equally queer about the state of the sex instinct among us?
One critic said that if he found a country in which such strip-tease acts with food were popular, he would conclude that the people of that country were starving. He meant, of course, to imply that such things as the strip-tease act resulted not from sexual corruption but from sexual starvation. I agree with him that if, in some strange land, we found that similar acts with mutton chops were popular, one of the possible explanations which would occur to me would be famine. But the next step would be to test our hypothesis by finding out whether, in fact, much or little food was being consumed in that country. If the evidence showed that a good deal was being eaten, then of course we should have to abandon the hypothesis of starvation and try to think of another one...Starving men may think much about food, but so do gluttons; the gorged, as well as the famished, like titillations.
Gorged gluttons, titillated by tidbits. Glossy magazines devoted to the same sort of "bacon striptease" Lewis described. Cooks have given way to chefs, who in turn have given way to "foodies", food stylists and photographers. It's not food as food, or even food as entertainment; it's food as fetish. Statistics about eating disorders indicate a bizarre, unhealthy fascination with food among Western women in particular - a sadomasochistic approach/avoidance mentality that is distinctly at odds with actual pleasure or nourishment.
I'm glad that Bauer has decided not to waste her talent by contributing to the gastroporn machine. May she eat well and with renewed relish!