Food Porn

Last night I was in my friend's room and I saw a cookbook resting on her roommate's desk. It had a beautiful picture of something - which I now know was a savory biscuit with tomatoes and whipped goat cheese - on the cover. It is called "Smitten Kitchen" and I spent the next twenty minutes flipping through it and yelping with joy as I read the titles of the food and saw the gorgeous pictures. I learned that the author of the book ran a food blog before publishing her first cookbook.

From http://smittenkitchen.com/

I went online to look at her blog and wow, it is really something. It got me thinking: what is so intriguing to us about pictures of great looking food? Companies use pictures of food for advertising to get our attention, get our mouths watering, and ultimately get us to buy the product, but how is this any different than the picture on the cover of the cookbook? Don't both get our mouths watering? Aren't both advertising? But somehow paging through pictures of a cookbook or even more popular these days, scrolling through food blogs or tumblrs of delicious looking food is quite acceptable.

Before I continue, I must admit that I have had really unhealthy relationships with food, so therefore I may be more hyper aware of food related things compared to the average person. But, I have a lot of friends here that scroll through websites like foodporndaily.com and talk about how delicious all of the food looks. But there is an attitude of "I would not eat that because it is really unhealthy for you, but I am going to look at it and pretend like I would." They are filling some need to actually enjoy good, rich, sweet, delicious - whatever the adjective is - food instead of actually eating it. A lot of these websites don't even have the recipes attached for the food that are pictured.

From foodporndaily.com

I mean, now that I think about it, is it any different than me paging through cookbooks? Except in that case, I would actually "indulge" in cooking and eating the food...