Food Porn

I subscribe to a Tumblr called “Gluttony is a Bliss”

Each and every day (well, most days), it delivers straight to my Google Reader pictures of unfailingly delicious and drool worthy foodstuffs.

It’s what I call “Food Porn” - many of the things are exotic and outrageous. I would never make or purchase these items, but I do enjoy looking at them and imagining what eating them would be like.

It’s what I imagine looking at “real” porn is like for people who enjoy that sort of thing. (I don’t have any problem with people who enjoy sexual pornography, I don’t really “get” it myself, though).

But I think it says something about the state of the country and how fetishized our consumption has become that “food porn” as a concept has come to exist and that so many people indulge in this sort of behavior. We have become such a culture of “I can’t eat that” that we want to watch these cable shows dedicated to divine and/or ridiculous foods. We want to look at magazines and blogs dedicated to the stuff. But on those same channels and in those magazines we are also constantly bombarded with marketing messages about how we must look and act and “behave” ourselves with these same food items, lest we find ourselves outside the boundaries of “Acceptable” consumption as defined by the current cultural mores.

But at the same time that I decry it… man, I love to watch that kind of thing.

And if you would like to see some really fabulous (and wonderfully photographed) food… I still highly recommend this Tumblr. (http://gluttonyisabliss.tumblr.com/) And if you are a cooking type, you might even try your hand at some of these things… It’s just that I am not