Food Porn

I recently viewed an NPR program where the guest was talking about the rise in what he called 'food porn'; the Food Network as a form of pornography. He talked about how the Food Network uses a lot of the same cinematic techniques that the porn industry uses, such as overmiking. My first thought was remembering the section in (I think) Mere Christianity where Lewis talks about a strip tease involving a leg of lamb. My second thought was that the guest must be exaggerating. But I thought about it some more, and I wonder if he was.

What characterizes pornography, as opposed to other forms of sexual conduct, is that one aspect of a good thing is made into the whole. Having sex with someone is not pornography. Pornography happens when the enjoyment of a beautiful body is made into the whole. And this indicates at least a certain structural similarity between pornography and 'food porn'. Cooking and eating a beautiful meal is not 'food porn'. But doesn't watching Giada do it bear at least a similar relationship to actually doing it ourselves as watching Jenna Jameson do it does to actually doing it ourselves? Food for thought.

EDIT: I posted a similar message on a listserv, and one of the other members noted the following, which I though I should put up here:

Ironically, after posting my last, I reached page 143 in one of my
current reads entitled HEAT by Bill Buford, a saga of a writer
fascinated by food and the art of cooking who apprenticed himself to
various chefs. The passage mention below immediately caught my eye.
He spoke of new shows (on the Food Network) putting a preminum on
presentation rather thn knowledge, "intimate-seeming camera close-ups
of foods, as though objects of sexual satisfaction.

......skin-flick
feel reinforced.......range of heightened effects.....amplified
sounds of frying, ,snapping, crunching, crewing,
swallowing.........always...a tongue making small, wet, bubbly tongue
sounds.......Talent.....directed .......to use it (her tongue)
conspicuously - to taste food on a spoon....work it around a batter-
covered beater or clean the lips with it........ aim spelled out by
former programming exec.........looking for the kind of show..makes
people want to crawl up to their television set and lick the
screen." (To which the author replied, ' "Yuck."')

If this is what the NPR guest on the program that Chris was referring
to had seen, well, yes. He has a point. I am generally a reader about
food rather than a watcher.

I suspect that where some of what I don't like about a lot of Food Network shows -- the focus on a vicarious pleasure of watching, as opposed to others of their shows (like my favorite, Good Eats), which are more 'educational'. I'm not sure to what extent watching Emeril makes one a better cook; I'm sure I've learned a fair amount from Alton Brown.

Embryonic Stem Cells

Don't worry, I'm not going to actually discuss the issue. I just wanted to complain about a common argument in support of the use of embryonic stem cells for research. The argument goes, "Well, they're going to be destroyed anyway, so why not at least use them for research?" This argument presumes that the inference between "It's morally acceptable to destroy X" and "It's morally acceptable to do anything whatsoever to X" is valid. But this is clearly not the case. Consider another argument of the same form: Death row inmates are going to die anyway, so why not use them for medical research? Very few people would think this is a valid argument.

And it's even more problematic in the case of embryos. Starting to conduct medical research on death row inmates is unlikely to result in more death row inmates. Nobody's going to think, "Hey, since this research is so valuable, we should sentence more people to death row." But it's certainly reasonable to think that experimentation on embryonic stem cells, assuming it shows promise, will result in more embroys being created.