Food Porn: “a glamourized spectacular visual presentation of cooking or eating in advertisements, infomercials, cooking shows or other visual media, foods boasting a high fat and calorie content, exotic dishes that arouse a desire to eat or the glorification of food as a substitute for sex”. Luckily, with the help of filters and smart phone cameras, even the sloppiest of baseball guilty pleasures can be portrayed as a gourmet dish.
Instagram gives college kids the ability to feign top chef cooking skills through pleasing aesthetics, but can it have a reverse effect on actual household-name cooks?
Martha Stewart has recently received a lot of criticism from followers because of her "disgusting" food tweets. Should someone as talented as Martha really need to worry about filters and small depths of fields when photographing her meals? Personally, despite a primarily grey color scale, I still recognize Martha's fabulous recipes. I was happy to see her personally respond to the harsh criticism without letting it affect her.
Kudos to Martha for a-dressing the critics while still recognizing her talents. Based on high engagement with her tweets, apparently her fans agree. Bright, colorful pictures of food may be nice to scroll through, but 1000 words won't fill your stomach. We should be wary of Brones' idea that we forget what's actually in the food and read the recipe rather than judge the angle.
Maybe if Martha utilized her Instagram account and started hashtagging "food porn" over twitpiccing, her followers wouldn't be as critical. But is it necessary for Martha to prove her accomplished cook status through a social media fad? What do you think?
