December 26, 2012 • 25 mins
Is food porn unhealthy? Do foodies represent a cultural era of feast or famine? Join Caroline and Cristen as they explore the rise of the foodie and the culinary hipster.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stuff Mom Never told you from how stuff
Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Kristen and I'm Caroline, and welcome back to part two
of our Holiday Feast. We're talking about food and food culture,
because tis the season to gorge yourself on whatever you want.
(00:27):
There are always those articles, Caroline about like how to
enjoy yourself during the holidays and not gain ten pounds
and it's like portion control. And you know what I
say to that, it's the holidays, you eat all the
figgy pudding that you want. Um and call me in
three weeks when I and I can't fit into my pants.
(00:48):
But in the last episode Feast, part one, we asked
whether or not food is the new sex, and we
divulge how much we think about food Caroline and I,
which is a lot all the time. But even though
you and I are mild food obsessives, would you go
as far as to call yourself a foodie? I would not.
(01:11):
Um actually dated someone who was so pleasantly surprised that
I was open to eating stuff beyond hamburgers. I guess
that he called me a foodie, but I kind of
actually recoiled at the description which I think it's funny
because if you read articles about foodies, like it's very controversial,
people hate them, but then they're they're you know, they're
(01:33):
considered snobs, food snobs, and people actually recoil from the
foodie label the way that others recoil from the hipster
label or the indie rock label or stuff like that.
They're definitely gastronomical hipster's where a hipster in the same
way hipster never wants to self label as a hipster
because that would be on hip A foodie although I
(01:54):
don't know, I do know some foodies will say, I mean,
I'm a bit of a foodie. But let's not get
ahead of ourselves. Backing up with food culture, can we
just for a moment take in how like food food tainment,
food entertainment as just blown up. We have things like
(02:17):
food documentaries like Supersize Me, Food Inc. Special Food issues
of mainstream magazines are all over the place now, celebrity
chefs and food reality TV, entire networks devoted solely to food.
The fact that we have on those food networks specials
just about people making desserts, chocolate just chocolate, shows the
(02:41):
popularity of food titles there was at one point, Um,
I want to say Nigella's Nigela Lass and that's her name, right,
her book was out selling fifty Shades of Gray. Because
you know what, people can have sex, but we really
want food more than that. We want to look at
pictures of food all the time. And what would you
call those pictures of food nowadays? I would call it
(03:03):
food pornography. That's right, that is the term. And that's
a lot of what we're we will be talking about
today because you know, you mentioned the whole like food
culture that's arisen, and how we have all these shows
and networks and movies dedicated to it, the Food Network,
Like I can't even watch it because I just get
so hungry. It makes me so sad. But we're going
(03:26):
to get into the science of of why all of
that that food on that you're watching on the television
makes you hungry in your brain. But maybe we first
take a little a little etymological side trip into like
when we started using these terms like foodie and food
porn because the history is actually longer than I assumed
(03:52):
that it would be. Yeah, what is it? Well? Check
this out. Foodie shows up in the Oxford English Dictionary
for the first time in night teen eighty in reference
to salivating patrons of a Parisian restaurant, and it was
predated by the term foodist in the late nineteenth centuries.
That sounds like you're against certain foods foods um And
(04:18):
then gastro porn pops up in the New York Review
of Books in nineteen seventy seven in an article by
Andrew Cockburn that was talking about the sensuous language of
cooking instructions, whereas you know, if you open up the
Joy of Cooking, that is not a food porn recipe
at all. Yeah. I remember when I was a kid,
(04:38):
I really enjoyed being in the kitchen, and uh my
mom always cooked from the Joy of Cooking. She loved it.
But we had this Better Homes and Gardens cookbook from
probably the like sixties or seventies, and it had like
technicolor photographs of all these cakes and casseroles, and I
(04:58):
always wanted to cook from that when I thought the
recipes were inherently better than Joy of Cooking, which just
looked so boring. Call me, call me a foodist. But
then in ninety four, food porn is thought to have
been coined by Rosalind Coward in her book Female Desire
(05:18):
when she's talking about how you know, women are because
of patriarchal gender roles have to stay in the kitchen
and uh fulfill their sexual you know, respectations by through
cooking as well. Yeah, she said it's an active servitude. Yeah,
which I mean that could be a whole podcast on
(05:40):
its own cooking and gender and feminism and stuff. We
won't go there. And even beyond food porn, we still
keep coming up with more specific words to describe these
food cultures that are coming up, such as in two
thousand seven, local war was named the word of the
year by the New Oxford American Dictionary. We love to
(06:02):
talk about what we eat, how we eat. We take
Instagram pictures of you know, dumplings and seaweed salads. I'm
just not thinking of food. And speaking of Instagram, I
would say that the Internet and social media in particular
has fed the rise of foodie culture because think about
(06:24):
just going on to Pinterest. It is a smorgas board. Yes,
I'm getting in as many food punts as possible. It
is a smorgas board of food porn. It's like the
Playboy of food. Porn that Pinterest. Well, yeah, these food
pictures are very popular. This isn't a women's health article
from October. Lots of food sites just like you talked
(06:47):
about how you didn't want to cook from the joy
of cooking. You wanted to cook from better homes and
gardens with all the pictures in it side. Now, my
mother has about seven thousand of those books. She has
begged my father to stop giving them to her. Anyway.
They say that lots of food sites have diverged from
being recipe driven and instead feature these pand in shots
of glistening foods. You're talking about Instagram and stuff. Food
(07:10):
images are the fastest growing category on Pinterest, Flickers porn
Food porn group alone has nearly six hundred thousand images,
and marketing firm three sixty I found that pictures of desserts,
if you're curious, are the most likely to be shared online.
So I think it's interesting to ask what the heck
(07:31):
are all these food images doing to us? Well, I
think that maybe the logic goes that it's fine if
we're just looking especially for something like desserts, which we know,
you know, on the on the food pyramid. But I
guess the food pyramid is now. It's a relative, a
bygone era on the food plate, um, you know the
part for desserts. It's like, I don't even think desserts
(07:53):
on the new food plate because it's not good for
us obviously. So we can look, but we can't touch, right,
So that's so it's fine. We're just gonna stare at
all those cinnamon bones and it's not going to have
a negative effect on our eating habits, right, because we're
not actually eating it. Tell me that's right, Caroline, it's
not right. Well, for most of us, it's not right.
I know it's not right for me. Like I actively
(08:13):
have to avoid Food Network because I look at that
TV show or the whole network and I'm just like,
but I want all of it, and then I over
eat chips and it's just not satisfying, and so then
I seek out brownies and it's a cycle of depression.
That's why I'm going to start a cooking show called
the Kale Show. Yeah, okay, I'll see what inventive things
(08:34):
you can come up with with kale. Kale chips are incredible.
Don't get me started on kale. I'm serious. It is
a corner stone of my diet. Well that that Women's
Health article pointed out that these photos and shows and
you know, whatever you're looking at actually provoke real emotional
and physical hunger that can be tough to control. That's
coming from neuroscientists Laura Martin, and she also pointed out
(08:57):
that those who were overweight actually appear to be more
since it's of to the effect of viewing all of
that irresistible food on TV or in magazine, which might
go back to like brain chemistry that we've talked about
before UM in our podcast on hormones and obesity, and
there does need to be something that that will trip
wire that and it probably also has to do with
(09:18):
how food porn exploits humans innate quote unquote super normal stimuli,
which essentially means we are hardwired to want food, and
especially fatty food. So in a way that food porn
is really delicious to our brain, our brain mouth. Yes,
because back in the day, and we mentioned this in
(09:39):
Feast Part one, that back in the our our evolutionary
for fathers for humans UM, food was scarce, and so
we not only were hardware to seafood and want that food,
but also the food that would give us the most energy.
So unfortunately today it would be something like lasagna dripping
(10:00):
cheese and cheese. Cheese, cheese. That's all we want is cheese. Yeah.
There have actually been a lot of studies on this effect,
the effect of viewing food porn, basically in the journal
Journal and the Journal of Neuroscience back in April, they
found that viewing images of that delicious food lit up
our brains reward center and caused women with the most
(10:22):
active mental response to overeat. Similarly, in obesity, they found
that simply seeing food increases levels of grellin, which is
the hunger hormone, which is what Kristen was talking about.
But there is a bit of good news to all
of this food porn obsession, and that is if we
(10:42):
see the food porn and then we, you know, for
on Pinterest, say we click on that food porn and
land on the recipe and cook that recipe, unless, of course,
it is for something like a chocolate volcano deep fried
with bacon. Um. If we cook for ourselves and are
stimulated by a food porn to do that, then we
(11:03):
have we do have a better chance of eating better.
It's more like, don't stare. If you're eating looking at
a lot of food porn than eating a lot of
processed food or going out to eat, then you might
be in for it. Rebecca or chant Over at the
Huffington Post in October actually argues that this whole food
porn being damaging is baseless. She thinks it's crazy, and
(11:24):
this comes after a doctor As show where he talked
about the effects of viewing food images and the concerns,
the health issues things like that. But or Chian argues
that are well double argue here. She says, arguing that
food porn makes you fat as akin to arguing that
regular porn makes you a sex addict. It's not only incorrect,
(11:44):
it's pretty irresponsible. Yeah. I think that, um, some of
the fears around food porn, I mean, even the fact
we call it food porn um are overblown. But still though,
just going on to social media networks, onto logging on
to Facebook, getting on Instagram, Pinterest, and seeing how obsessively
(12:08):
people and especially young people to document what they are
eating at restaurants and what they are making at home,
because usually it will be something kind of impressive or
at least like that looks incredibly delicious. Like if it's
a sandwich, it's not going to be a peanut butter
and jelly sandwich is gonna be like, you know, whatever
goes into an incredible stand something multi layered, maybe with sprouse,
(12:31):
something involving. But it seems to be some kind of
new marker for how like food cultured. You are. Oh look,
oh this this image. Oh this is of this little
Vietnamese place, like you've probably never heard of it. Yeah,
(12:51):
it's a strange Like I do think there's an argument
to be made of how food is a new sort
of cultural status symbol. Yeah, there is the argument that
food is replacing art. Well, I mean they've been all
the arguments. Food is the new sex, food is the
new art, food is the new indie rock music, all
of these things, but the food replacing art argument gets
(13:18):
gets a lot of play over at New York Times.
This is William Derris Siewitz, who in October wrote an
impassioned opinion piece about food and art. He basically says
that we are in danger, this is a quote. We
are in danger of confusing our palates with our souls. Kristen,
oh dear, Yeah, because food. He says food is not art. People.
(13:42):
We start both start by addressing the senses. So good food,
good art. You're addressing the senses. But food doesn't express emotion.
It doesn't give you insight into other people. It doesn't
help you see the world in a new way or
force you to take an inventory of your soul. Yeah,
he was on to say that we are now reading
the Gospel according to and not Joyce or Proost, but
(14:04):
to Michael Pollen and Alice Waters. Uh, and like totally
understand what he says, but it's like these these broad
brush claims that food is replacing everything. Food is the
new sex. Like you said food, food is the new art.
But food is simply I feel like a lot of
this foodie culture is coming out of like the accessibility
(14:28):
of food, and not just any old food, but good
food to where there's so much available that, Yes, it
is a marker of taste if you can sift through
that and find and choose the quote unquote better stuff. Obviously,
like art, different people have different tastes. And there's also
(14:50):
the thing of you know, accessibility of you know, can
you go out and afford to eat at Alice Waters
restaurant or can you go out and afford to buy
a Jackson Pollock, in which case like, yes, I would
realized those tabs would be much larger, but still, well, yeah,
I mean you can go to access really not only
excellent but unusual food. Doesn't mean you have to go
(15:13):
to a fancy restaurant. You can be a foodie and
do all of your shopping, cooking and eating from the
farmer's market. Well, and I feel like that's part of
it too, Like that's part of the foodie culture is
sort of in the same way of uh I would
I think maybe asking is food the new like hipster
dam is even even more accurate because it's there's that
(15:35):
pleasure in finding the low brow and the stuff like
you don't have to go like mainstreamed fun like amazing food,
like you can just go to like a food truck,
like your hipster boys, your foodie hipster boys. Um. Well.
One of those foodie articles that got people talking about no,
(15:56):
this is great that young people are exposed to good food,
or these people are ridiculous was a New York Magazine
article in March where the writer points out that it
really is kind of a generational thing. He says that
a food itself has become a defining obsession among a
lot of young people. It's now viewed, he says, as
a legitimate option for a hobby, a topic of endless discussion,
(16:20):
a playground for one upmanship, a measuring stick of cool.
Yeah he uh. The New York Magazine writer follows around
Diane Chang, who is a New York foodie. She she
doesn't do anything food related for her day job, but
it's funny because she is one of the ones where
she like the hipster label. She doesn't want to call
(16:43):
herself a foodie, but she does have a food blog
and her Instagram is all food and she throws food parties.
And he asked her to track everything that she ate
for one week, and she spent three fifty dollars alone
just on food. And I looked at all the photos
of everything she ate and it was an incredible spread,
(17:04):
which kind of made me, you know, look at my
bowl of kale and wonder how I could jazz it
up with some quail legs or something. Well, yeah, I
mean it is. It is kind of not intimidating, but God,
it's like, how do you have the time, Like I
don't even have time almost to go to the regular
grocery store, let alone the fancy farmer's market and cook
(17:25):
all this stuff well. And while all of this, like
foodie culture is going on and how it has become
this new mark of being cultured, especially among I do
think it is something that is very much among our generation.
I'll be curious to here from older listeners too. But
Nina Burley over at l A Times also notes how
(17:47):
this this food obsession is kind of ironic and really
sad considering the fact that a lot of Americans really
can't even afford a decent meal. You know that we're
talking ab out foodie and food ism from the high
level when yeah, it's true, like the average person is
not feeding themselves very well at all. She pointed out
(18:10):
that are are weird foodie, food porn, food network, top
chef obsession kind of coincided with the economy tanking, and
so there's more to think about as far as food
goes than just how it looks on a plate on
Top Chef. Yeah, so what do you what do you
think though, Caroline, Like, considering this new foodie culture that
(18:34):
has it's not necessarily the foodies are not new, obviously,
but it's simply more accessible and for some reason, generationally
it seems like we are a lot more into food
than we used to be. But do you think that
drawing a parallel between that and saying that food is
(18:54):
now like the new whatever, the new art is valid. Well,
I don't know if I would blow it up to
that stature. I think that websites like yelp to just
to name one, have almost made eating out at fine
restaurants or fancy restaurants or just a hole in the
(19:14):
wall that no one's ever heard of. It's made it
almost a competition to see who can eat the coolest
food and write the best review about it and have
the most check ins at a place. So there there
are a lot of social issues around food, and it
does seem to be a young person's pursuit as opposed
to years ago where maybe it was just stuffy, older
(19:37):
white city folk who were like you know, going to
find dining restaurants and things like that. Yeah, maybe a
lot of it too is obviously there's there's access to food, um,
but also the in our personal lives just it's a
byproduct of social media and how we want to over
expose pretty much every part of our lives. It's part
(20:01):
of the construct now that this like public of the
public persona that we are online. I actually don't post
any food photos online well because most of them would
be like, here's my Campbell's tomato soup again. But yeah,
I don't know. I'm not really interested in people's food photos,
to be honest. I think I'm just gonna start posting
like really like sad food, like uncooked yam, like a
(20:25):
yam that you've done nothing with. That's a sad looking food.
So get ready to Carol, look at this half eaten
box of quinoa that you haven't touched in three months,
hashtags sad food. But I do want to open it
up to listeners out there, because I'm sure we've done
We did an episode a long time ago on gender
differences among chefs, and I know we have a lot
(20:49):
of cooks and chefs and foodies, whether you want to
call yourself a food or not, who do listen to
the podcast. So I will be curious to hear from
folks like do you think do you feel like food
culture has become overblown? Just in general? Has it replaced
in a in a way art because it is so
accessible and do you feel competitive about your eating? Be honest,
(21:14):
we can. We can read your letters anonymously if necessary.
And speaking of letters, if you want to write into us,
our email addresses Mom Stuff at Discovery dot com, and
of course you can always start a conversation over on
Facebook as well. And we've got a couple of letters
to read to close out this episode POT two on Feast.
(21:34):
But before we get to that, we've got a quick
word from our sponsor, the brought us this episode of
Stuff Mom Never Told You. Yeah, here's a letter from
Chris on our pregnancy uh sex episode subject line pregnant
ladies equal sexy. WHOA, Yeah, I just listened to your
podcast on pregnancy sex and I must agree that pregnant
(21:56):
ladies are uber sexy. I always thought they were attractive
and had that glow, but it wasn't until my wife
and I were thinking about trying for a baby that
I realized how attracted to them I am. During the
entire nine months of her pregnancy, I couldn't get enough. However,
that bill curve you spoke of did not apply to
her at all. Don't get me wrong. There was sexy time,
(22:17):
but her appetite was not nearly as voracious as I
was led to believe by other sources. This kind of
surprised me, seeing as how she had a pretty easy pregnancy,
no morning sickness, back pain, et cetera until the very
end when she had high blood pressure. So to sum up,
Prego equal Sexy and Bell curves Lie. Thanks for the podcast,
and thank you Chris Well. I got one here from
(22:40):
Rameiro and this is in response to our episode on
child caregivers, and he writes, I listened to your podcast
on child caregivers. Thank you for doing so. I myself
as a child caregiver throughout my high school and beginning
of college years. Like many families, I came from a
single parent home, just my mother and I and she
didn't speak English. My mother was diagnosed with cancer while
(23:01):
I was in the tenth grade. I didn't even have
a driver's license, but I had to take her to
all her chemotherapy appointments and surgeries and interpret for her.
Since there was no one else who could do that.
I broke a lot of laws and everything I could
to make sure that she got the medical attention she needed.
So much so that I would fill out all of
her paperwork and knew exactly what medications she was on
and what she was allergic to before the doctors would
(23:23):
even ask her. I would fill out all the paperwork
and even signed for us since her English was very limited.
I don't want people to feel sorry for me, since
I think I'm doing very well for myself. But I'm
writing you because at that age I didn't have a voice.
That is why I really appreciated your podcast. In my
younger years, I was a voice of my mother who
was sick, and I don't regret doing it, but to
be honest, and maybe it was a cultural thing, I
(23:45):
never heard my mother thank me for all that I
did for I was just expected to take care of her.
Now that I'm an adult, I try not to relive
those years, But if my mother were alive today, all
I would want is the acknowledgment or recognition a voice
of the sacrifices that I and many other children do
awaiting the inevitable death of your loved one. Before your podcast,
I really didn't know the numbers nor any statistics regarding
this matter. So thank you for your podcast, which is
(24:07):
a great platform to give people like me some recognition
that we exist. And that letter just warmed my heart.
So thank you Ramiro, and to Chris and to everyone
who has written into us moms Stuff at Discovery dot com,
and if you're listening to this when it is coming out,
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(24:30):
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(24:51):
works dot com for more on this and thousands of
other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com? About me,
Pas
Welcome to stuff Mom Never told you from how stuff
Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Kristen and I'm Caroline, and welcome back to part two
of our Holiday Feast. We're talking about food and food culture,
because tis the season to gorge yourself on whatever you want.
(00:27):
There are always those articles, Caroline about like how to
enjoy yourself during the holidays and not gain ten pounds
and it's like portion control. And you know what I
say to that, it's the holidays, you eat all the
figgy pudding that you want. Um and call me in
three weeks when I and I can't fit into my pants.
(00:48):
But in the last episode Feast, part one, we asked
whether or not food is the new sex, and we
divulge how much we think about food Caroline and I,
which is a lot all the time. But even though
you and I are mild food obsessives, would you go
as far as to call yourself a foodie? I would not.
(01:11):
Um actually dated someone who was so pleasantly surprised that
I was open to eating stuff beyond hamburgers. I guess
that he called me a foodie, but I kind of
actually recoiled at the description which I think it's funny
because if you read articles about foodies, like it's very controversial,
people hate them, but then they're they're you know, they're
(01:33):
considered snobs, food snobs, and people actually recoil from the
foodie label the way that others recoil from the hipster
label or the indie rock label or stuff like that.
They're definitely gastronomical hipster's where a hipster in the same
way hipster never wants to self label as a hipster
because that would be on hip A foodie although I
(01:54):
don't know, I do know some foodies will say, I mean,
I'm a bit of a foodie. But let's not get
ahead of ourselves. Backing up with food culture, can we
just for a moment take in how like food food tainment,
food entertainment as just blown up. We have things like
(02:17):
food documentaries like Supersize Me, Food Inc. Special Food issues
of mainstream magazines are all over the place now, celebrity
chefs and food reality TV, entire networks devoted solely to food.
The fact that we have on those food networks specials
just about people making desserts, chocolate just chocolate, shows the
(02:41):
popularity of food titles there was at one point, Um,
I want to say Nigella's Nigela Lass and that's her name, right,
her book was out selling fifty Shades of Gray. Because
you know what, people can have sex, but we really
want food more than that. We want to look at
pictures of food all the time. And what would you
call those pictures of food nowadays? I would call it
(03:03):
food pornography. That's right, that is the term. And that's
a lot of what we're we will be talking about
today because you know, you mentioned the whole like food
culture that's arisen, and how we have all these shows
and networks and movies dedicated to it, the Food Network,
Like I can't even watch it because I just get
so hungry. It makes me so sad. But we're going
(03:26):
to get into the science of of why all of
that that food on that you're watching on the television
makes you hungry in your brain. But maybe we first
take a little a little etymological side trip into like
when we started using these terms like foodie and food
porn because the history is actually longer than I assumed
(03:52):
that it would be. Yeah, what is it? Well? Check
this out. Foodie shows up in the Oxford English Dictionary
for the first time in night teen eighty in reference
to salivating patrons of a Parisian restaurant, and it was
predated by the term foodist in the late nineteenth centuries.
That sounds like you're against certain foods foods um And
(04:18):
then gastro porn pops up in the New York Review
of Books in nineteen seventy seven in an article by
Andrew Cockburn that was talking about the sensuous language of
cooking instructions, whereas you know, if you open up the
Joy of Cooking, that is not a food porn recipe
at all. Yeah. I remember when I was a kid,
(04:38):
I really enjoyed being in the kitchen, and uh my
mom always cooked from the Joy of Cooking. She loved it.
But we had this Better Homes and Gardens cookbook from
probably the like sixties or seventies, and it had like
technicolor photographs of all these cakes and casseroles, and I
(04:58):
always wanted to cook from that when I thought the
recipes were inherently better than Joy of Cooking, which just
looked so boring. Call me, call me a foodist. But
then in ninety four, food porn is thought to have
been coined by Rosalind Coward in her book Female Desire
(05:18):
when she's talking about how you know, women are because
of patriarchal gender roles have to stay in the kitchen
and uh fulfill their sexual you know, respectations by through
cooking as well. Yeah, she said it's an active servitude. Yeah,
which I mean that could be a whole podcast on
(05:40):
its own cooking and gender and feminism and stuff. We
won't go there. And even beyond food porn, we still
keep coming up with more specific words to describe these
food cultures that are coming up, such as in two
thousand seven, local war was named the word of the
year by the New Oxford American Dictionary. We love to
(06:02):
talk about what we eat, how we eat. We take
Instagram pictures of you know, dumplings and seaweed salads. I'm
just not thinking of food. And speaking of Instagram, I
would say that the Internet and social media in particular
has fed the rise of foodie culture because think about
(06:24):
just going on to Pinterest. It is a smorgas board. Yes,
I'm getting in as many food punts as possible. It
is a smorgas board of food porn. It's like the
Playboy of food. Porn that Pinterest. Well, yeah, these food
pictures are very popular. This isn't a women's health article
from October. Lots of food sites just like you talked
(06:47):
about how you didn't want to cook from the joy
of cooking. You wanted to cook from better homes and
gardens with all the pictures in it side. Now, my
mother has about seven thousand of those books. She has
begged my father to stop giving them to her. Anyway.
They say that lots of food sites have diverged from
being recipe driven and instead feature these pand in shots
of glistening foods. You're talking about Instagram and stuff. Food
(07:10):
images are the fastest growing category on Pinterest, Flickers porn
Food porn group alone has nearly six hundred thousand images,
and marketing firm three sixty I found that pictures of desserts,
if you're curious, are the most likely to be shared online.
So I think it's interesting to ask what the heck
(07:31):
are all these food images doing to us? Well, I
think that maybe the logic goes that it's fine if
we're just looking especially for something like desserts, which we know,
you know, on the on the food pyramid. But I
guess the food pyramid is now. It's a relative, a
bygone era on the food plate, um, you know the
part for desserts. It's like, I don't even think desserts
(07:53):
on the new food plate because it's not good for
us obviously. So we can look, but we can't touch, right,
So that's so it's fine. We're just gonna stare at
all those cinnamon bones and it's not going to have
a negative effect on our eating habits, right, because we're
not actually eating it. Tell me that's right, Caroline, it's
not right. Well, for most of us, it's not right.
I know it's not right for me. Like I actively
(08:13):
have to avoid Food Network because I look at that
TV show or the whole network and I'm just like,
but I want all of it, and then I over
eat chips and it's just not satisfying, and so then
I seek out brownies and it's a cycle of depression.
That's why I'm going to start a cooking show called
the Kale Show. Yeah, okay, I'll see what inventive things
(08:34):
you can come up with with kale. Kale chips are incredible.
Don't get me started on kale. I'm serious. It is
a corner stone of my diet. Well that that Women's
Health article pointed out that these photos and shows and
you know, whatever you're looking at actually provoke real emotional
and physical hunger that can be tough to control. That's
coming from neuroscientists Laura Martin, and she also pointed out
(08:57):
that those who were overweight actually appear to be more
since it's of to the effect of viewing all of
that irresistible food on TV or in magazine, which might
go back to like brain chemistry that we've talked about
before UM in our podcast on hormones and obesity, and
there does need to be something that that will trip
wire that and it probably also has to do with
(09:18):
how food porn exploits humans innate quote unquote super normal stimuli,
which essentially means we are hardwired to want food, and
especially fatty food. So in a way that food porn
is really delicious to our brain, our brain mouth. Yes,
because back in the day, and we mentioned this in
(09:39):
Feast Part one, that back in the our our evolutionary
for fathers for humans UM, food was scarce, and so
we not only were hardware to seafood and want that food,
but also the food that would give us the most energy.
So unfortunately today it would be something like lasagna dripping
(10:00):
cheese and cheese. Cheese, cheese. That's all we want is cheese. Yeah.
There have actually been a lot of studies on this effect,
the effect of viewing food porn, basically in the journal
Journal and the Journal of Neuroscience back in April, they
found that viewing images of that delicious food lit up
our brains reward center and caused women with the most
(10:22):
active mental response to overeat. Similarly, in obesity, they found
that simply seeing food increases levels of grellin, which is
the hunger hormone, which is what Kristen was talking about.
But there is a bit of good news to all
of this food porn obsession, and that is if we
(10:42):
see the food porn and then we, you know, for
on Pinterest, say we click on that food porn and
land on the recipe and cook that recipe, unless, of course,
it is for something like a chocolate volcano deep fried
with bacon. Um. If we cook for ourselves and are
stimulated by a food porn to do that, then we
(11:03):
have we do have a better chance of eating better.
It's more like, don't stare. If you're eating looking at
a lot of food porn than eating a lot of
processed food or going out to eat, then you might
be in for it. Rebecca or chant Over at the
Huffington Post in October actually argues that this whole food
porn being damaging is baseless. She thinks it's crazy, and
(11:24):
this comes after a doctor As show where he talked
about the effects of viewing food images and the concerns,
the health issues things like that. But or Chian argues
that are well double argue here. She says, arguing that
food porn makes you fat as akin to arguing that
regular porn makes you a sex addict. It's not only incorrect,
(11:44):
it's pretty irresponsible. Yeah. I think that, um, some of
the fears around food porn, I mean, even the fact
we call it food porn um are overblown. But still though,
just going on to social media networks, onto logging on
to Facebook, getting on Instagram, Pinterest, and seeing how obsessively
(12:08):
people and especially young people to document what they are
eating at restaurants and what they are making at home,
because usually it will be something kind of impressive or
at least like that looks incredibly delicious. Like if it's
a sandwich, it's not going to be a peanut butter
and jelly sandwich is gonna be like, you know, whatever
goes into an incredible stand something multi layered, maybe with sprouse,
(12:31):
something involving. But it seems to be some kind of
new marker for how like food cultured. You are. Oh look,
oh this this image. Oh this is of this little
Vietnamese place, like you've probably never heard of it. Yeah,
(12:51):
it's a strange Like I do think there's an argument
to be made of how food is a new sort
of cultural status symbol. Yeah, there is the argument that
food is replacing art. Well, I mean they've been all
the arguments. Food is the new sex, food is the
new art, food is the new indie rock music, all
of these things, but the food replacing art argument gets
(13:18):
gets a lot of play over at New York Times.
This is William Derris Siewitz, who in October wrote an
impassioned opinion piece about food and art. He basically says
that we are in danger, this is a quote. We
are in danger of confusing our palates with our souls. Kristen,
oh dear, Yeah, because food. He says food is not art. People.
(13:42):
We start both start by addressing the senses. So good food,
good art. You're addressing the senses. But food doesn't express emotion.
It doesn't give you insight into other people. It doesn't
help you see the world in a new way or
force you to take an inventory of your soul. Yeah,
he was on to say that we are now reading
the Gospel according to and not Joyce or Proost, but
(14:04):
to Michael Pollen and Alice Waters. Uh, and like totally
understand what he says, but it's like these these broad
brush claims that food is replacing everything. Food is the
new sex. Like you said food, food is the new art.
But food is simply I feel like a lot of
this foodie culture is coming out of like the accessibility
(14:28):
of food, and not just any old food, but good
food to where there's so much available that, Yes, it
is a marker of taste if you can sift through
that and find and choose the quote unquote better stuff. Obviously,
like art, different people have different tastes. And there's also
(14:50):
the thing of you know, accessibility of you know, can
you go out and afford to eat at Alice Waters
restaurant or can you go out and afford to buy
a Jackson Pollock, in which case like, yes, I would
realized those tabs would be much larger, but still, well, yeah,
I mean you can go to access really not only
excellent but unusual food. Doesn't mean you have to go
(15:13):
to a fancy restaurant. You can be a foodie and
do all of your shopping, cooking and eating from the
farmer's market. Well, and I feel like that's part of
it too, Like that's part of the foodie culture is
sort of in the same way of uh I would
I think maybe asking is food the new like hipster
dam is even even more accurate because it's there's that
(15:35):
pleasure in finding the low brow and the stuff like
you don't have to go like mainstreamed fun like amazing food,
like you can just go to like a food truck,
like your hipster boys, your foodie hipster boys. Um. Well.
One of those foodie articles that got people talking about no,
(15:56):
this is great that young people are exposed to good food,
or these people are ridiculous was a New York Magazine
article in March where the writer points out that it
really is kind of a generational thing. He says that
a food itself has become a defining obsession among a
lot of young people. It's now viewed, he says, as
a legitimate option for a hobby, a topic of endless discussion,
(16:20):
a playground for one upmanship, a measuring stick of cool.
Yeah he uh. The New York Magazine writer follows around
Diane Chang, who is a New York foodie. She she
doesn't do anything food related for her day job, but
it's funny because she is one of the ones where
she like the hipster label. She doesn't want to call
(16:43):
herself a foodie, but she does have a food blog
and her Instagram is all food and she throws food parties.
And he asked her to track everything that she ate
for one week, and she spent three fifty dollars alone
just on food. And I looked at all the photos
of everything she ate and it was an incredible spread,
(17:04):
which kind of made me, you know, look at my
bowl of kale and wonder how I could jazz it
up with some quail legs or something. Well, yeah, I
mean it is. It is kind of not intimidating, but God,
it's like, how do you have the time, Like I
don't even have time almost to go to the regular
grocery store, let alone the fancy farmer's market and cook
(17:25):
all this stuff well. And while all of this, like
foodie culture is going on and how it has become
this new mark of being cultured, especially among I do
think it is something that is very much among our generation.
I'll be curious to here from older listeners too. But
Nina Burley over at l A Times also notes how
(17:47):
this this food obsession is kind of ironic and really
sad considering the fact that a lot of Americans really
can't even afford a decent meal. You know that we're
talking ab out foodie and food ism from the high
level when yeah, it's true, like the average person is
not feeding themselves very well at all. She pointed out
(18:10):
that are are weird foodie, food porn, food network, top
chef obsession kind of coincided with the economy tanking, and
so there's more to think about as far as food
goes than just how it looks on a plate on
Top Chef. Yeah, so what do you what do you
think though, Caroline, Like, considering this new foodie culture that
(18:34):
has it's not necessarily the foodies are not new, obviously,
but it's simply more accessible and for some reason, generationally
it seems like we are a lot more into food
than we used to be. But do you think that
drawing a parallel between that and saying that food is
(18:54):
now like the new whatever, the new art is valid. Well,
I don't know if I would blow it up to
that stature. I think that websites like yelp to just
to name one, have almost made eating out at fine
restaurants or fancy restaurants or just a hole in the
(19:14):
wall that no one's ever heard of. It's made it
almost a competition to see who can eat the coolest
food and write the best review about it and have
the most check ins at a place. So there there
are a lot of social issues around food, and it
does seem to be a young person's pursuit as opposed
to years ago where maybe it was just stuffy, older
(19:37):
white city folk who were like you know, going to
find dining restaurants and things like that. Yeah, maybe a
lot of it too is obviously there's there's access to food, um,
but also the in our personal lives just it's a
byproduct of social media and how we want to over
expose pretty much every part of our lives. It's part
(20:01):
of the construct now that this like public of the
public persona that we are online. I actually don't post
any food photos online well because most of them would
be like, here's my Campbell's tomato soup again. But yeah,
I don't know. I'm not really interested in people's food photos,
to be honest. I think I'm just gonna start posting
like really like sad food, like uncooked yam, like a
(20:25):
yam that you've done nothing with. That's a sad looking food.
So get ready to Carol, look at this half eaten
box of quinoa that you haven't touched in three months,
hashtags sad food. But I do want to open it
up to listeners out there, because I'm sure we've done
We did an episode a long time ago on gender
differences among chefs, and I know we have a lot
(20:49):
of cooks and chefs and foodies, whether you want to
call yourself a food or not, who do listen to
the podcast. So I will be curious to hear from
folks like do you think do you feel like food
culture has become overblown? Just in general? Has it replaced
in a in a way art because it is so
accessible and do you feel competitive about your eating? Be honest,
(21:14):
we can. We can read your letters anonymously if necessary.
And speaking of letters, if you want to write into us,
our email addresses Mom Stuff at Discovery dot com, and
of course you can always start a conversation over on
Facebook as well. And we've got a couple of letters
to read to close out this episode POT two on Feast.
(21:34):
But before we get to that, we've got a quick
word from our sponsor, the brought us this episode of
Stuff Mom Never Told You. Yeah, here's a letter from
Chris on our pregnancy uh sex episode subject line pregnant
ladies equal sexy. WHOA, Yeah, I just listened to your
podcast on pregnancy sex and I must agree that pregnant
(21:56):
ladies are uber sexy. I always thought they were attractive
and had that glow, but it wasn't until my wife
and I were thinking about trying for a baby that
I realized how attracted to them I am. During the
entire nine months of her pregnancy, I couldn't get enough. However,
that bill curve you spoke of did not apply to
her at all. Don't get me wrong. There was sexy time,
(22:17):
but her appetite was not nearly as voracious as I
was led to believe by other sources. This kind of
surprised me, seeing as how she had a pretty easy pregnancy,
no morning sickness, back pain, et cetera until the very
end when she had high blood pressure. So to sum up,
Prego equal Sexy and Bell curves Lie. Thanks for the podcast,
and thank you Chris Well. I got one here from
(22:40):
Rameiro and this is in response to our episode on
child caregivers, and he writes, I listened to your podcast
on child caregivers. Thank you for doing so. I myself
as a child caregiver throughout my high school and beginning
of college years. Like many families, I came from a
single parent home, just my mother and I and she
didn't speak English. My mother was diagnosed with cancer while
(23:01):
I was in the tenth grade. I didn't even have
a driver's license, but I had to take her to
all her chemotherapy appointments and surgeries and interpret for her.
Since there was no one else who could do that.
I broke a lot of laws and everything I could
to make sure that she got the medical attention she needed.
So much so that I would fill out all of
her paperwork and knew exactly what medications she was on
and what she was allergic to before the doctors would
(23:23):
even ask her. I would fill out all the paperwork
and even signed for us since her English was very limited.
I don't want people to feel sorry for me, since
I think I'm doing very well for myself. But I'm
writing you because at that age I didn't have a voice.
That is why I really appreciated your podcast. In my
younger years, I was a voice of my mother who
was sick, and I don't regret doing it, but to
be honest, and maybe it was a cultural thing, I
(23:45):
never heard my mother thank me for all that I
did for I was just expected to take care of her.
Now that I'm an adult, I try not to relive
those years, But if my mother were alive today, all
I would want is the acknowledgment or recognition a voice
of the sacrifices that I and many other children do
awaiting the inevitable death of your loved one. Before your podcast,
I really didn't know the numbers nor any statistics regarding
this matter. So thank you for your podcast, which is
(24:07):
a great platform to give people like me some recognition
that we exist. And that letter just warmed my heart.
So thank you Ramiro, and to Chris and to everyone
who has written into us moms Stuff at Discovery dot com,
and if you're listening to this when it is coming out,
I hope that everyone is having a wonderful and safe
holiday season. Let us know what you're doing during your
(24:30):
holidays by hitting us up on Facebook, tweeting us at
mom Stuff Podcasts, and you can also follow us if
you want to check out what we're up to on
Tumbler at stuff Mo'm Never told you dot tumbler dot com.
And if you want to learn a lot about food
and the science of food and even recipes as well,
you can head over to our website, It's how stuff
(24:51):
works dot com for more on this and thousands of
other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com? About me,
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