SMNTY Classics: Is foodie culture the new art?

Is food porn unhealthy? Do foodies represent a cultural era of feast or famine?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, this is Annie and you're listening to Stuff I've
Never told you. As some of you listeners know, when
I'm not doing this this podcast, you can hear me
over on my other podcast, which is called Savor and

(00:28):
it's all about the history, science, and culture of food
and drink. Recently, we travel to New Orleans, and our
mini series about our experience there has been coming out
over the past couple of weeks. We just did an
episode on food access and food justice and it's a
conversation that involves a lot of the stuff we talked
about here on this show. But this whole topic of
food as art um is something I've been thinking about

(00:51):
a lot lately, Instagrammable food and how that's kind of
become a thing. A way to stand out with freak
shakes are the bloody mares with grilled cheese and steak
on top. In this classic episode, let's look at the
question of foodie culture, art and all the stuff that
revolves around that. Enjoy. Welcome to Stuff Mom Never Told

(01:16):
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. Who we're
talking about food and food culture, because tis the season
to gorge yourself on whatever you want. There are always

(01:38):
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. But in

(02:00):
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 Carolina 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. Um

(02:23):
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

(02:44):
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

(03:06):
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

(03:28):
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

(03:52):
popularity of food titles. There was at one point, um,
I want to say, Nigella's Nigella Lawson, that's her name.
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

(04:14):
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.

(04:34):
It makes me so sad. But we're going 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

(04:55):
started using these terms like foodie and food porn because
the history is actually longer than I assumed 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 nineteen eighty in reference to salivating patrons
of a Parisian restaurant, and it was predated by the

(05:19):
term foodist in the late nineteenth centuries. That sounds like
you're against certain foods. Food um. And 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

(05:41):
you know, if you open up the Joy of cooking,
that is not a food porn recipe, that's all. Yeah.
I remember when I was a kid, 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

(06:01):
like sixties or seventies, and it had like technicolor photographs
of all these cakes and casseroles, and I always wanted
to cook from that one. 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 nine four,

(06:23):
food porn is thought to have been coined by Rosslyn
Coward in her book Female Desire, 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, expectations by through cooking as well. Yeah,

(06:47):
she said it's an active servitude. Yeah, which I mean
that could be a whole podcast on 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

(07:07):
war was named the word of the year by the
New Oxford American Dictionary. We love to talk about what
we eat, how we eat. We take Instagram pictures of
you know, dumplings and seaweed salads. I'm just now thinking
of food and speaking of Instagram, I would say that

(07:28):
the Internet and social media in particular has fed the
rise of foodie culture because think about just going onto Pinterest.
It is a smorgas board. Yes, I'm getting in as
many food punts as possible. It's a smorgas board of
food porn. It's like the Playboy of food porn. That Pinterest. Well, yeah,

(07:51):
these food pictures are very popular. This isn't a women's
health article from October. Lots of food sides. Just like
you talked 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 note,
my mother has about seven thousand of those books. She
has begged my father to stop giving them to her anyway.

(08:11):
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
images are the fastest growing category on Pinterest, Flickers porn
Food Porn Group alone has nearly six hundred thousand images,

(08:32):
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
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,

(08:53):
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
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

(09:14):
all those cinnamon buns 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
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 overeat
chips and it's just not satisfying, and so then I

(09:35):
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 you
can come up with with kale. Kale chips are incredible.
Don't get me started on kale. I'm serious. It is
a cornerstone of my diet. Well that that Women's Health
article pointed out that these photos and shows and you know,

(09:57):
whatever you're looking at actually provoke feel emotional and physical hunger.
That can be tough. To control. That's coming from neuroscientists
Laura Martin, and she also pointed out that those who
were overweight actually appear to be more sensitive to the
effect of viewing all of that irresistible food on TV
or in magazines, which might go back to like brain

(10:18):
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 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

(10:42):
in a way that food porn is is really delicious
to our brain, our brain mouth. Yes, because back in
the day, and we mentioned this in Feast Part one
that back in the our our evolutionary for fathers for
humans UM, food was scarce and so we not only

(11:02):
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 with
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 in the Journal of Neuroscience back in April,

(11:26):
they found that viewing images of that delicious food lit
up our brains reward center and caused women with the
most 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

(11:48):
of this food porn obsession, and that is if we
see the food porn and then we you know, we're
on Pinterest day, 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

(12:11):
stimulated by a food porn to do that, then we
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's post in October actually argues that this whole food
porn being damaging is baseless. She thinks it's crazy, and

(12:35):
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 is akin to arguing that
regular porn makes you a sex addict. It's not only incorrect,

(12:56):
it's pretty irresponsible. Yeah. I think that, um, some the
fears around food porn, I mean, even the fact that
we call it food porn um are overblown. But still though,
just going onto social media networks, onto logging on to Facebook,
getting on Instagram, Pinterest, and seeing how obsessively people and

(13:20):
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 something

(13:42):
involving but it seems to be some kind of new
mark or for how like food cultured you are, Oh look,

(14:04):
oh this this image, Oh this is of this little
Vietnamese place, like you've probably never heard of it. You
wouldn't have heard of it. Yeah, 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,

(14:26):
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 gets a lot of play
over at New York Times. This is William Derris sie Witz,
who in October wrote an impassioned opinion piece about food

(14:50):
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. 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

(15:11):
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
He goes on to say that we are now reading
the Gospel according to not Joyce or Proost, but to
Michael Pollen and Alice Waters. Uh, and like totally understand

(15:32):
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 of food,
and not just any old food, but good food to

(15:53):
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
our different people have different tastes. And there's also the
thing of you know, accessibility of you know, can you

(16:14):
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 realize
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

(16:34):
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 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

(16:56):
pleasure in finding the low brow and stuff like you
don't have to go like mainstream to find like amazing food,
Like you can just go to like a food truck,
like your hipster voice, your foodie hipster boys. Um. Well.
One of those foodie articles that got people talking about, no,

(17:18):
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
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,

(17:41):
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. She
like the hipster label. She doesn't want to call herself

(18:05):
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,

(18:26):
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

(18:46):
all this stuff well and while all of this like
foodie culture is going on, and how it has become uh,
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

(19:08):
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 about foodie and foodism from the high level when yeah,
it's true, like the average person is not feeding themselves

(19:30):
very well at all. She pointed out 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,

(19:51):
considering this new foodie culture that has it's not necessarily
the foodies are not new, obviously, but is 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

(20:14):
and saying that food is 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

(20:35):
or just a hole in the 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

(20:57):
maybe it was just stuffy, older 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 the access to food, um, but
also the in our personal lives. Just it's a byproduct
of social media and how we want to overexpose pretty

(21:18):
much every part of our lives. It's part 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 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.

(21:40):
I think I'm just gonna start posting like really like
sad food photos, like uncooked yam, like a yam that
you've done nothing with. That's a sad looking food. So
get ready to Caroline, 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

(22:01):
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 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

(22:22):
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, 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

(22:44):
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,
But before we get to that, we've got a quick
word from our sponsor that brought us this episode of
stuff I'm Never told you. Yeah, here's a letter from

(23:16):
Chris on our pregnancy uh sex episode subject line pregnant
ladies equal sexy. Yeah. I just listened to your podcast
on pregnancy sex, and I must agree that pregnant 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

(23:40):
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,
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 and et cetera until the very

(24:01):
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
Romero 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

(24:23):
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
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.

(24:43):
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
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

(25:05):
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
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

(25:26):
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
a great platform to give people like me some recognition
that we exist. And that letter just warmed my heart.

(25:46):
So thank you, Ramiro, and to Chris and to everyone
who has written into us. Mom's stuff at Discovery dot com.
And if you're listening to this one, it is coming out.
I hope that everyone is having a wonderful and safe
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(26:08):
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(26:29):
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