I was tipped off to
this article [warning long, but worthwhile] from
this article by a local food reviewer in the SF Bay Guardian.
Both are great pieces about how "entertainment, rather than news and consumer education" has affected critical journalism in the "food writing" field in the past 10 years. O'Neill describes the shift as "Food porn – prose and recipes so removed from real life that they cannot be used except as vicarious experience – has reigned."
Reidinger comments: "[I]t is revealing as to the nature of the culture we have built around ourselves – a culture that moves too fast for human comfort, a culture in which machines are tyrants not servants, a culture that does not question its ethos of more, bigger, better, faster and so cannot understand why its constituents have become unhappy and prone to porny woolgathering."
After reading the two pieces I thought about how much internet dailies, blogs, alt-weeklies, even ILX plays in this "porny woolgathering". I think one of my first 5 posts to ILM was on some "What type of hi-fi equipment do you own" thread and after reading several posts trying to out-do each other with thousands upon thousands of dollars/pounds of equipment, I posted "I have a large penis"... yes, all-at-once cheap, immature, low-brow, sub-custos-ian at worst... yet never had I felt such intense "music porn" in my readings on or off-line.
Anyways, I enjoyed the 2 articles and I hope you get some time to check them out!
― gygax! (gygax!), Sunday, 16 November 2003 21:21 (twenty-two years ago)
"When O'Neill tells us people buy professional-grade ranges in the hope that they might one day use them, she is plopping herself down right into that Boston Market television ad in which the yuppie matriarch calls out "dinner's ready!" while setting the big bag of takeout on the pristine -- clearly never used – $4,500 Viking range."
― gygax! (gygax!), Sunday, 16 November 2003 21:24 (twenty-two years ago)
"...[M]y mother interrupted one woman's compliments and asked: "Do you actually cook that stuff?"
"Of course not," replied the customer, who looked like my mother, tall, lean, with a white cap of stylishly coiffed hair. "Every week I cut them out of the magazine and promise myself I will cook them. Don't we all?"
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...I'm thinking here of unlistened to records sitting in a pile (i was guilty of this at one point in my life).
― gygax! (gygax!), Sunday, 16 November 2003 21:25 (twenty-two years ago)
recipes are just suggestions.
excpet when baking, no one follows them to the letter anyway...
*munch munch*
my food porn of choice is visual, glossy, photographic, of ingredients in the raw.
― Orbit (Orbit), Monday, 17 November 2003 01:23 (twenty-two years ago)