Whether in a restaurant, a market, or a traditional eatery, the place hardly matters: we've normalized seeing people photograph their food before tasting it. Where does this seemingly “new” obsession with capturing our meals come from?
Table etiquette has evolved to tolerate people willing to climb onto a chair to capture a table with symmetrically arranged dishes, tableware with an interesting touch, and food presented in ways that fall into two categories: first, those dishes so sophisticated in their arrangement of ingredients that, more than a salad with dressing, sometimes seem like a parody of a Pollock painting. In the other category are those foods where most ingredients are still recognizable, not transformed into components of a work of art, yet are photographed in such a way that it’s impossible for our taste buds not to react intensely when we see, for example, a cut of meat with juices still bubbling from cooking, a sauce whose lighting makes it appear perfectly thick, or a fruit at the ideal stage of ripeness, revealed by the vivid color of its flesh. On social media, these photos are popularly tagged as food porn.
One might think these practices were born from popular social networks, but interestingly, the attempt to capture the fleeting moment of a dish before it is devoured dates back many centuries. An art historian specializing in food portraits could tell us about the use of this practice in civilizations as ancient as Egypt, where codices depict lettuces as symbols of fertility, or in ancient China, where paintings of peaches represented immortality. Let’s not forget the famous still lifes—those representations of food alongside everyday objects like bottles, glasses, vases, etc. Dutch artists in the 1600s added oysters to their still lifes as symbols of sexual potency. In the nineteenth century, the dominant medical paradigm was the theory of humors. Thus, the balance between wet, dry, cold, and hot also reached the art world, where artists took care to include foods representing these four states. The subject of food portraiture is complex: it’s not just about food, but about the symbolism behind what was eaten at the time and its social meanings. Academics agree on a common trait: more than representing an everyday dish, the foods depicted are a way of portraying aspirational eating. Does this sound familiar in relation to food porn?
Capturing dishes is not a new practice, but it has become widespread. Today, not everyone has a canvas or the skills to paint, but we all have a camera to capture that moment, which symbolizes more than just food. No one proudly shares photos of frozen meals. If someone photographs a dish that fails aesthetically, it’s usually to humorously point out the flaw. The food we photograph is not just food: it represents where we were, with whom we shared, the social status we wish to have or appear to have, and the lifestyle we want to reflect (from a foodie to a health-obsessed gym-goer, or a cooking enthusiast). Food porn and the food photos we share on social networks simply reflect a maxim that has always existed in the history of the relationship between food and humans: we are what we eat.
@Lillie_ML
Originally published in El Economista
#stilllifes #foodporn #art #food #finearts
— This article was originally published in Spanish by Liliana Martínez Lomelí. Translation generated with AI from the original text.