It starts with a euphoric lick of the finger and a longing gaze into the camera. With a sultry smile, the woman on screen says, “Now that's good enough to take to bed.”

This, of course, is food television star Nigella Lawson speaking about her special chocolate fudge cake, but to the audience it feels like a lot more than just cake. The allusion to the bedroom combined with her sly grin and parted lips are meant to arouse our interest in food, connecting it to sex. But the naughty Nigella moment lingered with me, arousing questions about the phenomenon known in our popular culture as food porn.

Searching online for “food porn”, a multiplicity of observations, definitions, and explanations arise. Some depict food porn as best represented by such product-pimping celebrity cooks as Nigella, Rachael Ray, Emeril Lagasse, Giada De Laurentiis and even the once and future queen of food etiquette, Martha Stewart. Each employs various techniques to connect with food, and in turn with us. In Martha's case, food is shrouded in Puritanism and class—she tells us what is right and what is wrong, all while tempting us with what we can never have. Sexual pornography does the same (even sometimes playing with Puritanism), depicting bodies altered and stylized and contorted into sexual positions in ways that no viewer can replicate. Similarly, Giada, Rachael, and Emeril play with our desire to be master chefs, cooking with such prowess as to excite and satisfy our friends and family. (How many of us have twenty-thousand-dollar kitchens and never cook?) Nigella, as noted, is more explicit, coyly inviting us into her sensual kitchen and a sexualized world where food is foreplay.

If celebrity-centric stuff is the soft-core of food porn, then Extreme Food is more hard-core—the equivalent of the leather, whips, and S&M fetish scene. Here you can find pizza topped with deep-fried corn dogs, and Krispy Kreme hamburgers (called the “Luther” named after the late R&B signer Luther Vandross) that use donuts as buns. These foods are a reaction to the overabundance of health advice and diet regimens that dominate our food consciousness. Such sites as thisiswhyyourefat.com   showcase foods that are extreme in both combination of ingredients as well as the amount of fat content they contain.  

In contrast to this gastronomically brutal scene is the aesthetic perfection of food in the commercial media. This type of food porn is the most subtle, pervasive, and perhaps influential. It includes textual and photographic representation of food ranging from perfectly trimmed and coiffed chickens to gooey, exploding molten chocolate cakes. This type of imagery is splayed across the covers of food magazines like Donna Hay, Bon Appetit, and Gourmet, and employed in print and television advertisements to lure you into the local Outback Steakhouse. A memorable ad campaign from Marks and Spencer in the U.K. entices its viewers by using extreme close-ups of steamy, saucy foods punctuated by a female voice-over that is utterly sexualized. Like other f ood porn it mirrors sexual pornography, basing its appeal on a studio-perfected image that would be virtually impossible to recreate or even enjoy in reality. As in the world where fake breasts and collagen injections abound, food porn uses brown lacquer and blowtorches to give a roast chicken that perfectly tawny tone. Need a nice ooze of chocolate from the center of your gooey cake? Try some tasty liquid latex instead.

From Nigella to Marks and Spencer, all types of food porn play off the brain in our gut—the autonomic nervous system from which we derive our base pleasures. Frederick Kaufman, in his article Debbie Does Salad: The Food Network at the Frontiers of Pornography, has called this “the brain of the wow.” Like sexual pornography, food porn takes what is ordinary, natural, and even at times mundane, and makes it exciting, desirable, and unattainable. The question is, does it matter if Nigella wants to have carnal relations with a baked good or that there are sites dedicated to glamorizing the eating of coronary-inducing extreme foods? Maybe even the perfectly primped, airbrushed Marks and Spencer poultry has a place in our lives. But there is danger in creating a hyper-real world of the wow where every morsel is orgasmic, and in creating a perception of food that is more about spectacle and fetishization. If we turn on our backs on what real food looks like, we risk distancing ourselves from the daily, personal, and intimate part of where our food comes from and its importance in our lives.

— Matthew Runeare