Claire Lower mulls over the links between “food pornography” and the real thing:
Food porn, like pornography, is all about visual stimulation. Food is posed,painted, injected with fillers (chicken legs are made plumper with mashed potatoes), and masterfully lit for maximum appeal. Sometimes, the food you think you are seeing is something else entirely. For illustration, we need look only to the radical differences between promotional photos and the real thing when it comes to fast food. Like a 15-year-old boy whose only view of naked women has been online, we may be less aware of the artifice and may become distraught when real-life food doesn’t live up to the fantasy of food porn.
This was apparent when Martha Stewart – whose magazine is quite well known for its air of effortless perfection – shared some photos of some fancy food she was enjoying. The photos appeared to be taken on a camera phone in very poorly lit places and the results were – to put in mildly – not very attractive. The subsequent uproar was intense, and maybe a little undeserved. Though some of the photos were truly terrible, anyone who has ever Instagrammed a meal could see that this was a case of terrible restaurant lighting plus camera phone flash, two things which one is taught to avoid in Food Photography 101. Though no one should be surprised to find that Martha herself does not take the photos for her magazine and website, people were quite surprised to find that the reality of what Martha eats to be so far removed from the exaggerated representation of what Martha eats that we are so used to seeing in her cookbooks.
The Dish 