Samiul Bashar Samin
In the past 15 years, the number of people searching for ‘delicious’ things has tripled, according to Google. It’s everywhere: from conformist public radio stations to the hippest of mass-media outlets, delicious has become the sine qua non of food.
It wasn’t always this way. Julia Child would rarely even taste the souffle she had just made on her cookery show The French Chef (1963-73). But as such shows transformed into food porn in the 1990s, their conventions solidified: the ingredients pre-selected for idealised visual presentation, pre-measured and pre-prepped (there is no foreplay); the sizzling pan becoming more and more agitated; the guttural near-groan: Oh…Mmn… it smells so good.
Now, like all good porn, cookery shows need to end with the moment of bliss, the resolution of the tension built up during cooking: the lifting of the fork, the bite, the swallow, the taste… the reaction of ultimate pleasure – aka the Food Orgasm.
That orgasm did not always have to be delicious. Objective descriptions of what something tasted like, yes. And, certainly, subjective expression of the pleasure of the thing. But delicious, which sounds exactly like all the terrible words used to describe ejaculate, no.
For old-school foodies, the appropriation, popularisation and deintellectualisation of, like, their thing is the equivalent of the moment in the 1990s when frat boys started wearing Nirvana T shirts: the day when the cooking-show subculture went mainstream. What is an elitist food lover to do when Instagram has more than $8 millionposts about #foodporn?
Watching cooking makes us hungry, just as watching porn can make us horny – but in the mechanised, thoughtless way that isn’t about anything but the animal pleasure of the thing. Which means it isn’t actually about the real magic of the thing at all. Delicious, like its counterpart – the close-up of the cheap, squelching orgasm – cheapens the act itself. It is specifically one-dimensional – the equivalent of the rote facial in porn – and so the language suffers ‘shrinkage’: entire spectrums of flavour, taste and experience are gone. It’s all just delicious. That cheapens the transformation of raw food into the fantastic and, therefore, it cheapens us to the pornographic – the machine: all action, no soul.