Conforming to Ideas About Fast Food: Food Porn

In American society, apples are not the forbidden fruit – Philly cheese steaks are. We idolize Heidi Klum, Channing Tatum, and Tyra Banks, with their slender, muscular physiques, but we’re trapped in a culture that loves Big Macs and Quarter Pounders. We glorify women who are five sizes too small, while most of the food we have access to will make us ten sizes too big. This contradiction has transformed food from a practical, basic need to something that people lust after and feel guilty over. It’s a phenomenon we call food pornography.

Food, especially any that comes out of a fast food joint, is seen as a temptation: something that is naughty or seductive, that  feels so wrong yet tastes so right. As Jean Kilbourne, author and filmmaker, notes in her film Killing Us Softly 4, many phrases that were first used to address sexual behaviors and characteristics have now come to describe food.

People are captivated by McDonald’s commercials and lust after fries and pizza – but they feel ashamed once they’ve indulged, embarrassed if someone knew. Food marketers have taken note of the now-scandalous relationship between consumers and the consumed. And in an effort to entice viewers to buy their products, food slogans have taken a bow to sexual innuendo: Oreo’s new advertisement reads “the most seductive cookie ever,” while Kraft Macaroni and Cheese asks viewers, “How bad do you want it?”  Marketers of unhealthy foods are most prone to leveraging food porn, since these are the foods that people are expected, either by themselves or society, to avoid.

Food porn has evolved not because we hate healthy food, but because we want to measure up to the standard that the media puts forth as acceptable. Thus, we have come to treat food as a desirable little secret. Our strong desire for unhealthy foods stems from the perception that we must swear off certain foods in order to maintain the physical standards of skinniness that American culture demands.

But skinny does not always mean healthy. Food porn makes naked the ways we have limited ourselves by conforming to the ideals of society. Many of us are just fine the way we are – and we don’t need to resist the temptation of food to prove it.