Food Porn Has Taken Over the Internet and We’re Not Complaining

Sally’s Baking Addiction. “Black Forest Cake”. 2018. jpeg file. 

My Instagram feed is a dangerous place for someone on a strict diet (but who needs those anyway?). It’s full of food porn- vivid, close-up pictures of mouth-watering, delicious food. Pictures of an oozing stack of golden, grilled cheese sandwiches. Or a colorful, glistening chopped salad full of tomatoes, feta cheese, and avocado. Hungry yet? This is where I usually go to find my next cooking project, or to simply bask in the beauty of good food.

I’m one of the millions of people worldwide who have become massive food porn fans. While the term “food porn” may sound a bit racy at first, it’s actually the name for one of the biggest cultural trends of today. Food porn refers to visual media such as pictures or videos, that showcase food in an extremely appetizing manner. Amanda Simpson, the creator of the wildly popular website “Food Porn Daily”, describes it perfectly in an interview with The Daily Meal. “It’s what makes me drool. If at the end of the day I look at a photo and I drool, then it’s food porn.”

Food Porn is Viral

In recent years, food porn has taken over social media. On Instagram, the hashtag “#FoodPorn” has 253 million posts, an amount nearly equal to the entire population of the United States! In England, 1 in 5 British people have shared a food picture on social media in the past month. Additionally, the colorful food trend called “unicorn food” also first began on Instagram. These pictures of bright, pastel-colored foods became so popular that the coffee giant, Starbucks, created a “Unicorn Frappuccino”. Thus food porn trends end up transforming the way that people eat. 

Social Chain, an award-winning media publisher, released a data-based report in 2017 called “The Flavor of Social”. It examined food on social media. The report found that consumers of food content are five times more likely to use recipes they found on digital media than on TV. 

Similarly on Pinterest, food images are the fastest-growing category on the entire platform and get 50%  more engagement than fashion or style pictures. Flickr, the image and video hosting site, on the other hand, has its own Food Porn Group, with over 600,000 drool-inducing pictures. Just like Pinterest, food porn is the most engaged-with category on Flickr.    

Changing the Way We Shop

Food porn on social media is changing the way people shop, too. Waitrose, a brand of British supermarkets, issued an eye-opening report in 2017. According to it, a third of supermarket shoppers aged 18-34 are regularly posting pictures of their meals on social media. Waitrose’s managing director, Rob Collins, explained that the posting of pictures of meals online shows that food today has become a form of self-expression. It is now similar to “the clothes people wear, the cars they drive and the music they listen to. Food is today’s hottest social currency, ” he said in an interview with The Grocer.

This same Waitrose report showed that half of today’s consumers grocery shop two or three times a week. Such a frequency is a big change from shopping once a week, a norm 20 years ago. I’m definitely part of this trend. I cruise Instagram to find something that makes me drool. Then I head to the grocery store, on a mission to make my beautiful meal. I do a few of these small, meal-specific shopping trips a week. As a result, I actually waste less food, since I’m not buying anything that I don’t plan to cook. 

Because of COVID-19, food porn is inspiring people to cook now more than ever. Esmee Williams, the brand strategy Vice President of Allrecipes.com, said that the website’s traffic now has record-breaking traffic numbers. Allrecipes features beautiful pictures of food, along with the recipes to make them. It’s no surprise then, that in April it received over 60 million views.  

Psychology of Food Porn

Why does food porn enamor us so much? To find out, we have to look back at our original relationship with food, before social media and the modern world. Vivid images of food tap into a primitive part of our brain. This is from a time in our evolution when we were hunting and gathering. Food was hard to come by then. That food scarcity has trained our brains to seek out food that has the most reward for our effort. This alludes to more fat. For example, a glistening chocolate cake, or a rich, juicy steak sends a signal to our brain that it is full of fat. This lights up the reward center in our brain like a Christmas tree, giving us pleasure and the motivation to get that food.    

Over time, this psychological concept has undergone many revisions. For instance, in the mid 1900s, a Dutch biologist named Nikolaas Tinbergen made an interesting discovery. He found that multiple species of animals preferred flashier, brighter versions of their natural habitat. Using dummy fish, he observed that some species of fish would attack dummy fish with much brighter colored stomachs. He also found that mother birds would give food to dummy chicks with brightly-colored beaks, instead of their real chicks. They would even ignore their own eggs, and instead choose to sit on bigger, colorful dummy eggs. The biologist called these flashy-looking dummies “supernormal stimuli”. Food porn functions in the same way. Even though it’s just a picture and not real food, we’re more attracted to it. 

Food in Motion

Another interesting psychological trend was discovered by Charles Spence, an Oxford University professor. He found that showing food, specifically energy-rich foods, in motion gets a stronger reaction from a viewer. This is because it implies freshness. It also helps the viewer imagine themselves eating that food. Motion can even be implied in a still picture. This is more proof of how our brains have evolved to seek out high-energy, high-reward food.  

Brian Wansink, a food researcher at Cornell University, studied “protein in motion” with his colleagues. He had test subjects rate the appeal of two pictures of orange juice. One showed orange juice being poured into a glass. In the other picture, there was a static glass of orange juice. Guess which one was rated higher? You guessed it, the picture of orange juice being poured had much higher appeal. It just looks tastier! 

The Science Behind Food Porn

Let’s take a look at what’s actually going on inside our brains when we look at food porn. In 2004, scientists used brain-imaging to capture their subjects’ brain activity when looking at and smelling food. When we’re not exposed to food, our brain uses a whopping 25% of our body’s total energy. In this study, the subjects had not eaten in 20 hours. The scientists found that when looking at food, the subjects’ neuro-metabolism increased by 24%. That’s double the brain’s energy consumption! Their brains were activated by the food images, directing them to eat. 

Looking at food images has even been found to cause the body to prepare for digestion. The body will release the juices needed to break down the food that it is anticipating. One study observed a group of healthy young men as they were shown pictures of food and non-edible objects. During this process, researchers measured the levels of hormones in the blood that help regulate the eating process- ghrelin, leptin, and insulin. Ghrelin is the hormone that increases your appetite and makes you want to eat. Researchers found that when the young men specifically saw the pictures of food, their ghrelin levels increased. So what does this prove? Looking at pictures of tasty food really does make us hungry! 

The Bad 

However, there can be a dark side to food porn too. A Belgian study found that women looking at pictures of delicious-looking chocolate were more likely to overeat later on than women who had a real plate of chocolate placed in front of them. The power of food imagery on our hunger is definitely strong. 

There are also a lot of pictures of unhealthy food out there. It can encourage people to eat higher amounts of fat, sugar, and processed foods. 

The Good

Having said that, there are also many pictures of healthy food! On Instagram, the hashtag #healthy has over 169 million posts. Specific healthy foods are picking up popularity as well, such as #kale, with 4.1 million posts, and avocado at 11.9 million posts. 

Be selective about what you fill your feed with. Choose content that features vegetables, whole foods, and lean meats. Use your social media as a way of inspiring you to eat healthy, rather than tempt you to eat things that aren’t. There are a ton of healthy food porn accounts out there, like Lily Kunin’s @CleanFoodDirtyCity or Laura Davidson’s @ABeautifulPlate on Instagram. 

A study from Aston University in England discovered proof that what’s in your feed affects the way you eat. It found that subjects increased their fruit and vegetable consumption by a fifth for every portion they saw their social media peers having. One of the researchers who led the study explained that “The implication is that we can use social media as a tool to ‘nudge’ each other’s eating behavior within friendship groups, and potentially use this knowledge as a tool for public health interventions.” 

Food porn is also encouraging more people to cook. 54% of food porn consumers save recipe videos on social media in order to cook it themselves later. According to The Social Chain’s report, consumers are seeking out video recipes that will educate them. 22% of food content on social media is from people taking pictures of food they have cooked. 

This healthy food trend is backed up by new shopping habits as well. According to Waitrose’s report, consumers are doing less calorie-counting and buying fresher, more natural, lighter food then they did ten years ago. One example of this is a surprising 18% increase in eggplant sales. At the time of the report, shoppers were using eggplant as a substitute for carbs. They were roasting them to make chips or using them for lasagna in place of pasta sheets. There are tons of healthy food recipes like this on the internet and social media! 

Where Did Food Porn Come From?

The term “food porn” can be traced back to a couple of sources, and has evolved over time. The concept of “visual hunger” can be traced all the way back to back to the first century! Apicius, a Roman author and foodie of his time, wrote that “The first taste is always with the eyes.” 

The term “gastroporn” was born in 1977, in a review for a French cookbook. This happened in the middle of a cooking revolution, called “nouvelle cuisine”. This movement put a lot more importance on food presentation, or how food looks on the plate. 

The actual term “food porn” first appeared in 1984. A feminist writer named Rosalind Coward published a book called Female Desire. In it, she wrote that cooking “…is a way of expressing affection through a gift…That we should aspire to produce perfectly finished and presented food is a symbol of a willing and enjoyable participation in servicing others. Food pornography exactly sustains these meanings relating to the preparation of food.” And food porn was born. 

The concept of food porn took off in the ’90s, especially in the United Kingdom. This was mostly thanks to the popular cooking show, “Two Fat Ladies”. One of my personal favorites, it follows Clarissa Dickson Wright and Jennifer Paterson, two hilarious British chefs, as they cook their way through England. The show’s producer described their love of over-the-top, buttery foods as “pornographic joy”. The UK loved it. 

In the US, food porn really took off when the website Flickr created its Food Porn category. Soon after this, Urban Dictionary added “food porn” and its definition to its site. The rest is history! 

Conclusion

Food porn is a massive, highly effective, new social media trend. It taps into our primal instincts and has helped bring food into the digital age. But, like anything on social media, it’s all about how you use it. Here are a few ways you can use food porn in a healthy way: 

• Whether you use food porn to find new and exciting recipes, or just love to look at beautiful food (I’m right there with you), be aware of the kind of foods you look at. 

• Make sure to take breaks. Don’t make yourself feel hungry after you’ve already eaten! 

• Create a social media feed that is a healthy space, not a minefield for unhealthy temptations. Try to follow accredited nutritionists, and accounts that make food with lots of veggies and fresh, whole foods. 

• Use food porn as inspiration to cook more often! Studies have found that those who cook at home are much more likely to eat a healthy diet. They are also less likely to overeat. 

Waitrose’s Rob Collins said it best. “…We’re expressing ourselves through food as never before. From healthy eating to the explosion of food photography on social media, to our desire to entertain others through cooking – food is today’s hottest social currency; through it, we tell others about ourselves.”

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