As a primary theme source of my exhibit, I would like to touch on food materiality and how it relates to the material experience of eating and cultural representation.
A Short History:
Only when food-ways and agriculture began to stabilize in Europe and the Western World did real industrial growth begin to happen. With mass production, the rise of supermarkets and print being the primary medium , food products needed a way to differentiate themselves. As the first innovations in marketing, the most basic indicators of discrimination would be materials--labels, posters, lithographs, signage, window displays.
Food as a Material Medium
When we eat out in modern society, we mediate with the environment and food in a subject-object relationship. We form translations of the material food world and objects into desires, actions, thoughts, senses/feelings, and emotions. Food becomes an experience and thereby dematerialized medium. For example, an online restaurant review is an immaterial log, a digital capture of a material experience. A meal is ephemeral; its materiality only lasts for brief minutes. On the other hand, food is a quintessentially material need and thing. When we eat, we mediate with the environment and food in a subject-object relationship. We are constantly in need of more nourishment and meals:
So many materiality and immaterial constructs goes into the mealtime.The theoretical model of the meal by Hans-Jurgen Teuteberg shows the material complexity that goes into each meal, from the body's arrangement to dish aesthetics. Within the scope of visuals of food alone there color, textures, arrangement, size, shapes, and proportions:
Two extremely different ways to enjoy sushi and food porn. Image Sources: Unknown
Novelty pasta shaped like the male phallice. Image Source: Thestir.cafemom.com
Food purchases and meal materiality are related to the consumer's economics, convenience, lifestyle, and media advertising. In the late 1900s, America would be known as a overly obese culture. Many health advocates would begin to blame fast food marketing and a unhealthy lifestyle supported by the media. Although media possesses extraordinary inertia, the norms and standards that dictate them can and do change--"expressive of changeable social, economic, and material relationships" (Gidelman 8). What happened to make us such gluttons? There is a significance to surviving material culture evidence as Schlereth points out--it often provides us with with broader cross section of society and, therefore, extends our sources of cultural information beyond written or statistical records (Schelereth 5). Food media will explain our diets and consumption patterns in the future.
Rise of User-generated Food Culture
"Food porn" has less to do with actual food and more to do with the image, aesthetic, and material display. Aided by the 'enhancements' of digital photography, you can get your fill of great food.
Flickr Food Porn Group ReelCreated with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.
An August 2009 search for the term food porn on Flickr.com yielded 22,753 results.
A November 2010 search for the term food porn on Flickr.com yielded 63,412 results and a group consisting of 421,740 photos (streamed above).
