Does This Taste Funny? A Half-Baked Look at Food and Foodies (13 page)

It’s
a safe bet that the first picture was a meatloaf, and the second was probably
chicken. All I know for sure is that broccoli was on sale that week.

If a picture is actually
worth a thousand words, then I worked much harder than necessary on the book
you’re reading. This book has about forty thousand words, so by that formula, I
could have simply taken forty pictures to make my point.

Having
read more than my share of food blathering, and having now blathered a bit
myself, I want to offer a couple of suggestions to anyone out there considering
getting all ‘bloggy’ about food:

If
you’re writing about food, try to use words that at least, in some small,
tangential way, relate to FOOD.

Very
few salads are actually ‘
ethereal’
(celestial; heavenly; of or
pertaining to the upper regions of space), and please stop calling things
‘TOOTHSOME.’ That’s like
American Idol
judges saying something is
‘pitchy’—it doesn’t mean anything!

No
matter how well your duck confit turned out, do not write that you had a
‘foodgasm.’ I enjoy food. I’ve had some amazing meals in my life.
None
of them have been as good
as sex. If you are in
fact
having ‘foodgasms,’ you need to see a doctor.

My next tip is for
anyone who uses the subtle, nuanced medium of still photography to enhance
their writing and communicate the essence of a dish:

Stop
with the EXTREME CLOSEUPS! It’s the photographic equivalent of YELLING! I don’t
need to feel like I’ve been miniaturized and trapped in a freakishly large bowl
of bisque. No matter how ‘rustic’ or ‘artisanal’ the bisque is. If I want to
experience the ‘essence’ of a dish, I’ll cook the freaking dish.

I recently discovered
that our camera has a special setting for ‘food,’ which tells me there are far
too many people writing about food these days.

I’m not sure what the
setting
does
, exactly, but I’m guessing that without
it, none of my
pictures
of food would even
look like
food.

I like to take pictures
of things that I write about, but I’m still learning. One thing I’ve learned is
to write down what the dish being photographed actually
was.
I have a
lot of pictures of what probably was some variation on meatloaf, but I’m not
really sure
.

I also have a tendency
to shoot all my food pictures from directly above the dish
—

—which makes an
cobbler look more like aerial views of an archaeological dig site. There’s a
reason The Girlfriend takes most of the pictures now.

While there are many
things you
could
say about our photo-culinary exploits, I don’t anyone
would describe our pictures as ‘food porn.’

The term ‘
food porn’
was coined in the
mid-eighties in the book
“Female Desire,”
and the author claimed,

“Cooking
food and presenting it beautifully is an act of servitude . . . a symbol of a
willing participation in servicing others.”

I
have a fundamental problem with the phrase ‘food porn.’ No matter how you
define
pornography, it’s a bit of a leap
to apply the term to pictures of food.

It’s
true that the
words
used by food writers are straight out of ‘Penthouse
Forum.’ Succulent. Decadent. simmering. And don’t forget all the drizzling, and
the simmering, and the oozing.

this is not an example of food porn

But there’s a simple test
you can apply which proves that food pictures can’t be ‘pornographic’—would you
be mortified if your mom walked in on you looking at a
picture
of food?

“Honey–I
thought you blocked the Food Network in Bobby’s room! The boy’s DVR is filled
with ‘Iron Chef’ episodes! Next thing you know he’ll be basting things!”

The
term ‘food porn’ may be of recent vintage, but the concept has been around for
centuries. Take a look at this medieval obscenity, courtesy of Cristoforo
Munari (1667-1720)

–

“VASELLAME DI TERRACOTTA, ZUCCA, VERZA, SPALLA DI MAIALE E
PIATTO CON COLTELLO PIATTI”

Translation:
 
"Still
Life with Unfortunately-placed Cabbage"

Or how about this 1864 Monet,
provocatively entitled, “The Joint of Meat”

Notice here how Monet objectifies his
subject,
treating
it

as if it were just "a piece of
meat"

Ultimately,
what’s considered food porn depends on where you live. It’s all about
‘community standards.’Maybe, in parts of the Deep South, a picture of a stick
of butter is pornographic—maybe in the Ukraine, it’s a soft-focus image of a
bowl of borscht.

You Can Look It Up

Learning to cook requires learning a new language.
It seems like there are dozens of terms for even the simplest kitchen tasks,
and a lot of the words aren’t even in English!

So, as I started to cook more, I gathered more
recipes, and that meant learning a lot of cooking terms on the fly. And on the
internet.

I’m always hesitant to trust information on
Wikipedia, because it’s ‘community edited,’ which means anybody can change an
entry.

I’ve heard it’s better now, but I was always nervous
that I would try some technique from Wikipedia for making, say, short ribs and
accidentally create a crude explosive device.

I knew I had to stop relying on the internet when I
read the following entry for the word ‘julienne’:

adjective
(of
food,
especially
vegetables)

fashioned into
the shape of sixties actress Julie Newmar (derived from ‘Julie N.’)

By now, I’ve mastered quite a lot of cooking jargon,
which I try to drop into the conversation. Some people are less impressed than
others . . .

The Girlfriend
:
What’s for dinner tonight?

Me
: I blanched
some
haricots verts
to go with the braised turkey
,
and right now
I’m working on a remoulade.

The Girlfriend
:
Did you say we’re having turkey?

There’s no reason to memorize every arcane food word
or phrase, but you should probably learn a handful of basic terms. Conveniently,
I’ve assembled a sampling of cooking vocabulary that I believe could cause
confusion for the novice cook.

Bear in mind, some of these refer to fairly advanced
techniques or complicated dishes, so in certain cases, I chose to simplify the
definitions.

A
COOK'S LEXICON