I don’t know what to write today. I just want to go to sleep.
But I’m not going to cop out, so my topic for the day is: Food porn.
When I say that I didn’t mean porn involving food. Rather it’s a written description of food or a visual representation of food that evokes feelings of hunger, desire or craving toward that food. Same concept as X-rated porn except the object, in this case, is food instead of people, and the fantasy is of eating instead of shagging.
Fancy hardcover cookbooks make excellent food porn. Have you seen this one? (Ooh, child!!)
I sometimes like to peruse any of the cookbooks in my collection, my recipe folders or take out menus while I eat. But a Carl’s Jr. circular ad from the mailbox fits the bill too. Some may say this distracts me from enjoying my food, but it’s not like that to me. I like to read while I eat anyway. I can explain that to you but I would be straying from my topic.
While thinking of this topic I surprisingly realize that looking at food porn is something I have been doing since I was a kid. And although I can’t trace my memory back to my first instance I do recall clearly a series of books by a particular author that contain numerous descriptions of foods and has always fired up my fantasy for those foods as a kid. They were The Little House on the Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder.
I’m sure most people are at least somewhat familiar with Wilder’s books of life on the early American frontier. What some reader might also have noticed is the abundance of descriptions of the foods her family ate. For example, in Little House in the Big Woods there are descriptions of how her family butchered a pig and the various foods they made from the wondrous animal – how they smoked the meat, how they made head cheese, how they roasted the curly tail as a snack.
But while most of the foods the Ingalls family ate in their various frontier homesteads were fairly humble, the foods her husband’s family ate in Farmer Boy were positively bacchanalian. A prosperous farmer family from New York, the Wilders nearly always end their meals with a pie of some kind. In one chapter of the book, the Wilder parents went away for a week, leaving their 4 children in charge of the house. They spent the week making and eating taffy, cakes & ice cream. Another chapter described the buffet of foods that the ladies had cooked for the annual fair, right down to the way the skin curled away from steaming boiled potatoes.
I know I’m not the only that derives such pleasures from reading Wilder’s books: Saveur, a food & cooking magazine, mentioned the Little House on the Prairie books in one of their Saveur 100 edition (I can’t remember which year) where each year they pick a list of their favorite 100 food related items/person.
I think the Pomona Public Library, which has a Laura Ingalls Wilder Children’s Room, should include a display of the various foods mentioned in Wilder’s book – similar to those plastic representations of the menu at some Japanese restaurant – perhaps as part of a larger diorama depicting different scenes from the books? Kids like food.
Another good one is this, Food of a Younger Land by Mark Kurlansky. As summed up by USA Today in its 2009 article on the book:
“It's based on reports, forgotten for more than 60 years, from the Depression-era Federal Writers Project. Part of the New Deal, it created work for writers, including a few who became famous, such as Welty (The Optimist's Daughter) and Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God)...One of its last projects, begun in 1939, was a guidebook to local foods and eating traditions. It was to be called "America Eats," but it was abandoned in 1942, shortly after Pearl Harbor, when federal resources shifted from social to military spending.”
The reports were presented as they are, unedited, and they contained a range of topics from “A Los Angeles Sandwich Called a Taco” to “Georgia Possum and Taters.” I didn’t find myself desiring a lot of the foods, but I did end up wanting a taco.
If you have a favorite book you can recommend do let me know. I’m always up for adding another book to my wish list.
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
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