Tiffany Leigh discusses the origins of the #foodporn tag in Playboy this month, suggesting that the phenomenon isn’t really so distant from actual pornography. Delving into the origins of the word “porn,” Leigh finds roots in the Greek word “pornographos” in reference to prostitution, adding, “[American linguist Benjamin] Zimmer says that the French then borrowed that term and used pornographie in 1842 to describe ‘obscene paintings’ they discovered in the temple of the Roman God Bacchus, who was infamous for ritual cult-like madness, religious ecstasy and tribes of wild women and bearded satyrs with erect penises who followed him.”
Leigh notes that one of the first uses of the phrase “food porn” was in an article by Alexander Cockburn in the 1977 New York Review of Books:
Cockburn surmises from his reviews and draws parallels between porn and food: both offer something that is (overly) coiffed and groomed, and both offer a form of aesthetic and sensory pleasure that is attained without actually engaging in real acts of sex and cooking: “Between manuals on sexual techniques and manuals on the preparation of food; the same studious emphasis on leisurely technique, the same apostrophes to the ultimate, heavenly delights. True gastro-porn heightens the excitement and also the sense of the unattainable by proffering colored photographs of various completed recipes…the delights offered in sexual pornography are equally unattainable.”
