Food Prawn

Once upon a time, cookbooks only contained recipes. The big problem with recipes is you can't see the result (or taste them). This problem is especially problematic for ethnic (now, international) food. People just want to know what a dish looks like, even if tasting it, or trouble-shooting it is often beyond what a cookbook can do.

My favorite kinds of cookbooks are those by Cooks Illustrated, such as The Best Recipe. Cooks Illustrated looks like one of those fancy cooking magazines that you can get at a well-stocked bookstore, but it's not. As high-brow as it looks, this magazine mostly contains recipes of traditional American fare. Turkey, corned beef, pot pies, key lime pies---all of these are typical recipes you'd find in the magazine.

What Cooks Illustrated does differently from nearly every other publication is its approach in presenting recipes. This is a magazine written as if an inventor or an engineer had switched professions and decided to cook. A recipe is never presented as a recipe. Instead, you're given a baseline recipe that's not quite right, and the many trials-and-errors the author makes in search of making the "perfect" dish. The author often knows what they are looking for, in terms of taste, ease of preparation, and so forth, and take a McGyver-like approach to the solution.

The big problem with most cookbooks is they fail to tell you why a recipe works. What happens if you add more of this, or less of that, or substitute one ingredient for another. What quality are you looking for? Recipes are really shorthand. Few cookbooks explain how to find good ingredients. They don't tell you what to do if you can't find this ingredient or that.

It used to be that if you didn't live in a large metropolitan area, and knew where the specialty food stores were, you had little chance of making a dish. For example, it's exceedingly difficult, outside of major cities to get ingredients for Indian recipes. What's helped budding cooks everywhere is what's helped everyone everywhere: the Internet. With e-commerce, you can often mail-order ingredients and expect to get them in some reasonable amount of time. It also helps that ingredients needed for international cuisine are now making it even to the most rural of areas.

Cooks Illustrated doesn't really help you on that front. They do, on the other hand, question why recipes are the way they are, and believe in the kitchen as chemistry lab, where you test out ideas, and make notes. In the process of explaining their failures, they encourage the average person to also experiment, and question recipes, and really, that's what people should do.

Of course, many of us lack the time to do this, and so we trust recipes, or better yet, Cooks Illustrated to explain their trials. Really, more cookbooks should avoid the "religious" approach of "just have faith in the recipe" and take a more scientific approach to food.

Speaking of science and food, I wonder if Alton Brown would be possible if Cooks Illustrated had not existed? I think it's possible. Cooks Illustrated has never been too heavy on food science. An occasional food scientist is consulted to explain why certain foods do what they do, but it's mostly up to the author to make 20, 30, even 40 different versions, like some modern Edisonian epicurean.

Alton Brown was not the first food scientist. He is perhaps the first food scientist superstar. Star of his own show, Good Eats, he isn't so much interested in providing recipes (although he does some of that), as he is in telling you how food works. Why souffles fall, how to make a great pancakes or coffee or cheesecake. He's the foodie equivalent of Bill Nye, the Science Guy, and his show is very influenced by Nye, even if it's (fortunately) far less grating (pun intended) than Nye.

But I digress.

I wanted to talk about pictures in cookbooks. In the last ten years or so, cookbooks with great food photographs have proliferated. Most food photographs share something I find mildly annoying. They are taken using macro lenses. These lenses were often used to take close up photos of tiny flowers or bees near flowers. They have an extremely small depth of field, which is the distance where the subject of a photo is in focus. A flower can be in good focus, but the blades of grass behind it blurry. This draws attention to the subject of interest while blurring the background.

Somehow, like the macarena, this caught among food photographers, so much so that nearly every food photographer takes pictures of their dish using macro lens. When photographed in this manner, the center of the dish can be in sharp focus, while the back of the dish (yes, the back) is out of focus, blurred for heightened artistic effect. Dishes are lovingly photographed and presented, until a phrase entered the foodie lexicon.

Food porn.

Food porn is the photographing of food that increases, for lack of a better phrase, their sex appeal. My roommate, Dave, says Donna Hay is the queen of food porn. Her books not only contain great, simple recipes, but fantastic photos of those dishes.

It is funny to refer to photos from cookbooks as porn, and I began to think about its use. Porn, when applied to food photographs, is seen as a funny, mildly lewd way of describing great photos of food. And yet, were the same care taken with photos of unclothed models, we'd have something that probably wouldn't even qualify as porn.

In fact, the definition of porn is somewhat vague. Generally, people agree that photos of unclothed people don't usually qualify as porn. This is one reason that topless women from African pygmie tribes could adorn the pages of National Geographic, which, if we were using the definition of "food porn" as porn (ie., high quality pix), then National Geographic would be the epitome of its own "food porn".

According to online defintions, porn requires some degree of sexual arousement. But what is the boundary? Certainly, photos of self or mutual gratification generally count as porn. But what about pictures of beautiful people. Abercrombie and Fitch show sexy post-teens enjoying some outdoor activity sans clothing. There's no sex shown, but sexiness is what these photos are selling. Do they qualify as porn. What if these individuals were reading books, or looking sufficiently bored?
These are often very high quality photos taken by photographers with talent.

Is their attractiveness part of what makes it porn? If they were the overweight husband with a balding pate, a moustache, and hair on both sides (think Aqua Teen Hunger Force) and a rotund woman with large bosoms and a larger bottom, would that qualify as porn? Certainly, if we simply say, the photographic depiction of female or male genitalia (ah, you have to love these near-euphemisms that allow me to sound sophisticated while referring to someone's pee-pee) is porn, then the criteria is somewhat simple.

And yet--yet, for every rule, you can break it. I had heard in New York City, a few years back, strip joints were no longer able to provide the full monty, at least, without attracting the local constabulary (gawd, you have to love the Intenet for allowing me to find a word like constabulary). The strippers, suitably constrained, had to rely on what writers have always had to rely on---imagination. They suggest, they tease, they give you all but the visual climax (as it were). Would photographs like that constitute porn?

Clearly, I don't have the answers. But, I think the answer is that porn, like art, is up to the eye of the beholder, and food porn, is in a different category. It is not the equivalent of "porn" (at least as I see it), in the food world. The name is a bawdy sophistication showing that a snob doesn't have to be prudish. Food photos are a kind of anthropomorphism (not exactly, but it's close to what I mean).

As a leetist snob, I'll explain anthropomorphism. This is the attribution of human qualities to non-humans. For example, you might say "my cat is sad" or "the computer is thinking". Being sad or thinking are qualities we generally attribute to humans and are not necessarily those that cats or computers have. In this sense, "food porn" is attributing a quality
(namely sexiness) to food that is normally attributed to humans. However, while "porn" is seen as somewhat derogatory, "food porn" is thought of as funny in reference to highly skilled photos meant to shows dishes at their best, enticing, yes, the viewer. But it's all done, yes, tastefully.

Oh, I suppose I should explain the title of the article, though it certainly pains me to do so. In order to avoid using the word "porn", many Internet denizens started using "pron", which I'm sure was simply a misspelling, which perhaps some sad individual thought was the correct spelling of "porn" and became a running joke. The geek among us (I mean, the g33k among us) have even gone so far as to replace the "o" with zero, and thus provided us with the l33t spelling, "pr0n".

I imagine the word "pron" sounds like prawn.

And now you know.

And knowing is half the battle.