viz. - Food

Nailed It: Pinterest Food Fails and Envy on Social Media

Deb Streusand — Wed, 19 Nov 2014 14:01:17 +0000

We’re all familiar with the genre of food porn, those delectable treats that show up on Instagram and Pinterest, tempting us with food that is as beautiful as it is (presumably) delicious. Articles such as “The 35 Most Heartbreaking Food Fails of 2013” and “21 People Who Prove Your Baking Could Be Worse” demonstrate the difficulty people have in replicating the lovely pictures they see on the site. If one searches Pinterest for “food fails,” one gets a barrage of paired images. Each features the original Pinterest picture and the result of someone’s attempt to make it, often with the ironic phrase “nailed it” written across the second picture in the white text used for internet memes. In the era of food porn, food doesn’t just have to be tasty; it has to look just right, too.

The “food fails” usually result from an attempt to replicate a complex image, often a food item that is supposed to look like something else, like this shark:

Image Credit: Alanna Okun

Though the watermelon and grapes probably tasted perfectly good, the cook failed to make the watermelon appear like the healthy and voracious-looking shark in the upper picture. Instead, it looks like a cross between a jack-o-lantern and a creature with eyestalks. Similarly, the skeleton on the right seems to have been through some sort of nuclear meltdown:

Image Credit: Arielle Calderon

It only takes a few touches for something that was supposed to have been cute to turn creepy. But it’s not merely the hubris of trying to make your food into representative art that results in food fails. Food can collapse, crumble, melt, or burn. While the first three calamities, at least, do not affect the taste of the food, they prevent the appearance of the food from fulfilling what was in the cook’s mind and before the cook’s eyes on Pinterest.

Image Credit: Plowing Through Life

I would be perfectly happy to eat either of the cakes pictured above, but if I were to try to make the former, I couldn’t help but be disappointed if it turned out like the latter. In the era before food porn, I half-remember and half-imagine, one would make recipes from cookbooks or those handed down from one’s relatives or neighbors, aiming only for them to taste and look as good as they did when other people one knew made them. That classic I grew up with, The Joy of Cooking, has no photographs. Now that we have photographic social media, however, we have more to aspire to, and consequently, farther to fall.

The juxtaposed images may at first seem to be arguing for the inadequacy of the cooks attempting the Pinterest recipes. However, it was presumably those cooks who posted the images of their “fails,” and perhaps even they who put the meme text on them. For this reason, I think the posts also argue that Pinterest and Instagram pictures of food create unrealistic expectations. Like Facebook, these sites can be used to create envy of the person posting the picture, forcing the viewer to compare themselves to a fictionalized ideal life. The original baker or cook did not post the images of a series of trial runs, just as most people’s Facebook posts do not share their failures but focus on their successes and satisfactions instead.

The “food fail” articles are written to amuse readers, or, in the case of the baking article, to make them feel better about their own efforts. Despite their humorous nature, however, the food fails are reflective of a larger social phenomenon. We are in the habit of comparing our lives unfavorably to those of others as reflected on social media. Though we may know deep down that they probably have just as many failures and bad days as we have, all we see on many social media accounts is evidence of an unremittingly successful life. So we try to shape our own social media presences to reflect our successes as well. This effort may not fail quite as tangibly as the "food fails," but like them, it represents an attempt to reach for something that is unrealistic for most of us. The juxtaposed Pinterest images are a reminder that other people, too, are merely human.

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Food

Social Media

memes

Food Porn Roundup: The Seven Deadly Desserts

Aubri Plourde — Thu, 13 Nov 2014 17:35:25 +0000

It seems to me that we can canvas each of the Seven Deadly Sins with food. Specifically, with dessert.

Image Credit: Not So Humble Pie

Good lord. I shouldn’t be surprised that a piece of cake can look so blatantly sexy. In fact, there are whole websites dedicated to food porn. No, not pornography involving food—just pages upon pages of scantily-clad tarts and oozing puddings. It’s a whole sub-genre of Internet photography.

Canvassing the Internet for desserts (which, by the way, I do not recommend), I’m both delighted and surprised by how often post-dinner snacks are described as sinful. The association of sex with food is ubiquitous! Here we have Midnight Sin Chocolate Cake:

Image Credit: Not So Humble Pie

Austin even has a food truck just for “sinful” cookies:

Image Credit: Sinful Desserts

Any quick search for desserts will turn up “guilty” (or the inverse lie, “guilt-free”), “sexy,” or even “naughty.” Further, all of the photographs or rare illustrations show the food in close-up, often cut open, lilke the cookie and cake above, as though the food were revealing something. So I got to thinking. And here we have it, foodies, the roundup of the Seven Deadly Food Sins:

1. Pride

I thought this one would be tough. That cookie doesn’t look all that smug, to me. But, as usual, Pinterest never disappoints. Here we have good-ol’ Red, White, and Blue Patriotism smuggled into our dessert choices:

Image Credit: Buzzfeed

2. Sloth

Okay, so most of the lazy desserts imply that they’re easy to make, enabling to baker/chef to be lazy. But, they’re described as “Lazy Apple Pie” or “Lazy Cookies,” so I’m totally counting them. Here we have Lazy Squares:

Image Credit: Jen's Favorite Cookies

3. Wrath

I feel that dessert is by definition the antidote to anger, but for those viz. readers who do not eat their feelings—or, maybe, for those who do, I’m looking at Angry Orchard Hard Cider Apple Cupcakes:

Image Credit: Brown Sugar

4. Envy

No envious desserts to be found, but I found plenty of desserts that made me envious of their consumers, so I chose Pumpkin Sin Dip:

Image Credit: Lamberts Lately

I’ll admit that the envy is all mind here, but I think anyone who has gone pumpkin-picking and made real desserts will join me in my fall from foodie grace.

5. Greed

Greed is good. In this case at least. For greed, I went down memory lane to the Dessert Lady, a cafe in downtown Orlando. The cafe itself could be called greedy; slices of cake run around the price of a meal elsewhere, although in fairness they are enormous. Here’s their “latest temptation,” Blackberry Swirl Cheesecake:

Image Credit: The Dessert Lady

6. Gluttony

I will confess: I’m going through what my roommates are calling “Aubri’s Cookie Phase.” This involves ordering from Tiff’s Treats repeatedly, so that there is an unending stream of cookie boxes in our kitchen. Of course, I could just bake cookies. But they won’t be as good! And yes, I have been redefining gluttony for the past few weeks.

Image Credit: Tiff's Treats

And, of course:

7. Lust

I saved this last, most obvious, and perhaps most resilient sin for last because, while I was able to round up examples of “sins” for each of the others, lust and dessert seem to go so well together to have become cliche. Over and over again, cakes are described as “sexy"; pies as “tempting”; puddings as “better than sex.” Here, we skipped the modifiers and just named the dessert Sex in a Pan:

Image Credit: Jo Cooks

I’m amused by all of the associations with food and sin, but this connection between food and lust is particularly interesting to me. Visually, I’m often finding similar typefaces selected for desserts to the ones I might find for lingerie sales. I recall reading a nice polemic against calling desserts “Guilt-Free.” I couldn’t find it again, but I do remember that the author suggested that labeling desserts this way might ask us to feel guilty about all other desserts.

I agree with her point, but I wonder if adding the visual element of these foods turns that idea on its head. Yes, implying that fatty desserts should make us guilty is troublesome for body image concerns. At the same time, though, it seems to me that these bloggers, chefs, and photographers have embraced the guilt, the way lingerie shopping asks us to embrace lust. Sure, they’re associated with gluttony and lust, but these seems to be paradoxically positive attributes when they’re paired with such gorgeous photography, with disassembled and unmasked desserts, and with such blatant enthusiasm. Of course, this argument is shamefully limited; I haven’t examined the writers of these, or their written comments on body image or consumption. I do think, though, there could be a positive case made for this kind of celebration. If desserts this tempting are being paraded across the Internet in all their trans-fat glory, maybe they’re also doing some cultural work to remove the stigma from lust or consumption. Maybe, if we’re all very lucky, that chocolate cake can do some good for some body ethics and sexual liberation.

Or maybe I just need to justify how often I gave into temptation while writing this post.

Tags:

Food

Visual Rhetoric

Sin

Educated Wine? Or: How to Feed Your Elitism with Booze

Aubri Plourde — Tue, 16 Sep 2014 21:58:43 +0000

Image Credit: Roots Run Deep Winery

I don't know anything about wine. I know there are reds and whites, and I know that, thankfully, they don't give me migraines.

And I'm not picky. Give me something that isn’t too acidic, nothing too sweet, and I'm happy enough to grade some student papers. But I'll admit that—when I’m choosing wine myself—I choose it entirely on one qualification, and one only: the label.

I'm in graduate school, so it will surprise no one that I purchased this wine, Roots Run Deep's "Educated Guess”:

Image Credit: Roots Run Deep Winery

This wine makes me feel like I've become a chemist just by drinking it.

If it looked like actual chemistry, though, I don't think I'd be interested. It's the "guess" I'm interested in—the elegant fusion between brain work and style. Sure, this label plays into my innate sense of grad-school elitism. But it's also visually striking; it suggests that a team of people slaved over this bottle and its contents in a group brainstorming session, in a messy room, with lots of chalk. It's the representation of intellectual labor that compels me. This label is showing off.

Maybe the scientists' offices across the university look like this. I hope they do. I'm struck, though, staring at this label, by how much it resembles my white board when I'm planning an essay. My white board and Prezi applications often become a chaotic collections of the refuse of my mind:

Image Credit: Aubri's Computer

In fact, my Although I’m an excessively organized person, I’m also attracted to this kind of visual evidence of intellectual labor. It blends the analytical and the creative, a connection the makes of Educated Guess are happy to encourage, calling winemaking an "art vs. science" and claiming that the title came out of the kind of brainstorming session I envision when I see this label.

Of course, anyone who's ever watched five minutes of Don Draper brooding knows that title and label matter far more in product purchases than do the actual product. There are even studies that show we evaluate the flavor wines by how fancy we perceive them.

There was a good reason I very rarely choose a wine like Barefoot:

Image Credit: Barefoot Wines

This wine is the opposite of Educated guess. The label, which might fit into my colleague Deb's post on girly drinks, suggests a lack of planning: someone (the winemakers? the marketers? the consumers?) couldn't be bothered to put on shoes, let alone churn out some chemistry for a cabernet. This wine, according to its label, is not a wine for planners, not for someone making an educated guess, or even a Hypothesis (Roots Run Deep's other vintage). It’s a wine for the spontaneous, the free-spirited--for after school.

These wines are classed, but not just by their prices (both cost generally under $20, although Barefoot is cheaper). The labels play into some kind of intellectual classism. Okay, so maybe a new academic is more susceptible to this kind of thing than the average consumer. Still, I wonder: what do we get out of these labels? If, like me, you choose your wines based on a label (super-tasters need not apply), do you go for the wine that confirms some sense of elitism? Or the wine whose label asks you to let your hair down?

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Visual Rhetoric

Food

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