MARIE'S MUSES

Gastro-porn suggests various definitions. One was given on the Paul Whitehouse comedy series Happiness when Johnny Vegas, watching Nigella Lawson on TV, reached into his trousers. Another came from the food-writer Joanna Blythman: gastro-porn is the kind of programme we watch while consuming a ready meal. In a 1977 article in the New York Review of Books, Alexander Cockburn wrote: "True gastro-porn heightens the excitement and also the sense of the unattainable by proffering coloured photographs of various completed recipes . . . The delights offered in sexual pornography are equally unattainable." Gastro-porn offers satisfaction but never delivers it, and is therefore addictive.

Alright, I am here to confess, it's true, there's no sense in denying it....I am a Gastro Porn Addict.  There....it's out...I have outed myself....I am out of the Larder....soul stripped naked before you....chocolate cookie crumbs falling from my lips.  I spend hours and hours every day reading recipes on the internet, trolling recipe sights looking for my next fix....the floor by the side of my bed is stacked with various cookbooks, not to mention our library which is overloaded with various cookbooks, cooking magazines, computer print outs of....you guessed it.....recipes!  I have recipe software that I just had to have, that I rarely look at, but at the time I bought it....well....you know....I have folders on the computer that I have filled with pictures I have taken of food I have cooked and eaten and I look at them frequently.  When I start banging out my pots and pans in the kitchen I make sure the batteries in the camera are charged and at the ready.  Oh...and don't get me started on Food TV.  A foreign holiday is just another excuse to go wandering around a grocery store and look at food in another language and I'd rather shop for the ingredients for a new recipe than a new pair of shoes.

I'm one of those rare birds that actually tries out (or trys very hard to) most of the recipes I collect.  (and my waist line shows it I might add) Publishing Industry research shows that most cook book afficionados only try one or two, possibly three recipes from each book on their shelves.  And yet they buy more.  Each new book from Nigella Lawson, Gordon Ramsay, Jamie Oliver, Gary Rhodes, Delia etc. all go right to the top of the best seller lists almost from the get go...just the latest in the line that goes back to Keith Floyd and Fannie Craddock.   Yet the rise of the cookery star has coincided with a decline in the amount of time people actually spend cooking. (Unless you are lucky enough like me and get to do it for a living)

Temptation is at the root of our problems. Just as pornography corrupts people into performing sex acts that they would never have thought of alone, so we are titillated and tormented by gastro-porn shoved at us from every angle, which sets us slavering for things we were once perfectly happy to do without … Today, we are assaulted by food pornography, even on our way to work, when cappuccinos, or ciabatta with American bacon, or smoked salmon and scrambled egg breakfasts offer themselves to us. At lunchtime, having chosen between sandwich outlets, we will be lucky if we can bring ourselves to leave with just our BLT - how can we resist a fruit smoothie, a low-fat carrot cake, a mocha cappucino or a bio yoghurt?

I confess though, that I am not ready to go into re-hab for my addiction....I guess I am still in denial....now hand me my latest issue of Delicious....I need a fix!

|  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this