Tag Archives: Home Cooking

My thoughts (or more precisely, ramblings) on the role of food photography in the “home made” movement follow. I argue that food photography that privileges the “beautiful” over the “meaningful” discourages participation in the movement. In effect, emphasizing the aesthetics of the image instead of the image’s meaningfulness as a representation of life erects a barrier between the “non-foodie” and the kitchen. We only do the contemporary food movement a disservice by fetishizing the image of home cooked food at the expense of the narratives behind the image. Much of my argument is conducted in an academic, abstruse, and (slightly, I would like to think) pretentious style. If you read the last few sentences, you get the gist of my argument—feel free to skip to the pictures at the end, which my brother took of me preparing striped bass, cavatelli with dill pesto, and rainbow chard. Obviously though, I’d prefer if you read the body of my ramblings before moving to the images.

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Food photography is a drug: it ensnares the senses, enraptures the mind, magnifies an impossible experience into an inflated realm of potentiality. Addictive and destructive, contemporary food photography functions as an opiate, lulling the public into complacency. Satisfaction with a fantasy world leads to complacency; individuality renders down into a transparent, massless anathema of hedonistic visual pleasure.

The pleasure of cooking in the home is spiritual; all other and alternative forms of gratification derive from home cooking’s spiritual satisfactions. Providing for the self, and by extension, the family, provides primarily for the physical: cooking produces nourishment, the essential nutrition that supports everyday existence. Nevertheless, it is widely recognized that the family members may obtain nourishment from numerous sites outside the home. In fact, the demise of the “family dinner” over the past three decades—beginning with the displacement of food from the dinner table to the couch (and its attendant television) and concluding with the complete obliteration of structured family mealtimes—demonstrates the fragility of the kitchen as a site of physical nourishment. The kitchen actually provides no unique physical nourishment—the manifest purpose of food, its nutrition, remains independent from its manifest site of production. Yet, the physical nourishment of home cooking contains other forms of nourishment too—specifically, the spiritual nourishment alluded to above. Continue reading →