Did Anthony Bourdain Invent Food Porn

Tony

.

Anthony Bourdain

KITCHEN CONFIDENTIAL

The BOOK THAT MADE TONY FAMOUS

BUT DID HE INVENT FOOD PORN ???

Well Tony popularized the term FOOD PORN, and did so without a doubt more than any one single person in this World. Yes Tony did, and is still doing so, with his wonderful Food Shows (Food Porn) : NO RESERVATIONS, PATS UNKNOWN, The LAYOVER and other Bourdain Shows, all absolutely wonderful, and as only Tony could do,     "Fugettabout it FOOD NETWORK, you can Only DREAM of Doing something as Masterful as Mr. Bourdain." Keep Dreaming ..

So Who Did INVENT FOOD PORN, you want to know? Well a writer named Rosalind Coward in her book FEMALE DESIRE (1984)  ...

Here you go, the passage Mis Coward wrote, using the term Food Porn for the first time in the History of the World ..

"Cooking food and presenting it beautifully is an act of servitude. It is a way of expressing affection through a gift... That we should aspire to produce perfectly finished and presented food is a symbol of a willing and enjoyable participation in servicing others. Food pornography exactly sustains these meanings relating to the preparation of food. The kinds of picture used always repress the process of production of a meal. They are always beautifully lit, often touched up." 

.

ANTHONY BOURDAIN on The LINE at LES HALLES

NEW YORK , NY

.

FOE GRAS

TONY'S FOOD PORN

PAPAYA KING HOT DOGS

One of TONY'S FAVORITES

FOOD PORN

TONY'S FAVORITE FOOD PORN

A BOW of NOODLES in SOUTH EAST ASIA

PHO in VIETNAM

.

BARBECUED PIG

PORK

.

TONY'S IDEA of HEAVEN !!

FOOD PORN

THE BADASS COOKBOOK

SECRET RECIPES

 

.

FOOD PORN  - Lust for the Gastronomic, from Zola to Cookbooks ...

by Anthony Bourdain 2001   Food porn, the glorification of food as a substitute for sex, is not an entirely new phenomenon. Nor, perhaps, is the "objectification" of food: displays or descriptions of food -- and its preparation -- for an audience that has no intention of actually cooking or eating any of it. Few people leafing through that ultimate volume of chef porn, the unspeakably lush, jaw-droppingly beautiful "French Laundry Cookbook," would ever attempt to re-create its recipes. We keep it on a special place on our bookshelves, safely away from any food that might mark its seductive and colorful photographs, as our parents might once have kept Miller's "Tropic of Cancer" or "The Olympia Reader" away from general reading. Like the best of pornography, the best of food porn depicts beautiful "objects" arranged in ways one might never have previously considered; star chefs, like the porn stars before them, doing things on paper which few amateurs would ever try at home.

If early works about sex sought to appeal to a sense of yearning, a longing for physical gratification, so did Emile Zola's 1873 foodie masterpiece, "The Belly of Paris," which places its starving hero at the epicenter of French food, the Parisian central marketplace of Les Halles. In page after page of lavishly detailed descriptions, the line between sex and food becomes permeable, the charms of charcuterie, fish, meat and vegetables threatening to supplant sex entirely. Among wildly enthusiastic accounts such as "surging piles [of vegetables] akin to hurrying waves, this river of verdure rushing along the roadway like an autumn torrent . . . tender violet, blush rose, and green yellow" comes this bodice-ripping vision of a pork store:

"There was a wealth of rich, luscious, melting things. Down below, jars of preserved sausage-meat were interspersed with pots of mustard. Above these, small plump, boned hams, golden with their dressings of toasted bread crumbs and adorned at the knuckles with green rosettes. Next came larger dishes, some containing preserved Strasbourg tongues, enclosed in bladders colored a bright red and varnished so that they looked quite sanguineous beside the pale sausages . . . [T]here were black puddings coiled like harmless snakes, healthy looking chitterlings piled up two by two, meat, minced and sliced, slumbered beneath lakes of melting fat . . . [F]rom a bar overhead strings of sausages and saveloys of various sizes hung down symmetrically like cords and tassels, while in the rear fragments of intestinal membranes showed like lacework, like some guipure of flesh." While Zola's prose might well inspire tumescence, I doubt that its effect on reader behavior differed much from a return visit to a favored passage in "The Story of 'O.' " It's as hard to imagine that readers of the former rushed out and began assembling the ingredients to make boudin noir or tongue en gelee as it is to imagine readers of the latter went to purchase a corset or a riding crop. In both cases, it is the voyeuristic aspect that appeals, not the prospect of real blood and meat, nor real tangles of sweaty limbs.         


.

A $95,000 TRUFFLE

NELLO'S
EURO-TRASH CENTRAL

And Home of Extreme Pretension

White Truffle season is upon us, and the fancy fungus is now popping up on city menus at the usual outrageous prices. Uptown restaurateur Nello Balan has gone one better by getting his mitts on what he "claims" is the World’s biggest White Truffle, weighing in at a mouth-watering 4 pounds. But regulars (Euro-Trash) at his "Pretensious" Madison Avenue eatery won’t get even a whiff of it — Nello says he sold it Thursday to Russian oligarch Vladimir Potanin for $95,000.

Potanin, who has a $14 billion fortune, is the fourth-richest man in Russia and a business partner of Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov. Potanin mainly lives in Moscow, so it’s unlikely any of us will get an invite to his place for a truffle dinner.

DUMPLING HOUSES NYC

FRIED DUMPLING SHOP

ALLEN STREET

LOWER EAST SIDE

NEW YORK NY

ALLEN STREET DUMPLINGS were the ones who started it all. The Chinese Dumpling Craze.

5 Tasty Pork Dumplings for a mere .99 Cents. OMG ??? !!! There was Nothing Cheaper !!!

Probably at the time, the Best Food Bargain in The Entire World, considering how High Prices are in NYC. Damn ? This was just as cheap as Eating in South East Asia. Just a Dollar for a meal. In New York ? You couldn't beat it.

Eventually the price went up to $1.50 and then $1.99, but still, they were Damn Cheap.

Four of My 5 DUMPLINGS

VANESSA DUMPLINGS

VANESSA DUMPLING HOUSE

ELDRIDGE STREET

NY NY

After ALLEN STREET, VANESSA DUMPLING HOUSE opened, and things really took off. Five tasty Pork Dumplings for .99 Cents. A Bargain !

At first Vanessa was tiny. A narrow shop just about 4 feet wide. There were a few seats you could eat at, at the counter.

PROSPERITY DUMPLING

About 4 blocks down on ELDGRIGE 

from VANESSA DUMPLING HOUSE.

This is where I'd go after my Haircut. Vanessa had gotten way to crowded and popular.

"