The Rise of the Fantasy Food–Industrial Complex

Food media as we know it emerged in the mid-twentieth century, with the advent of high-quality food photography. It was in the postwar era that cookbooks with stylish photos first entered the market. Alongside cookbooks were newspaper supplements and food magazines — Gourmet with its aspirational gelatinized dinners and sturgeon caviar aperitifs, McCall’s with Nickolas Muray’s color photographs of fruit plates and lemonade.

From its early days, pictures of food had little connection to reality: dyed mashed potatoes stand in for ice cream, shoe-polish for grill marks, and thick motor oil for syrup on pancakes. In the decades after this deluge of food imagery began, journalist Alexander Cockburn coined the term “gastro-porn,” linking food photos to a new aesthetic inspiring longing without attainment.

Several years later, feminist critic Rosalind Coward would use “food porn” to describe a coercive seduction designed to subjugate women. Since then, images of food — and women mixing, cooking, and coyly tasting it — have only become more viral.

Ruby Tandoh’s All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now is a piecemeal history of the intentional and anarchic creation of contemporary taste, desire, and lifestyle around food. Much of Tandoh’s narrative takes place on the internet, or in the legacy media that it has superseded.

In vignettes that whisk us from tradwives to supermarkets, to the vogue of health-coded sodas, a portrait emerges of food in the “affluent West.” Food has never been about mere sustenance, but media has transformed it into a source of a new kind of aesthetic experience. What is the nature of this experience? It is the stream of endless recipe reels clogging your Instagram feed. It is your grandmother as she opens her first full-color cookbook. It is the bizarre contemporary phenomenon of making food for the simple reason that it photographs well. The plastic, see-through cups for bubble tea, tin-pan dinners, mommy influencers making gourmet bento boxes for their children, reels ad infinitum.

Tandoh’s story has a British focus — she became famous after appearing on The Great British Bakeoff — but the narrative she weaves has resonances beyond those isles. As newspaper supplements were rolling out recipes demanding colorful and fresh ingredients, the traditional mom-and-pop style of British grocery was being decimated by the likes of Sainsbury’s and other American-style supermarkets and agricultural products.

Tandoh’s account of why we eat the way we do is full of insights, but a great deal of the book is less about consumption and more about manufacturing desire. While the average Brit’s diet became increasingly dominated by monopoly-manufactured trash, their visual diet broadened. Sainsbury’s branded corned beef could in the 1950s be consumed beside images of caprese with fresh mozzarella and a coquettish flourish of olive oil.

The strong current of fantasy in food is perhaps most visible in the writing of people like Elizabeth David, a mid-twentieth century writer and chef who described her own seminal cookbook on “Mediterranean food” as equal parts literature and escapism. She is among the writers whose influence on British cuisine and the transformation of cooking into high culture Tandoh follows most closely.

It made sense that middle-class Brits were seduced by the escapism of David’s cookbooks. She wrote for the gourmets of postwar England whose storefronts were denuded of color, stocked with daily offerings of rationed meat, butter, cheese, eggs, milk, and sugar. Who in this context wouldn’t dream of the Mediterranean? “Lemons, oranges and tomatoes” were, David tells her readers in 1950, “as rare as diamonds.” From this drab tedium, she offered respite, or, as Angela Carter wrote in a London Review of Books article from 1985, a value system. What Carter meant by this was a vision of a kind of civility in which food is so abundantly available as to be transformed into a medium for expressing one’s moral outlook.

Tandoh’s book describes how ordinary people came to start fantasizing about food in the era of mass culture. The postwar ration period understandably looms large in her account, but so too does the post-COVID era. Looking at the food writer Margaret Costa, Tandoh observes a devotion to simple, high-quality ingredients that can verge on excessive, well-matched by the sourdough bakers and Bon Appetit fandom of the early 2020s. Costa’s popularity grew in the 1940s and ’50s, but reached its height by the 1960s and ’70s as she found a way of writing about food that could persuade readers that another life was possible.

All we (those of us lucky enough to assume food to be a mundane daily necessity) had to do was stop viewing eating as routine and instead conceive of meals as sublime ceremonies. This fetishizing of food bothered critics like Angela Carter who warned against foodie tendencies in the London Review of Books. The more food becomes an abstract object, the more grossly removed its middle- and upper-class worshippers can feel from the material concerns that undergird its consumption: What’s in it? Who gives or withholds it from us? Can we afford it? “This rapt, bug-eyed concern with the small print not even of life but of gluttony is, I think, genuinely decadent”, Carter wrote.

Turning to the present, Tandoh tells us that the unimaginable quantity of content coming out of the internet has transformed our food culture and industry from the bottom up. Ordinary people now shape taste. We post photos and like photos and, by doing so, make the machine run. A 2021 poll of two thousand Americans found that 40 percent had ordered food that they had not eaten to take a photo, 57 percent said they would rearrange their plate to make food look more attractive for pictures, and another 27 percent confessed to having changed their diet to include more photogenic meals.

Where Tandoh sees diversity, I see a mass proliferation of images prone to making food feel more homogenous, if not straight up whitewashed. Staple spices and condiments from around the world are subsumed into various forms of “fusion” and trendy young recipe developers and mass-oriented clickbait pages unite to produce millions of derivatives of miso-glazed brussels sprouts. It is perhaps because the abundance of choice has produced a greater sense of homogeneity that we have, as a counterpoint, a desperate desire for authenticity.

The British online food column Vittles’ quest for the “Real London” has led it to add the mediocre piri-piri chicken spot around the corner from me to one of its best-of lists, although the restaurant has nothing going for it other than perhaps not caring as much about where they source their poultry as the yuppie spots do. A more niche segment of New York City was infatuated by the “Nonna” restaurant in Staten Island, in which different grandmothers rotated cooking dinners from “their culture.” (To be clear, I love Enoteca Maria). While a frenetic economy forces us to replace grandma’s food with cornflakes or gluten-free, paleo whatever, the pang of nostalgia is not easily ignored. Inevitably, we just want grandma back, even if that means going to someone else’s.

All Consuming offers a look at contemporary food’s architecture and aesthetics — the grocery stores, the diner chains, the photographs, and mass-luxury products — and a fainter glance at its more powerful forces: the middlemen, the food businesses, the conglomerates slowly eating away at our small farms, waterways, and autonomy. Clearly these two things are related, although Tandoh’s book is not primarily concerned with drawing the connection.

Part of the problem is that food and the way that we (the “affluent West” to which Tandoh refers) talk about it continues to be a thinly veiled cover for superficial moral judgements: what we think appears good or bad, conscientious or brainwashed, sophisticated or vulgar, commercial or authentic, overhyped or underground. Where our own image-making falls on the spectrum between viral food influencer and authenticity trawler has become a stand in for our views on a whole host of other, more meaningful, moral and political issues.

What we are not doing is facing the utter lack of choice that this maelstrom of images glosses over so spectacularly. Why do we eat the way we eat now? The ten companies that own the majority of the world’s food brands might have something to do with it. People will do a lot for choice, even if that means deifying its image. As we come face-to-face with our utter lack of it, as we stare down the death of so many lifeforms, languages, and foodways in a grand, glittery, corporate-mediated hall of mirrors, we might all just start to go a little bit insane and churn our own butter for views.