House porn– magazines like Dwell, and Architectural Digest, that make you scratch your chin, and wonder, “Does anyone truly live like this?” Sure we love them, maybe we even steal ideas from them, or hold them up as models of something we some day aspire to, but ultimately are they good for us?

I bought some cookbooks recently, and food porn they were. Actually it seems that more and more these days it’s difficult to buy a cookbook that is not porny. Blurry fruitbowls, whisks, frosted with beaten egg whites, haphazardly thrown about pristine kitchen counters, and juicy pieces of meat, hot off the grill, marks perfectly posed, glistening in the noonday sun, have all become commonplace as we glance through the newer cookbooks or flip through the pages of Gourmet magazine. My feeling towards food porn is quite similar to my feelings towards house porn; revel in it I will (you might even see my versions of food porn on this site), but I will always question its need.

I have plenty of cookbooks, dog-eared, and stained with little bits of food and drips of sauces, that do not have a single picture in them. And are they any worse because of this fact? Absolutely not. Are the foods that they are carefully explaining how to make poorer in quality? Of course not. In fact, it could be argued that these books have a certain freedom to them by not containing pictures, that the food benefits from the freedom that is supplied by not lavishly displaying its wares. Sometimes when a recipe displays the final product, perfectly sliced, free of gristle, with just the right amount of sauce to adorn not drown, I feel pressure to perform. I get disappointed when the dessert I made, delicious though it may be, does not look just right.

When I was in the 4th grade we had a California Missions project. Each student in the class was assigned a different Mission on which to do a class project, culminating in a scale model-making of your assigned Mission. I asked for my mothers help, and although she sat with me as I placed little plastic monks, tonsures gleaming, around my Mission, never once did she simply do it for me. This was for two reasons: 1. This would have been cheating, it was my project assignment not hers. 2. She didn’t want me to feel badly about not having my Mission turn out exactly right, knowing that a woman in her mid 40′s could produce a far better Mission than a girl of 10. Do you get what I am saying?

And so, let me vow now to continue my cookbook collecting, giving equal shelf space to the picture-less, as well as the porny. Taking pictures of food is fun, Gaussian blurring is a gas, and I will indulge in all of these things in the future. But I will try very hard to not feel badly about the foods that I prepare from the porny books, and I will say to myself: No ones (insert name of food being prepared here) really looks like that.