Free Does This Taste Funny? A Half-Baked Look at Food and Foodies by Michael Dane Page B

Show me a kid who wouldn’t want to try
some Trout Wrapped in Licorice! Even Grandma might try a cup of Almonds Dipped
in Duck Fat!

MYSTERY DISHES
    One
would think that, if I were taking a picture of something, I would also write down what it was. Since I don’t, I have a lot of pictures of . . . food.

    It’s
a safe bet that the first picture was a meatloaf, and the second was probably
chicken. All I know for sure is that broccoli was on sale that week.

I Know It When I See It
    If a picture is actually
worth a thousand words, then I worked much harder than necessary on the book
you’re reading. This book has about forty thousand words, so by that formula, I
could have simply taken forty pictures to make my point.
    Having
read more than my share of food blathering, and having now blathered a bit
myself, I want to offer a couple of suggestions to anyone out there considering
getting all ‘bloggy’ about food:
    If
you’re writing about food, try to use words that at least, in some small,
tangential way, relate to FOOD.
    Very
few salads are actually ‘ ethereal’ (celestial; heavenly; of or
pertaining to the upper regions of space), and please stop calling things
‘TOOTHSOME.’ That’s like American Idol judges saying something is
‘pitchy’—it doesn’t mean anything!
    No
matter how well your duck confit turned out, do not write that you had a
‘foodgasm.’ I enjoy food. I’ve had some amazing meals in my life. None of them have been as good
as sex. If you are in fact having ‘foodgasms,’ you need to see a doctor.
    My next tip is for
anyone who uses the subtle, nuanced medium of still photography to enhance
their writing and communicate the essence of a dish:
    Stop
with the EXTREME CLOSEUPS! It’s the photographic equivalent of YELLING! I don’t
need to feel like I’ve been miniaturized and trapped in a freakishly large bowl
of bisque. No matter how ‘rustic’ or ‘artisanal’ the bisque is. If I want to
experience the ‘essence’ of a dish, I’ll cook the freaking dish.
    I recently discovered
that our camera has a special setting for ‘food,’ which tells me there are far
too many people writing about food these days.
    I’m not sure what the
setting
does
, exactly, but I’m guessing that without
it, none of my pictures of food would even look like food.
    I like to take pictures
of things that I write about, but I’m still learning. One thing I’ve learned is
to write down what the dish being photographed actually was. I have a
lot of pictures of what probably was some variation on meatloaf, but I’m not
really sure .
    I also have a tendency
to shoot all my food pictures from directly above the dish —

    —which makes an cobbler look more like aerial views of an archaeological dig site. There’s a
reason The Girlfriend takes most of the pictures now.
    While there are many
things you could say about our photo-culinary exploits, I don’t anyone
would describe our pictures as ‘food porn.’
    The term ‘
food porn’
was coined in the
mid-eighties in the book
“Female Desire,”
and the author claimed,
    “Cooking
food and presenting it beautifully is an act of servitude . . . a symbol of a
willing participation in servicing others.”
    I
have a fundamental problem with the phrase ‘food porn.’ No matter how you
define
pornography, it’s a bit of a leap
to apply the term to pictures of food.
    It’s
true that the words used by food writers are straight out of ‘Penthouse
Forum.’ Succulent. Decadent. simmering. And don’t forget all the drizzling, and
the simmering, and the oozing.

    this is not an example of food porn
    But there’s a simple test
you can apply which proves that food pictures can’t be ‘pornographic’—would you
be mortified if your mom walked in on you looking at a
picture of food?
    “Honey–I
thought you blocked the Food Network in Bobby’s room! The boy’s DVR is filled
with ‘Iron Chef’ episodes! Next thing you know he’ll be basting