Whether food or otherwise, porn is still porn

THE COUPLE SAT at the end of the bar, making a point of being distanced from any of the other patrons. We see all types — those who go to bars for companionship and those who go there to avoid it. A bartender’s place is not to judge, but to simply do. We leave the judging to the priests and poets.

“How big are your sides of mashed potatoes?” said the woman in the paisley summer dress.

“Pretty big.”

“Can we get extra?”

After I walked away the couple giggled conspiratorially.

In the restaurant business, starches go a long way. I have never had anyone complain that there wasn’t enough rice, pasta or potatoes in their dish.

I set down the overflowing bowl of buttery potato goodness in front of them.

“Can we get a little more?” her partner asked.

“What?” a surprised sous-chef asked when I asked him for more. “Sure,” he said, plopping an obscene amount of potatoes onto a plate.

“Now, that’s more like it,” the couple said. He hugged her, and she hugged him. It was a little weird. I looked around for a priest or a poet.

They sat in their dark corner turning the plate of mashed potatoes around and around, peering at it from every conceivable angle. I started to feel vaguely uncomfortable, like I was watching something intimate, something forbidden.

The man took out his camera phone and began taking pictures, only increasing my discomfort.

“It’s for our blog,” she said.

Now, I got it. Food porn, they call it.

In 2000, the Daily Telegraph in the U.K. described food porn as “a backlash against low-calorie and diet foods by marketing treats that boast a high fat content and good artery-clogging potential.”

But that is only part of it. One of the last print covers of Newsweek magazine had a photograph of a woman with bright red lipstick being tantalized by a pair of dangling asparagus tips. It certainly did not leave much to the imagination, and that was the very same magazine that my grandmother used to subscribe to.

Food has certainly been sexualized before. The refrigerator scene in “9½ Weeks” or the butter scene in “Last Tango in Paris” come to mind. But now things have gone from the sublime to the ridiculous.

Porn is now defined as “television programs, magazine, books, etc. that are regarded as emphasizing the sensuous or sensational aspects of a nonsexual subject and stimulating a compulsive interest in their audience.” As such, it has entered into the American mainstream. We take ridiculously enhanced exaggerations of normal biology and carry them to extremes.

Food porn comes in two varieties, one covertly sexual and the other an obscene backlash to an overly health-conscious society. Either way it is a little uncomfortable.

Twenty-four oysters and two pork chops later, the couple was still snapping pictures, isolated in their creepy corner. They didn’t actually eat the food; I guess fantasy can supplant reality when it comes to application.

After a particularly extravagant dessert order (one that sat uneaten on the bar) I dropped off their check. But not before I was blinded by a flashbulb, not so blinded that I didn’t see that the camera was no longer focused on the food, but rather on something underneath the bar, and apparently beneath her sundress.

And I thought I had been uncomfortable before!

It left me with these thoughts:

• Porn is porn no matter the subject.

• Somewhere out there is a blog with pictures of decadently delicious mashed potatoes and a few other unmentionables.

• “In short, the problem with pornography is not that it shows too much of a person, but that it shows far too little,” said Pope John Paul II.*

• “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description (“hard-core pornography”); and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it.” Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, regarding possible obscenity in the 1958 film “The Lovers.”

• Sometimes a piece of asparagus is just a piece of asparagus. And sometimes it’s not.

• “I’m at the age where food has taken the place of sex in my life. In fact, I’ve just had a mirror put over my kitchen table,” said Rodney Dangerfield**

*Priest.

**Poet.