Slow Motion Food

The fork, for it performs more of a textured separation and readying as compared to a spoon, is handled gingerly as if held by Leopold Stokowski leading an orchestra.  It stab-scoops up a bite of closely photographed food, pauses on the way up, and exits the frame, all of this happening in a slow motion trick designed to enhance the crumb, color, and composition of the featured recipe.

Social media is having a wonderful time creating these miniature food features which emphasize food ballet, causing salivary glands to explode in applause. But why?  You've seen them if you read Facebook; pork chops dance in air, noodles align in rows, salad fireworks dazzle the eye.  How is it that we are attracted to this new form of advertising like cats following a mouse, with enlarged pupils? Why does falling food enchant and hypnotize?

It is named Slow Motion Food Photography, and is usually combined with Macro Food Photography.  What it gives is a hyper-realism that grabs your sensory circuitry and amps up the idealized pleasures of taste, sensation, ownership, and satiation.  You want that gooey, melty, golden cheese luxuriously oscillating from between two slices of buttered bread, crusted from grilling.  It teases a survival instinct through those dramatic images showing an unctuous filling, and you imagine the glistening bite traversing down your throat after breaking through the resisting crunch of the crust with your teeth, salt on your tongue.  This magnification increases desire; it distracts, and having food makes pain temporarily disappear.

If a fork is used but disappears as it carries a morsel up to the off-screen mouth, we await the flavor and texture in our own, and are a bit miffed at the sleight-of-hand.  It feels empty, deprived, fooled by a dishonest fork.  So go get a bag of whatever is in the cupboard and substitute this for that, I wonder how often it happens.

The craziest ones are the desserts, as if layering Oreos over pudding then blending more Oreos with cream cheese in a food processor for another level won't have the family flying around the ceiling in a chemical stupor.  The fork slides through the crushed cookie layers as if they were diamonds, loads up the tines, and again pauses as if this goodness is too rich, a miracle, a mythology come to life.  It looks good even to me, and I don't care for Oreos; Lorna Doones are more my preference.

The genre has become funny, like watching a dog with it's head out a car window, yet I also miss some good recipes because I don't have patience enough to watch a lemon be juiced at so many frames per second. Just give me the facts, a straight link where I don't have to read how your little dumpling began to walk the week you were making the video so ha ha some parts had to be shot over again scroll down eighty feet for the actual recipe, and keep the redundancy down to none at all.  I don't have to read the title, the same title over again, nor the title announced again in the first sentence.  Do these people get paid by the word, or are we an audience of wombats?

Geez, I'm being nippy.

The city lights are on, the late train just pulled in at Exchange Street, sounding a horn that echoed off the buildings of downtown.  Fall is nearing, the farmer's markets are burgeoning with produce from an ending season.  Peaches are almost over, corn is going, tomatoes will follow; we will have Chippewa potatoes, peppers, pumpkins, cabbages, carrots, and cauliflower to stock our larders. Soup, always a good thing that can be made out of these.  Tuck in the kids, test the latches, pet the dog, call the cat, cover the bird.

Get yourself in and dream of time, for nothing stays the same, all you can do is grow and learn and be kind to each other.  And that is enough.  Good night, good hearts.