Voozh

👁 Food Porn (trope)

Rated M for mmmmmmmmmm.^{From L-R, top to bottom}Wakfu, Food Wars!, Kirby: Squeak Squad, Last Window, Gourmet Hound, Hannibal

"Good food is like music you can taste, color you can smell! There is excellence all around you. You need only be aware to stop and savor it."

— Chef Auguste Gusteau, Ratatouille

Food porn is two things:

Food artfully portrayed in close-up, high resolution, well-lit photography reminiscent of the way one would show a model in porn; and/or
Food given exceptional focus in any manner which causes the audience to drool over it and lust for it as if it were porn.

The second has probably existed forever, but the first is a trope primarily popularized by the modern Cooking Show, cooking magazines, cooking books, advertising, and other visual media where the food is the main focus. In visual media, the presentation goes beyond edutainment or straightforward depictions of the food and tantalizes the viewer with careful close-up shots of artfully arranged dishes or the pristine appearance of their raw ingredients, choreographed action shots of its preparation and accompanying moans of pleasure produced by the people eating them. In written media, the same can be accomplished by writing at great length with poetic, descriptive prose about the food in a similar manner.

The production of professional, high-octane food porn is an involved process. These 👁 Image
articles 👁 Image
go into detail of the technique and principles. The camera operators borrow a lot of techniques from the conventions of actual porn: "pornographic gaze", extreme close-ups with shallow Depth of Field, careful cropping and lighting, soft focus, even shapes and arrangement vaguely resembling parts of anatomy. Erotic Eating isn't this trope, but may be employed in it. The fact that the perfect food presented to the camera will be unobtainable to most people only adds to the porn appeal. Like real porn, there are also thousands of amateur examples, as Googling the term will quickly illustrate.

Alas, as in real porn, many of these orgasmic delights are photoshopped or faked some other way. This is especially true in commercials,^notethough by law they have to show the actual food being sold; the cereal may be real but the milk is white glue, the lettuce in the burger is protected by a hidden piece of cardboard... but it is also necessary: under hot studio lights, frozen food will melt, hot food goes cold, (and cold food goes lukewarm), cereal gets soggy, sauce flows into undesirable shapes or drips off the items, veggies wilt. Cooking shows, cookbooks and food magazines, on the other hand, will generally show you the real deal, even though it has been gone over by a stylist to look as good as it can. If you've ever puzzled over the term "food stylist" in credits, that's what this person does. Similarly, restaurant reviews and photographs are generally quite honest, though - particularly if the review has been commissioned by the restaurant the reviewer has gone to visit - things may be equally dressed up; the table settings are even more meticulous than normal, the tables and cutlery are polished to within an inch of their life (or possibly even replaced with ones for just such an occasion), and extreme amounts of care are taken to making sure the presentation of the food itself is nothing less than absolutely perfect.

While food porn may be decadent, exotic or sinful, food porn by itself isn't Not Safe for Work (Not Safe For Diets, on the other hand...), and doesn't involve sex. This is not to say it can't be combined or used in ways with actual sex appeal. Also no relation to aphrodisiacs. Usually. But on the other hand, Rule 34 would give the term "Food Porn" a more... literal meaning.

May happen when eating something prepared by a Supreme Chef. Compare Impossibly Delicious Food, Erotic Eating (where the act of eating the food is a blatant Visual Innuendo), Delicious Distraction or Orgasmically Delicious (In-Universe versions), Nutritional Nightmare (where you take unhealthy foods and make them even more unhealthy). See also Costume Porn and Scenery Porn.

Contrast Nausea Fuel and Poverty Food.

You might have confused this trope for Erotic Eating.

Examples:

open/close all folders

Advertising

The entire premise of dining advertisement is to make the diners want to go out and order the food being sold. Equating food with sex by having attractive individuals eating the food is one thing, but most food ads will pornograph the food itself on top of that. To achieve this end, commercial advertisements will make sure that:
- The food is viewed from angles which make its portions appear larger than they truly are.
- Certain foods (like ice cream) that cannot keep long enough to take the perfect shot are often passed over in favor of longer-lasting substitutes, or some clever substitutes are employed that look as close to the real thing as possible. Firm desserts, like cakes, cookies, pies, meringues and tarts are particularly popular subjects in dining adverts for this reason.
- Only the best takes make it in. A cook could burn 99 burgers and make 1 perfect one. Guess which one appears in the commercial?
- Actors that consume food for commercials may appear to enjoy it on camera, but spit it out afterward. This is because they must do several takes. For the same reason that many actors do not drink unless they spit, or smoke unless they don't inhale, they can't eat too much food lest it interfere with their acting abilities. Alternatively, they may actually eat the food, but they won't eat the entire thing, as getting full and unable to eat any more would equally make filming difficult after a few takes.
The Marks and Spencer advertising campaign,👁 Image
featuring lovingly videoed Food Porn accompanied by Dervla Kirwan's seductive voice proclaiming "This is not just (food), this is (list of superlatives and special techniques, food)." A very common target for parody (arguably showing it's a successful campaign and has permeated the public consciousness). For example, when Kirwan guest-starred in Doctor Who, "These are not just Cybermen..."
- The music is less pornographic, but the current iteration of the campaign 👁 Image
  voiced by Matthew Macfadyen is pretty sexy.
In a 2018 Australian outdoor dining promo video,👁 Image
there are numerous of plates and bowls containing delicious-looking food, and there are a few mouth-watering close-ups. (Trekkies would recognize the black-haired, clean-shaven young man as Evan Evagora, the model-turned-actor who portrayed Elnor on Star Trek: Picard.)
"Bowl to Soul 👁 Image
", advertising the British food company Wagamama shows details of a dish being prepared and a woman enjoying it (stylized as her playing around in a wonderland of food).
"Dear Alice": The harvested food eaten at lunchtime and stored in the fridge is very lushly and appetizingly drawn to emphasize the high quality of agriculture in the Solar Punk setting.
Qrazy Chocolates: As bizarre as the ingredients used can be, a lot of the pastries and other desserts shown on the channel look absolutely delicious.
Often subverted in the Got Milk? ad campaign: the commercial's protagonists typically eat luxurious chocolate chip cookies, brownies, pancakes, or bread thickly spread with peanut butter, shown in gorgeous close-up, only to become very uncomfortable when they realize they have no milk to wash it down. For actor Sean Whalen, the star of the "Aaron Burr" commercial featuring peanut butter, it was a real-life subversion too: filming multiple takes made him so sick of peanut butter that he claims he's never eaten it again.

Anime & Manga

Borderline-ubiquitous in Japanese media. Almost every anime and manga has a scene of food-focus, and many are entirely about food — and not always in restaurant settings. Part of the reason for this is because the food items tend to be stationary unless interacted with, they're a perfect opportunity for artists and animators to really show off how much intricate detail they can put into their work.

ACCA: 13-Territory Inspection Dept. is famous as the show that says it's about conspiracies, but is actually about bread and cakes.
Although Ah! My Goddess is more well-known for Costume Porn, Technology Porn, and Scenery Porn, there was a case of this in a manga chapter where Peorth tried to woo Keiichi by preparing him a huge, elaborate feast "which insisted on being eaten"... even after that fiasco, Keii proved he was Above the Influence and still had a nice, light dinner with Belldandy.
Anpanman has multiple food-based characters (ranging from prepared meals to single ingredient items, the titular hero himself is one of the best foods in the universe of the show), so this is natural. The finished dishes always end up looking perfect when prepared by the right person, and a lot of times, the food is the most detailed-looking items in the show.
Black Butler is this in spades just about every episode/chapter. From the type of tea Sebastian is serving, to the meal being prepared that day, everything is described and portrayed in such away that you can't help but start to salivate at the very sight of it.
A Bride's Story is filled with Scenery Porn and this trope. From food in daily meals to food-stands in markets and feasts in wedding, you will hungry when you read those chapters. At one point, there is verbal Food Porn:
Amir's brother: I want some mutton. Slices fresh off the grill, piled high on a plate. The really juicy kind! Some fried rice might work, too... pour soup all over it and shovel it in! Oh, that stuff's good!
Cat Planet Cuties has an in-universe example; the Catians decide to launch a diplomatic mission to Earth just because of Eris's description of Okinawa cuisine.
Every chapter of Cooking Papa revolves around the food Mr Araiwa gets to eat or make. Even in black and white, the meals look exquisite. To further whet the appetite, each chapter ends with how to make the dish.
Setting aside liberties taken to up the extravagant garnishing, Chūka Ichiban! highlights the varied styles of Chinese cooking, from the Guandong province to northern Beijing, detailing the ingredients used in each dish (the more realistic ones, at least), the history, and attention to detail on the techniques used to create the dishes.
Death Note is quite guilty of this throughout its first season. L spends almost every moment on screen eating some form of sweet and each scene focuses on his food quite heavily.
Delicious in Dungeon combines this with D&D-style monsters to produce lusciously illustrated depictions of Grilled Kelpie, Holy Water Sorbet or any manner of strange (but delicious-looking) creations.
D.Gray-Man: Whenever Allen eats something or thinks about food we get to see a lot of it in all its delicious detail.
Dragon Ball:
- Dragon Ball: Imagine how hungry people get after seeing all the yummy food Goku got to eat.
- Dragon Ball Super leaned heavy into this trope when Whis first tried instant ramen. After taking the first bite, he practically has an Immodest Orgasm before going into delicious detail on the simple yet scrumptious dish.
The Drops of God is like an oenophiliac's dream. It's a manga that not only has a plot based on wine, but goes into loving detail about wine whenever the chance arises. It even spawned the /a/ meme "decantering [sic]", where the restaurant is stunned into silence as he decanters "from such a height" because it's so "magnificent and jawdropping".
Emma: A Victorian Romance: The titular Emma is a maid at a rich household and cooking for her mistress is one of her tasks. Thus, we get to see (in close-up) her bake bread, make scones, serve tea, etc. as well as wealthy people attending fancy dinners where they are served numerous courses of a variety of foods.
Fate Series
- Today's Menu for the Emiya Family is a lighthearted spinoff of the franchise that focuses on the characters' daily lives and the delicious meals they cook for every kind of occasion.
- Although food isn't the focus of the series like it is in Today's Menu, Fate/kaleid liner PRISMA☆ILLYA does its best to carry on the Fate tradition, especially when Shirou is around.
Food Wars! is essentially made of food, porn and food porn. In any given episode/chapter, you will find lovingly-drawn, mouthwatering images of food (including fresh ingredients, completed dishes, and beautiful shots of in-progress cooking). The series also features almost-explicitly-sexual "foodgasms" (in which delicious food causes characters to lose their clothes and experience quasi-sexual ecstasy), along with descriptions of the why of cooking that can only be described as a culinary nerdgasm.
Fushigi Yuugi had this in its first episode when Miaka thought about the food she wanted to eat. And in a few episodes beyond.
Besides its extravagant animation, abundance of Costume Porn and attention to detail, Gankutsuou also takes great care to make you feel hungry every time the characters sit down to have a meal.
Gohan no Otomo depicts its various feature dishes in mouth-watering detail, which stands in stark contrast to the otherwise simplistic character and background designs. The full-page colours serve to make the food look even more appetizing.
Gourmet Girl Graffiti can safely be called "Food Porn: the Anime" (with its only real rival in the domain being Food Wars!). This trope and Orgasmically Delicious appears at least Once an Episode, but usually more.
Taken a bit more literally than most in Haruhi-chan, where Haruhi starts off intending to have Mikuru strip down so a life-sized Chocolate!Mikuru can be made. Played more straight with the chocolates they do make.
Hell Girl: In episode 9, "Sweet Trap," the desserts that Hiromi makes are simply divine.
Is Kichijoji the Only Place to Live? often focuses on the delicious snack foods the main characters treat their clients to.
I Want Your Mother To Be With Me!: The food from Kobaiken (Yuzuki's family's restaurant) is drawn in lavish detail.
JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable: In the anime episode "Let's Go Eat Italian Food", Josuke and Okuyasua visit a new Italian restaurant run by Tonio Trussardi. The dishes are presented in a quite appetite-whetting manner, and even the depiction of the effects of eating them is not enough to kill the appetite in-universe.
Kaze no Shōjo Emily takes place in rural Canada and has at least two major characters that are farmers (Lofty John and Jimmy Murray), leading to a lot of shots of farm produce. Camera shots particularly fixate on apples.
Kenichi: The Mightiest Disciple shows Chikage having a food porn moment by apparently getting a sugar high just from looking at food. She isn't normally allowed to have sweets...
It is impossible to watch an episode of K-On! without drooling over Tsumugi's cakes.
In Laid-Back Camp, food is portrayed with incredible detail: from grilled meat, to onsen fried eggs, nabe and campfire curry. The food evidently tastes as good as it looks, given the characters' enjoyment of their meals.
Maid-Sama!: Usui is an exceptionally good cook. You will be drooling by the end of chapters in which he cooks.
Not Love But Delicious Foods Make Me So Happy by Fumi Yoshinaga (who also made Antique Bakery). There's a new restaurant visit in every episode.
Oishinbo revolves around a pair of journalists sent by the newspaper company they work for to search for food and recipes to create the "ultimate menu", and most of the foods they encounter are drawn to show how such delicious foods would look like.
Ouran High School Host Club has a great deal of focus on elaborate foods.
Volume 3 of Our Dreams at Dusk has a few examples of lovingly-drawn food, such as the awkward lunch Utsumi attends. One scene in particular focuses on the protagonist trying onomichi ramen for the first time, complete with his mental commentary:
Tasuku's thoughts: The biting flavor of fish broth with soy on the thin noodles is... But the minced pork back floods it all with a rich texture. For a soul weary from walking...
Tasuku: It's good.
One Piece: Sanji's cooking, and other fancy dishes...
Penguindrum: Beautiful-looking meals are a regular feature, including: Yuri's picnic lunch, Himari and Ringo's bento, a stew-based dinner, cookies and tea, an artfully plated fancy dinner...and because the director seems to have a fondness for a certain curry-related pun, multiple variations on Japanese curry.
Princess Connect! Re:Dive: The series loves food so much that nearly every episode is named after a dish and the main characters are in an adventuring party with the stated objective of sampling food from across the kingdom. You had better believe that it's got loving close-ups on rice balls, omelettes, mugs of boulliabaisse and even, much to the distaste of Karyl, fried bugs.
Puella Magi Madoka Magica. Despite being extremely dark, ominous, and/or philosophical for 99% of the runtime, a scene is still devoted to enjoying Mami's beautiful and delicious cakes. The sequel movie has all the characters sing a song about food to turn a monster into a giant multilayer cake.
Ranma ½ revels in this trope. To the point most of Ranma's suitors realize that they have more chance to win him over by going Through His Stomach rather than Show Some Leg.
Real Drive will make you want the sundaes that Minamo and her friends eat. Generally, food is depicted beautifully in the series, along with other things.
Revolutionary Girl Utena: While not not as rich in examples as later works directed by Kunihiko Ikuhara, each time Anthy makes shaved ice it looks appealing. There are also a variety of charmingly decorated cakes that appear throughout the show, often single-handedly eaten by Chu-Chu (even though they are larger than he is).
Restaurant to Another World is about a restaurant, so the food porn has narrative justification. The people in the fantasy world love them some Japanese comfort food.
Ristorante Paradiso revolves around a restaurant in Rome. Naturally, lots of attention is put into both food and wine.
Sailor Moon has a lot of this. Especially evident whenever Usagi got to eat something.
She Loves to Cook, and She Loves to Eat: Pages and pages of the manga are dedicated to detailed illustrations of Nomoto and Kasuga cooking and eating.
Shirokuma Cafe likes showing off their food, especially the desserts. One instance then subverts this when parfait samples in the images of Polar Bear, Panda, and Penguin are quickly demolished by two enthusiastic patrons, causing Polar Bear to change his mind about serving the desserts as a special item on his menu.
Silver Nina has multiple chapters centered on young Nina, who has until then grown up in Europe, getting to try out Japanese foods with her uncle. The food itself frequently receives great attention to detail.
Silver Spoon absolutely loves showing off its rural food. In the author's extra manga about the drawing process, she mentions that the assistant who is in charge of drawing the food in the manga pretty much deprives herself of food during drawing sessions, so as to make the food look more delicious on paper. It's kind of like drawing pretty girls when you're single (according to the author).
In Space☆Dandy, the second episode is dedicated to the crew looking for the perfect ramen. While there is some iffy alien cuisine present, the characters eat it all without complaint, and it's hard to finish the episode and not want to fix yourself a giant bowl of the stuff.
From Spice and Wolf, Holo loves food of all kinds, and her wolf nature means that Lawrence often has to describe new human foods to her. No one will blame you if you drool over the description of honey-pickled peaches with figs and almonds.
The second ending sequence for the SPY×FAMILY anime shows the Forger family cooking together, and then a beautifully animated shot of all the dishes they made.
Studio Ghibli films 👁 Image
are stuffed with this. From the assorted piles of spirit food in Spirited Away, to fresh vegetables being picked and washed in My Neighbor Totoro, to bacon and eggs sizzling in a pan in Howl's Moving Castle, it's liable to make mouths water in viewers who haven’t eaten in a couple of hours.
Superman Vs. Meshi has this SO much, that this could practically be renamed "Food porn: The manga". Each chapter has detailed descriptions and imagery of Japanese cuisine with Superman's reaction always being that the food is delicious and speaking in Purple Prose about it.
Most of the dishes in Tamayura are presented nicely, but extra points go to the sweets prepared by Fuu's grandmother.
'Tis Time for "Torture," Princess: Many of the "tortures" involve tempting the Princess to talk with delicious food, vividly drawn and described.
Toriko: Do NOT read this manga on an empty stomach. The manga itself regularly spends at least a third of each chapter simply having people eat. The genius of the artist is that somehow it manages to make you salivate — even when the food is in black-and-white!
- What is possibly even worse is that, unlike with most other examples of Food Porn, the food described in Toriko doesn't exist, but the flavors the food is based on do. So during the description of say a meat that is a perfect combination of the best pork you have ever eaten and the best crab in the world, you salivate and imagine eating, only to be brought back to the cruel reality that this meat doesn't exist. Sheer mental torture.
Wakako Zake unsurprisingly has some of this, being a manga that's almost exclusively about enjoying food and drink. The drawings of food are less gratuitously detailed than in many other examples, but they're still more lovingly drawn than the characters or backgrounds.
The Wallflower: Half the manga revolves around mealtimes, with panels devoted to displaying Sunako's culinary creations before they dig in.
The Way of the Househusband: Whenever Tatsu cooks (which is pretty much every second chapter), it results in detailed, hunger-inducing shots of the food in question.
Two works by Chica Umino, Honey and Clover and March Comes in Like a Lion, portrays most of the meals shown with loving detail.
Welcome to Japan, Ms. Elf!: Various Earth foods are very well-described^noteGenerally Japanese food, but other nations' food do crop up. This is justified by the fact that the other world's food quality is generally not great, partly due to lack of seasonings. Marie, Wridra, and others who tasted Earth food generally has quite extreme reaction when eating, sometimes bordering on Orgasmically Delicious. Also, food (and their containers) are the only items he's allowed to bring from Japan to the other world (and, after a bit of experimentation, the reverse). Even basic food like home-made katsudon and gyoza end up lovingly illustrated.
What Did You Eat Yesterday? is based off of this. It can go for pages just listing food ingredients, how you make the food, and just showing off food. At times it can be hard to remember it's a Slice of Life Boys' Love series.
Yakitate!! Japan deserves a mention as it consists mostly of baking duels.
The entire point of Cooking Master Boy, plus cooking tournaments and duels.
Yoake Mae Yori Ruriiro Na: Inverted. Due to serious production problems, the anime tried to pass a green ball with squiggly lines off as a cabbage. It was so embarrassing it made the term "cabbage" shorthand in Japan for an anime production falling apart. What makes this notable, however, is that this incident is considered the reason why anime lavish so much attention on Food Porn — to avoid reminding people how terrible the cabbage in Crescent Love looked.
Yumeiro Pâtissière has sparkling pastries that send their eaters on adventures.
Yuri Kuma Arashi: Shared food as a symbol of togetherness is a theme throughout the series; for example, Sumika and Kureha share a glossy, golden-brown chikuwa roll in the first episode. Ginko's Spaghetti Napolitan definitely deserves a mention here, made specifically because it is Kureha's favorite.

Comic Books

Chew:
- The main character's girlfriend is a food critic with the ability to describe food so accurately and vividly that people actually taste the food. She writes Food Porn Literature.
- For a literal example, a oneshot character is a food photographer whose works actually induce orgasms in the viewers.
While Anthony Bourdain's Get Jiro! is first and foremost a satire on trendy cuisine, it is also a love letter to good cooking.
All the dishes presented throughout Seconds (2014) are drawn with lovingly detail. This is a comic about restaurants after all.
Quite common in Asterix whenever food is being served, especially since Obelix is a Big Eater. The Pirate Captain's birthday feast in Asterix and the Great Crossing is a prime example. Feast your eyes.👁 Image
Dollicious: Since it is a show about cooking, it pretty much centers around this. One story has Ramen make every dessert in the cook book.
French comic Magda Cuisiniere Intergalactique runs on this: it's all about an interplanetary cooking competition, with much emphasis on the choice and provenance if ingredients, and twelve-year-old heroine Magda is a passionate and creative cook. There are recipes in the back of the albums.

Comic Strips

A Bloom County strip features Portnoy watching a late night commercial for "Boo-Boo Burgers". The viewpoint is from the side, so you can't see the screen, but the soundtrack of "someone eating a Boo-Boo Burger" could have been lifted verbatim from one of the more... climactic... scenes of just about any convenient porno. The strip ends with Portnoy grumpily paying for a Boo-Boo Burger, while commenting on his hatred for them.
One FoxTrot Sunday strip had nothing but detailed panels of Peter making coffee, bacon and eggs, peanut buttered toast, and orange juice. In the last panel, Peter is smelling his breakfast, and Roger, with a glass of brown liquid nearby him, comments "I'm telling you, Andy, NOBODY starts a diet on a Sunday!", to which Andy responds "Roger, pipe down and drink your breakfast.".

Fan Works

Hetalia: Axis Powers fanfic Cucinando…Sōkoku?👁 Image
: The author sure gives some nice descriptions of the Vicciola Pepper Filet Mignon and Kobe Beef Tataki Italy and Japan had finished making during their so-called "cooking competition".
At the end of said hour, Italy and Japan had finally finished and had prepared enough for everyone present to have two plates each with all able to try both of theirs. Four pieces of Vicciola meat marinated in olive oil, fat, butter, and sauce were seasoned with kosher salt and cracked black pepper with rosemary sprinkled on top and potato wedges on the side were on the Italian's dishes while several slices of Kobe beef slathered in chili oil and sprinkled with cracked black pepper and sea salt with enokitake and tatsoi on the sides were on the Japanese's.
Steven Universe fanfic Just a Normal Coffee Shop is supposedly set in a coffee shop (it's not), some of the food and drink descriptions can get very detailed:
- Steven's hot chocolate in Chapter 1: Sweet, rich, creamy, with a delicious drizzling of syrup and cinnamon on top
- Pearl's cinnamon tea and apple pie in Chapter 3
  As the dark steaming liquid swirled inside the porcelain, the fragrance of cinnamon wafted to her nose. Mixed with the sweet aroma of apple pie, it was simply divine and Pearl couldn't help the dreamy, almost obscene sigh that left her lips. She then grabbed her fork, carefully stabbing the tip of the pie. It was a delight to hear the crust crunch as the tines sank into it, and then watch the filling ooze out as she brought the fork further down, breaking a piece off. Ah, such decadence!
The Touhou Project doujin series titled Koishi the Loving Gourmet, in which the eponymous character (who is Invisible to Adults, btw) is sharing the meal with other Gensokyo residents. And by 'sharing', we mean that she's dining without paying — if they don't know you're there, they can't charge you any.
The fanfiction A Feast Of Foods 👁 Image
parodies A Song of Ice and Fire's tendency to use this.
Jon had broken his fast on only a small sliver of garlic sausage and a raw onion. And a fresh bun, filled with raisins, pine nuts, and apple. With butter. And half a duck. And a bowl of lamb stew, simmered in ale and wild herbs.
Cori Falls is shameless about this trope to the point where later in her fanficcing career half the story is just talking about what the characters ate. The lady could have had a promising career in writing restaurant brochures.
Small Problems 👁 Image
has this in the last chapter whenever the author is describing pancakes.
In When the Moon Fell in Love with the Sun Peeta gets elevated from "baker's son who's pretty good with icing" to Supreme Chef who seems to be trying to win Katniss' heart by going through her stomach. About 20% of the entire story is dedicated to lavish descriptions of luxurious and delicious food and Katniss' rapturous reactions to it.
In And the Giant Awoke Tyrion hires Jelena, a skilled and very creative Essosi chef. Every meal described afterwards is a homage to the wide variety of foods she comes up with, from potages to sandwiches to the most lavish feasts of King's Landing.
In Infinity Train: Blossoming Trail, there are multiple instances of food being described and cooked as part of Author Appeal. In fact, you know that Green Phantom Queen has written certain parts of the original three stories of the Blossomverse solely because of this trope.
In Harry Is A Dragon, And That's Okay, quite a number of the Hogwarts feasts (especially the Halloween and Christmas ones) have the food described in loving detail. Extra emphasis is on how magical they get, allowing food to be shaped into impossible displays with amazing tastes. Just as an example from Harry's second-year Halloween feast, one dessert is a brownie and sponge layer cake, cemented with caramel, covered in a chocolate shell and shaped into a full-sized pumpkin! With lemon aftertaste!
- And then the Hogwarts house elves are gifted Muggle cookbooks by the Weasley Twins and more modern food starts showing up, like pizza and paella.
- Even Dragon!Harry, who can eat literally anything, has his own specially-made food stylized just as artistically, with just as unusual tastes. He finds a metal cleaver made of mixed metals quite unusual, but thinks that the iridium in it provides a nice spice.
A Mother's Touch: Yoko spends the first part of Chapter 6 making a delicious stack of chocolate-chip pancakes with extra syrup and whipped cream. This has a justification in-universe because she's using them to lure out Sora so he can tell her what he knows about the Fusion Dimension. And also because, just like Infinity Train: Blossoming Trail, the author is a major foodie.
A Stack of Fresh-Fried Parathas 👁 Image
, a collection of vignettes regarding Kamala and Bruno, as friends and as a couple, features food as a major theme throughout. To quote the introduction: "A Pakistani girl and an Italian boy fall in love. Of course food is part of the story."
The Bolt Chronicles: In "The Teacher," Dr. Vanderbilt appears as a guest in Penny's Home Ec class and makes over-the-top fancy breakfast fare. Penny's description of the various dishes is enough to cause her friend to drool.
In Thy Good Neighbor, Lord Fairchild keeps a splendid table. When first meeting Lord Stark, he serves a serving of spiced Wassail cider as an opening along with a variety of asparagus over a peppered sauce, scallops served in browned butter, and bacon-wrapped prunes soaked in tea, for preparation to the main course of a large stuffed goose with all the accoutrements (particularly roasties, which are unknown in Westeros), and finishes with a spot of tea and a strawberry tart; all together, while in Yharnam it may simply be the Sunday dinner of a well-to-do upper class family, in Westeros it is a royal feast. He continues the tradition when welcoming the Stark children, and even often sharing food normally considered fit for a lord's table with the guards.
In Dread Our Wrath, A great number of foods are described in loving detail. So much so that it received its own page!👁 Image
"No Reservations In Narnia 👁 Image
": A Crack Fic crossover with the late Anthony Bourdain and his camera crew taking a food tour of Narnia. Given Lewis's love of this trope and Bourdain's career, the prose is loaded with descriptions of Narnian food. Even the Marsh-wiggle cooking is described with great and careful detail.

Film — Animated

From the Disney Animated Canon:
- Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: The Evil Queen invokes this with the poisoned apple. After coating it with Sleeping Death poison, she commands it to "turn red to tempt Snow White, to make her hunger for a bite". Sure enough, the apple turns a bright, appetizing shade of red, making it all the more tempting for Snow White (and the audience).
- Beauty and the Beast features Food Porn during the "Be Our Guest" musical number when the servants treat Belle for dinner.
- The Princess and the Frog: As Tiana's goal is to open a restaurant, the glorious depiction of food is prominent in this film. The breakfast-serving montage in the diner offers a mouth-watering display of food and it seems that even non-transformed animals are in love with the fine New Orleans fare.
Coraline features this during the scenes where Coraline ate dinner with the Other Mother. Never wanted to have a chandelier that double as a milkshake dispenser so badly. Also, who could forget:
Other Mother: (opens a box) They're cocoa beetles... from Zanzibar! (takes a bite)
Played straight with Twilight Sparkle in My Little Pony: Equestria Girls 1 when she eats an apple without using her hands.
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and its sequel, even when it's Anthropomorphic Food — at times, of the homicidal kind.
Isle of Dogs features a scene roughly halfway in the movie of a chef preparing a traditional bento box in great detail, complete with fresh fish, crab, squid, vinegar rice, and wasabi poison.
Over the Hedge, especially during the scene where RJ teaches the family of animals how humans treat food.
Ratatouille: The Pixar animators that worked on the movie made careful studies of food and chefs to get the look right and it shows, complete with carefully crafted closeups. The sensual enjoyment of food is one of the themes that drives its main character, Remy. Most of the other entries on this list are about the pleasure of eating. Ratatouille emphasizes the artistry involved in cooking the food. And then there's the closeup of the titular ratatouille itself at the climax.
Sausage Party ends with literal Food Porn via an orgy.
The hot chocolate Ned Flanders prepares for Bart in The Simpsons Movie is deliciously over-exaggerated in the number of toppings he gives it. First a mountain of whipped cream, then shaved chocolate, then a vanilla wafer, topped with more whipped cream to act as glue for a marshmallow, then finally toasting the marshmallow with a kitchen torch. Bart initially rejected Ned's hot chocolate as he believed "cocoa's for wusses", until he sees how Ned makes it. He immediately yanks the cup right out of the window and races down his treehouse to have it all for himself, leading to...
Bart: Oh my God!
Jin Lee's introduction in Turning Red has him cooking dumplings with slow-mos, lots of closeups on the near-photorealistic ingredients, emphasis on the moisture, and sizzles.

Film — Live-Action

The Age of Innocence: The 1993 film version has several over-the-top sumptuous shots of elaborate gourmet dishes. It helps set the film's mood of decadent 19th-century upper class extravagance.
Avatar: Has a flicker of this when Avatar Grace tosses Avatar Jake a Pandoran fruit and, well, to put it this way: "He takes a bite of her big, juicy fruit."
Babette's Feast: Lovingly displays the entire process of preparing the meal. Like Tampopo, this is a movie that will make viewers suddenly realize they want to eat.
Birds of Prey (2020): Has Harley Quinn's beloved bacon-and-egg sandwich from Sal's, made step by step in mouthwatering detail while Harley gushes about each ingredient. For extra points, the whole scene is basically a parody of the Male Gaze.
Captain America: The First Avenger: Colonel Phillips initially tries to bribe an imprisoned Dr. Zola with a tray holding a prime cut of steak, tater tots, steamed broccoli, and a glass of milk...and with the Reality Subtext of rationing during World War II, it's probably even stronger in-universe. When Zola refuses, Phillips just helps himself to the meal.
Chef (2014): is full of this, to the point where the last forty minutes basically dispenses the plot and focuses on the cast making Cuban sandwiches and other delights around the country.
Chocolat: A movie about a woman trying to change the world through a chocolate shop wouldn't be complete without beauty shots of it to match.
Compulsion (2013) features Amy, who is obsessed with making every dish perfect because she associates food with love. As a result, her presentation is always very detailed, with numerous comments on the various spices and seasoning she has used.
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover: Never has cannibalism been so tempting.
Daisies: The two protagonists spend most of the film ravenously eating as much food as they can stuff in their mouth. The infamous sequence with the Food Fight is a supreme example. Never watch this movie with an empty stomach.
Daughters of the Dust: That crab and shrimp gumbo family dinner looks so delicious.
Eat Drink Man Woman: The protagonist of this movie, Tao Chu, is a professional Chinese chef who cooks a scrumptious dinner for his three unmarried daughters once a week. The movie starts by showing him cooking one of those with gorgeous cinematography, and other similar scenes of food preparation and serving appear throughout the movie. The entire film could be considered one big Festival of Food Porn for Chinese cuisine.
Good Burger: If there's one positive note that would be said about this critically panned film, it's how delicious the burgers at the titular restaurant look (hence the film's title), especially with the secret sauce made by the dim-witted employee, Ed.
GoodFellas: The movie uses Food Porn as an ongoing motif to represent Henry Hill's high-class mafia lifestyle and the perks that it offers. As a wiseguy Henry is always eating like a king and the film pays close attention to the meals he has; all the mobsters always seem to have their meetings at fancy restaurants or over dinner at each others' houses, and even when Henry gets sent to jail he and the rest of the wiseguys he's locked up with still manage to have pasta with homemade sauce, wine, and even friggin' lobster every single night. Henry's narration of events even pauses several times in the movie so he can go into detail over how the food on-screen is being prepared. When Paulie finally tells Henry to get lost and leave the mafia, he's cooking sausages in a pan while Henry (having lost weight from his cocaine addiction) looks on hungrily. At the end of the film when Henry has to leave his old life behind and become "an average nobody" he laments that an order for spaghetti with marinara sauce now only gets him egg noodles and ketchup.
Hairspray: The Sidekick Song "Big, Blonde, and Beautiful" is Food Porn set to music. And when Edna crashes Maybelle's party to take Tracy away, Maybelle entices her to stay with a soul food spread.
Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle: The White Castle commercial that sends Harold and Kumar on their quest. It even includes sleazy-sounding porn music. There's also the Burger Shack drive-thru guy's description of White Castle burgers. Harold and Kumar's White Castle meal itself, specifically just before both of them eat the whole thing, is pretty darn good looking as well.
Harry Potter: Sometimes shows up, especially during the feasts at Hogwarts, or that pudding that Dobby ruins in Chamber of Secrets.
Hook: The feast of imaginary food, once Peter begins to believe in it, is seen by the audience in full splendor.
Idiocracy: Parodies the trope with a video of a girl cutting a piece of steak with her feet on the porn channel.
Jiro Dreams of Sushi: This 2011 arthouse documentary has been described as about 80 minutes of this trope. Many reviews suggest that if you don't eat before seeing the film, make sure you have dinner reservations immediately after, because you will be drooling by the time it's over. (Word of advice, though: don't go for sushi: you'll probably be disappointed unless the place you go to is nearly as world-class as Jiro's.)
Julie & Julia: Particularly the way they present the filet of sole in the scene with Julia Child and her husband at the Parisian restaurant soon after transferring over from China, the scenes dealing with the boeuf bourgignon, and even the scenes with pre-Julia era Julie Powell making a bruschetta with a tomato salad topping that looks mouthwateringly delectable. Some of the recipes Julie recites, too, such as the chocolate cream pie (Word of God is that's Nora Ephron's recipe, not Julie's) and chicken with mushrooms, port, cream and butter. Ooh la la!
Last Holiday: Features a lot of delectable food. Justified, as Georgia wants to be a chef, and works in a department store in Kitchen Wares.
Laurel and Hardy: Verbal food porn would show up in some movies — in "Pardon Us" they're in prison going on a hunger strike, when a guard lures them out of it by describing a sumptuous feast being served in the mess hall (which of course was a lie). In "Block-Heads", Ollie reunites with his long-lost Army buddy Stanley and invites him home to his wife's cooking that he lovingly describes. Naturally, his wife isn't keen on the idea (it being their anniversary is one reason).
Marie Antoinette (2006): Contains several displays of mouth-watering desserts.
The Matrix: Cypher comments on the taste and juiciness of a piece of steak that he is about to eat, although he knows it isn't real. Then there are the orgasm-inducing cakes the Merovingian serves.
The Menu is a film about an Evil Chef who sets up a group of rich customers for an increasingly deranged culinary experience designed to mock and insult them. Each and every one of the courses he serves is depicted in sumptuous detail on screen, in a manner homaging the Netflix cooking series Chef's Table. Ironically, during filming, the food sat out for so long that it was often cold and fairly unpalatable by the time they finally served it to the actors to eat on screen.
North Korea: This country's films have a suspicious tendency to do this.
- O Youth!!: 1994. Features several lavish dinners, which is even more remarkable since it was produced in the depths of the horrible famine of The '90s that killed something like 10% of the North Korean population.
- The Schoolgirl's Diary: 2006. Has several shots showing the large meals the family eats. Enough to give one the impression that the film is yelling, "Hey, look at how much food we have! Our nation is so prosperous and not starving at all!"
Pan's Labyrinth: The Pale Man sits in front of a table full of fresh, tantalizing food. Do not eat any of it.
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. Brief in-universe example: due to the nature of his curse, Barbossa cannot taste anything. So he invites Elizabeth to dinner and just watches her eat and drink. The look on his face while this happens is, in the words of Director Gore Verbinski, "like a vampire seeing blood."
The Princess Diaries: Present during scenes where Mia is training to be a princess by learning how to eat properly, as well as the State Dinner scene where we get close-ups on each food item.
Quentin Tarantino: A favorite trope of the director.
- Quite a few food-related scenes in Pulp Fiction: The one in Enemy Eats Your Lunch when Jules enjoys Brett's burger and soda, or Mia and Vincent in the diner standing out.
- Inglourious Basterds: The strudel scene. Set in WWII, so the strudel was rather something.
- Django Unchained features the tastiest-looking beer you'll ever see. The cake's not too bad either. And the iced tea looks really refreshing.
- Death Proof: The gross way Stuntman Mike eats his nachos does not diminish how appetizing they look.
- The Hateful Eight: The stew at Minnie's looks amazing.
The Santa Clause: Played With when the camera pans over a very appetizing Christmas dinner...and then pulls back to reveal that it's on a TV screen while Scott Calvin is busy extinguishing a burning turkey.
The Shop Around the Corner: When Mr, Matuschek invites errand boy Rudy to share Christmas dinner with him:
Matuschek: Rudy, do you like chicken noodle soup?
Rudy: I certainly do, Mr. Matuschek.
Matuschek: And what would you think of roast goose stuffed with baked apples, and fresh boiled potatoes in butter, and some red cabbage on the side, huh?
Rudy: I'd love it!
Matuschek: And then some cucumber salad with sour cream...
Rudy: Oh, Mr. Matuschek!
Soul Food: With multiple displays of yummy... soul food (with a theme being how important those meals are to the family). Collard greens, macaroni and cheese, sweet potatoes, etc. You will walk out of that movie hungry.
Tampopo: It blurs the line between Food Porn and fetish in the romantic scenes featuring a good deal of Erotic Eating, the rest of the movie is focused on the protagonist producing the perfect ramen, with visuals to match.
Waitress: The shots of not just the gorgeous pies, but how lovingly they were made.
Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971), and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005): Food Porn is pretty much a given in both. But if you want to experience true chocogasm, be sure to watch the opening of the 1971 version.

Literature

The Affinity Bridge: Spends a lot of time on the 1800s British food the main character eats.
Anton Chekhov:
- On Mortality: A Carnival Tale: This darkly humorous short story is several pages of a glorious Food Porn, which suddenly ends with the main character dying of a stroke right before eating the best piece of meal.
- The Siren is full of lush descriptions of Russian cuisine. It also overlaps with Delicious Distraction in this case.
The Baby-Sitters Club: Especially prominent in Dawn and Claudia books of the series.
Breakfast of Champions: Mentions a science-fiction novel that Kilgore Trout wrote about a planet where food was scarce, so the inhabitants' pornography is people eating food slowly and happily.
The Brotherhood of the Black Flag: Has several vivid descriptions of meals provided in a variety of locations, from taverns to fancy balls. Captain Reynard has a tradition of welcoming new crew members with a lavish feast shared with his officers, and Michael McNamara is no exception.
Campfire Cooking in Another World with My Absurd Skill extensively describes the cooking process of each dish Mukohda prepares, all of which leads to mouth-watering results that the denizens of the world find absolutely divine. His cooking is also what leads him to forming a contract with a legendary beast. The anime adaptation wastes no screentime giving closeups of the finished dishes. If you ate something beforehand, expect to feel hungry again.
The Cat Who... Series: Qwill, a lover of good eats, is often treated to great dishes from gourmands, restaurants, and charming home-cooks, each of which are described in scrumptious detail.
A Christmas Carol: introduces the Ghost of Christmas Present sitting on a throne of mouth watering food. The same ghost takes Ebenezer to the market where the groceries look just as delicious. Even the humble meal at the Cratchit's house is much fawned over.
Crazy Rich Asians: Both the novel and its film adaptation are full of lavish descriptions of the best food Singapore has to offer, from the famed Lau Pa Sat hawker centre to the spread at Nick's grandmother's mansion.
The Crosses-Boy's Counselor: Since the novel's setting is in Jamaica, it gets pretty descriptive about the local cuisine. For example, Sitara and Carolyn have a breakfast meeting at a local restaurant in Montego Bay where Sitara is eating a traditional Jamaican meal of ackee and saltfish with boiled bananas, fried dumplings, and bammy slices, along with a cup of jasmine tea.
C. S. Lewis:
- The Chronicles of Narnia: Occurs frequently throughout the series, most notably the feast conjured up by Bacchus at the end of Prince Caspian.
  - This article 👁 Image
    explains why Turkish Delight was important enough to Edmund to sell out his family to the White Witch.
- Mere Christianity 👁 Image
  : Food Porn is used as an analogy to discuss regular pornography — basically, that if an audience had the same reaction to a presentation of food as to pornography, one might assume they come from a country in the middle of a famine and are starving. However, the "starving" theory is immediately picked apart when Lewis points out that the next step would be to determine whether there was in fact a famine and that no one could accuse our society (and in The '50s at that) of being undersexed. (See the Quotes wiki for the full quote):
You can get a large audience together for a striptease act (...) Now suppose you come to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon...
- The Screwtape Letters: Lewis discusses Food Porn briefly, calling it "gluttony of delicacy," an overly sensuous concern with the taste and appearance of food that doesn't involve overeating.
Dead Souls: Those squires like to eat.
Discworld:
- In The Wee Free Men, Tiffany is subjected to Food Porn as a traditional ploy of The Fair Folk, with the twist that she's more tempted by a vast and varied selection of cheeses than by sweets. She's a dairy worker, and was curious what they'd taste like.
- Unseen Academicals:
  - A lot of detail is given about the deliciousness of Glenda's pies. Given that she's a cook at the Unseen University, whose wizards are notoriously fond of their meals, it's not surprising that her food holds a high standard.
  - Glenda's grandmother, who was the cook at the Assassin's Guild, had Vetinari practically salivating at the fond memory of that cooking. He is pleased Glenda has continued with that level of skill.
- Thief of Time has a mouth-wateringly detailed description of a high-class chocolate shop. Susan and Unity go on to weaponise the chocolate against the Auditors who have a Weaksauce Weakness against it.
- C.M.O.T. Dibbler's sausages-in-a-bun, however, are Food Gorn more often than naught... but that only happens when they actually enter someone's mouth. Up until that point, they quite often look remarkably appetizing, as do his pies. The recipient, in any case, can identify everything that went into their production, and then immediately wish they hadn't.
- Conversational Troping in The Fifth Elephant, when Vimes reflects that the way people think about food and sex are comparable: "it fascinated people, they sometimes bought books full of complicated recipes and interesting pictures, and sometimes when they were really hungry they created vast banquets in their imagination — but at the end of the day they'd settle quite happily for egg and chips. If it was well done and maybe had a slice of tomato."
- In Witches Abroad, Mrs. Gogol's Genuan cooking (which doubles as the medium where she sees the future) is described as astonishing, even if most foreigners would probably not be comfortable with the amount of many-legged swamp creatures that go into it. Even Mrs. Pleasant, a very good chef in her own right, is blown away by it.
- When the Wizzard Rincewind is stranded, first in the Discworld's Far East and later on in its Australia, this trope becomes explicit. Rescued by a tribe of nubile women who have no men, who promise they will do anything he wants, the particular unfulfilled craving that has given him lurid and frustrating dreams for months on end is the first thing on his mind. He asks them if they have any potatoes.
All of the Dragaera books contain loving description of food, wine, cooking, and Yendi both starts and ends with an extended "onions" metaphor. Read Dzur without getting hungry at least once. It's impossible. (To clarify, each chapter of the book begins with an overly long description of each course of a seventeen-course meal in the finest restaurant in the world, which the main character eats casually while waiting for every assassin in the city to learn he's back in town.)
Dying Earth: All meals in the series are described in exquisite detail, and all are either lavishly this trope or nauseatingly inedible with no middle ground.
Earth's Children: Contains very detailed descriptions of Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon cuisine. It will likely leave the reader with a craving for a nice, juicy slice of wooly mammoth.
Elizabeth Chadwick:
- Her novels of Norman England and the Angevin Empire frequently contain vivid descriptions of food; most notably at grand occasions like weddings, coranations, and religious feast days, but also on a smaller scale in cozy family gatherings.
Ella Enchanted: Has a lot of this. Especially pronounced seeing as how one of the characters (Mandy) is an excellent cook.
In Emergence, Candy's descriptions of some of her meals while in the shelter come close, but her descriptions of meals prepared by Supreme Chef Adam definitely qualify. The reader will be in the kitchen in need of a snack after reading any one of said descriptions.
Enid Blyton:
- Her books are bound to feature this, given that she was writing during WW2 when rationing was causing, if not hunger, then definitely a craving to pig out on Forbidden Fruit. It's a wonder the girls in her boarding school series can even move after one term. The series' have usually forbidden midnight feasts.
The Famous Five: Famously described all the kids' meals in meticulous detail. "And lashings and lashings of Ginger Beer!"
Fluke: The titular stray dog's persistent hunger leads to tantalisingly vivid descriptions of any available food.
The Girl Who Chased The Moon: Does this with cakes, to the point where one edition of the book even has recipes for three of them in the back. There's also a big deal made of southern-style barbecue pork sandwiches (the preparation, the different varieties).
Goblin Market spares no detail in describing the succulent fruits the goblins sell, courtesy of two protracted monologues — one at the beginning, and one near the end — that describe the sheer variety of delectable fruit they have to offer.
Come buy our orchard fruits,
Come buy, come buy:
Apples and quinces,
Lemons and oranges,
Plump unpecked cherries—
Melons and raspberries,
Bloom-down-cheeked peaches,
Swart-headed mulberries,
Wild free-born cranberries,
Crab-apples, dewberries,
Pine-apples, blackberries,
Apricots, strawberries—
All ripe together
In summer weather—
Morns that pass by,
Fair eves that fly;
Come buy, come buy;
Our grapes fresh from the vine,
Pomegranates full and fine,
Dates and sharp bullaces,
Rare pears and greengages,
Damsons and bilberries,
Taste them and try:
Currants and gooseberries,
Bright-fire-like barberries,
Figs to fill your mouth,
Citrons from the South,
Sweet to tongue and sound to eye,
Come buy, come buy.
Gone with the Wind: Has lots of good old Southern comfort food porn, either detailing the rich meals that Scarlett and her family enjoyed during good times, or detailing the bitter memories of what they couldn't eat during the last years of the war during Tara's years of poverty.
The Hardy Boys: the series originally included extended, lavish descriptions of meals. Series creator Edward Stratemeyer reasoned that since teenage boys have huge appetites, they'd appreciate such detail. Later editions of the earlier volumes saw such passages removed, in accordance with the growing preference of young readers for dialogue and action over description.
Harry Potter: Each school year opens with a huge welcoming feast. Christmas dinners also get this treatment, as you'd expect. One of the "rules" of the Harry Potter series is that in any scene set during a meal in the Great Hall, it will always be mentioned what food is being served, even if it's only in a throwaway line. Apparently, a book Rowling read as a child (The Little White Horse, specifically) did this and she liked it.
Heidi: Every other paragraph is a loving description of the fresh milk and creamy cheese that her grandfather makes on his farm. You want the cheese toast.
In His Only Wife Afi prepares three meals for her husband Eli when he calls to say he will be at their flat (for the first time in weeks), since she does not really know what he likes and really wants to please him: "akple and okro soup, fufu and light soup, and yam and red fish stew." She also puts great care into choosing ingredients and preparing meals. Even if the reader is not familiar with Ghanaian food or even with West African food in general, they might end up drooling.
While at sea, Horatio Hornblower doesn't usually get anything better than preserved brine meat, hard biscuit with weevils and "coffee" that's just burnt bread in hot water. So when he does get actual good food, it's described in great detail. Pellew's dinner in Hornblower and the Hotspur is the high point; several pages are used to describe the steak-and-kidney pie, ragout, fresh vegetables, wine and cheeses, with some rather amusing Purple Prose about how angels in Heaven might call on Pellew's chef for advice on how to prepare their mashed potatoes, and other such asides.
The Hunger Games: Suzanne Collins has a field day with this trope. The Capitol is flamboyant in everything (including meals), and it's narrated by a girl who spent most of her life with barely anything to eat.
The Iliad: A lurid description of a feast, featuring a "double fold" of meat, is repeated at least twice. The Feast Scene is a staple in ancient Greek epics, almost as important as the Great Battle Scene.
Inheritance Cycle: Has descriptions of not one but two feasts in Eldest within the space of a few chapters, although this isn't a trademark of the series.
Ishq and Mushq: Has a lot of food porn with the Indian food Sarna cooks, especially in the early chapters.
The James Bond novels are all over this trope; in addition to being a heavy drinker, 007 is something of a gourmet who loves to eat out. The high point is perhaps the meal that Bond and M eat at Blades (the latter's club) in Moonraker — smoked salmon, a marrow bone, fresh strawberries, expensive wine, cognac and shots of Latvian vodka (which Bond sprinkles some ground black pepper into), although special mention should go to his breakfast in From Russia with Love in which the best part of a chapter is used to describe a boiled egg, toast (with a choice between honey, jam and marmalade) and black coffee. Then there's the short story "007 in New York", which mostly consists of Bond wondering where and what he's going to eat when visiting said city, with a footnote detailing his preferred recipe for scrambled eggs ^note basically, use more butter than you usually would, and serve with pink champagne. It's worth noting that when Ian Fleming started the series, Britain was still on rationing. Think on that, and imagine how powerful the food imagery would have been when the books were first published.
Jelly Belly: Has this in spades. It's to be expected when your narrator is a preteen boy who loves to eat!
J. R. R. Tolkien:
- Extremely detailed descriptions of the foods served in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. In both stories the viewpoint character is usually a hobbit, who are famous for enjoying food as thoroughly and as often as possible and the four hobbits are getting less than they're used to, so they pay attention to every item on their current menu. (Even if it's just elven waybread.)
Little House on the Prairie: The series describes, in-depth, nearly every meal and dish that ever came up in the narrative, especially in Farmer Boy. It's likely that the reason is a combination of the author's eye for detail and the sad fact that her family often went hungry or ate the same food every meal for months at a time when she was a child, resulting in her considering a decent meal to be a sensual and special experience.
- The reason it's "especially" in Farmer Boy? Almanzo's family was much more well-off than Laura's. Laura's family had one or two cows at a time. Almanzo's had six or more — it's mentioned that Almanzo only milks the old, gentle ones. So the quantity and variety of food affordable to young Almanzo is something that Laura probably never experienced, and that made it special.
Like Water for Chocolate: Practically swims in this trope. Each chapter opens with a traditional Mexican recipe, and specific foods are often symbolically tied to themes and plot points.
- The 2016 sequel '’Tita's Diary'' features the same recipes and a few more, plus diary entries where Tita goes on about the joy of cooking and appreciating food.
The Lost Diary of Don Juan: The Corpus Christi chapter features HIGHLY detailed descriptions of the extravagant meal served for a major Holy Day. Following the example of the titular protagonist and a few others, nearly all the guests eventually begin to consume and enjoy their food in a HIGHLY sensual manner.
Madame Bovary: Part 1, Chapter 8 features an elaborate ball at the chateau La Vaubyessard. Emma is awed by the lavish presentation of fancy foods, including things she's never tried or even seen before.
Malleus: Inquisitor Eisenhorn manages to turn this into an interrogation tool. He deliberately enjoys a fine glass of vintage amasec^noteSPACE Cognac and a lho stick^noteSPACE cigarette during an interview with Pontius Glaw. Glaw, being unable to experience either of these, is caught off guard and subsequently becomes more forthcoming with information.
Moby-Dick: Has one chapter titled "Chowder", which is dedicated to the eponymous food.
The Moonlit Vine: Puerto Rican food features heavily in this story about a teenager who learns she is a descendant of Taino chieftain Anacaona. A special mention goes to alcapurrias (fritters made with green bananas, taro root, and ground beef), described in enough detail to make the reader drool.
Nero Wolfe: Title character is a gourmet (among other things) and employs Fritz Brenner, an excellent chef. Every Nero Wolfe story contains at least one detailed description of a fine meal, and at least two (the novel Too Many Cooks and the short story Immune to Murder) revolve around food and cooking, and thus have huge portions of food porn.
Nightfall (Series): After growing up at the Resistance, where she had to survive on scraps and rats, Myra ends up in the vampire’s palace. During their first meeting, Prince Vladimir treats her to an elaborate dinner and practically gives her a lesson in gastronomy and wine-tasting. She is shocked since she has always viewed food as a means of survival and not something to enjoy.
Pan Tadeusz: The epopeia is known for its detailed descriptions of food, including the famous description of hunter's stew.
Rainbow Magic: Cakes and other food items are lavishly described and illustrated.
Redwall: Let it suffice to say that there is at least one grand (mostly vegetarian^noteNot entirely vegetarian as the woodlanders do eat fish) feast every book and woodlanders really love their food, enough to inspire some people to try to convert them to real life recipes 👁 Image
and there's an official Redwall Cookbook 👁 Image
. Brian Jacques mentioned in an interview that this was because he grew up during World War II rationing and would read cookbooks to deal with the scarcity, and decided to fill his own series with descriptions of food.
The Reincarnated Vampire Just Wants to Enjoy Her New Life: Goes into exquisite detail with each and every meal Scarlet, the main character, makes, and the description will make you hungry, and yes, the recipes are real.
The Reynard Cycle: One scene in Defender of the Crown plays this trope very straight, featuring a page long description of a royal banquet.
Robert A. Heinlein novels would sometimes have an interlude with extensive and loving discussion of the food the protagonists are eating:
- The meals of the recently arrived colonists on Ganymede in Farmer in the Sky.
- The breakfast Joan/Johann Smith orders in I Will Fear No Evil.
- Friday is laden with lovingly detailed descriptions of luscious — and cholesterol-laden — meals. (Any single meal Friday eats in the Tormeys' household gets more description than all three human Tormeys put together.)
- The restaurant menu and the breakfast food description in the short story "Cliff and the Calories", collected in Expanded Universe.
- The "Happy Hangover" breakfast description in ''The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress".
- The "Harvest Brunch" and "Holiday Eyeopener" breakfast descriptions in Chapter 1 of To Sail Beyond the Sunset.
Robert B. Parker:
- Novels tend to feature this (he started his career as a professional food critic), especially the Spenser series, which often goes into elaborate detail about what the character is making and/or eating. This is less pervasive in the Sunny Randall novels (except when Spike, the Manly Gay restaurant owner is around), so it could just be the character.
A Series of Unfortunate Events:
- As Sunny later develops the ability to cook, food descriptions are frequent. The yummiest is the brunch at the beginning of book 12.
- The most outlandish is in Book 10, where Sunny is forced to make breakfast for the villains with what basically amounts to some snow, some coffee beans, and a frozen jug of orange juice. And she does. And it sounds really good. And Olaf ruins it anyways.
Some of Sidney Sheldon's novels go into depth about the characters' meals, often to illustrate their luxury. The Stars Shine Down describes the dinner menu Lara Cameron selected for her birthday ball, which consists of foie gras, cream of mushroom soup, John Dory fillets, lamb with rosemary and pommes souffles with French beans, and a mesclun salad with hazelnut oil. Rage of Angels describes all of the Italian dishes served at a mafia family dinner that Jennifer attends. Even one-off occasions get detailed looks at food; the dinner Oliver cooks for Leslie at the beginning of The Best Laid Plans is stated to be "grilled flank steaks marinated in soy sauce, garlic, and herbs, served with baked potato, salad, and a perfect red wine."
Sexplosion: In this mock book review, Stanisław Lem describes the rise of literal food porn after most people become uninterested in sex due to overexposure.
The Silver Lotus: Author Thomas Steinbeck (son of John) uses this trope several times throughout the novel, most notably in the description of the wedding feast for the two main characters.
S. M. Stirling fills his books with loving descriptions of food.
A Song of Ice and Fire: Dedicates pages to describing what the characters are eating in excruciating detail. The books as a whole are prone to Description Porn. And now, that Food Porn is being reproduced in rapturous reproducible detail 👁 Image
.
...and a flagon of Dornish wine.
Spectrum (2002): Close to being Food Porn: The Novel. Each of the seven parts opens with long passages about some dish or other (even something mundane like rice gets such a rhapsody that it would be enough to make one ravenous). Both Martin and his uncle are gourmets and love to cook. The meals on every planet and every station Martin visits (even the spartan cuisine of the Library) are always described in loving detail. Even when Martin's jailed, he doesn’t forget to note the quality of the prison dinner.
Sport: Louise Fitzhugh's novel has a scene in which Sport's stepmother-to-be cooks dinner for him and her fiance. Sport all but drools over it.
Steel Crow Saga uses it to illustrate cultural divides and the crossing of them, with quite a lot of Cultural Posturing from the characters on the superiority of their country's cuisine gradually turning into appreciation for others' cuisine. Special mention goes to the feast Jimuro has at Steel Cicada's hideout, as its the first time he's tasted his native foods in years, and the one Roumei prepares for Lee to demonstrate her appreciation of the latter's heritage.
Super Minion: Has a lot of this, which is unsurprising given that it's written in the first person from the perspective of a character who regarded food as its utmost priority even before downloading a mysterious software package that among other things gave it the ability to appreciate good food. Tofu at one point spends about five minutes describing a battle with a superhero, and then half an hour describing a company dinner after the battle.
Temeraire: Especially following the second book, the series likes to describe what people and dragons eat in fine detail (dragons enjoy their food cooked as much as anyone else, something that Europe hasn’t yet discovered). Laurence actually hires a Chinese cook to feed Temeraire, who after experiencing the fine dragon-cuisine of China has taken a liking to having his cows more prepared than 'freshly slaughtered and raw'.
Tita Rosie's Kitchen Mysteries: Arsenic and Adobo can spend several paragraphs describing the ingredients, appearance, and taste of anything Lila eats or cooks. Since Lila helps out at her aunt's restaurant and her best friend is a barista who likes to experiment, there is no shortage of new food and drinks to describe. Homicide and Halo-Halo and Blackmail and Bibingka tone it down just a little.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn: Francie Nolan tries to write a novel about the luxurious life a wealthy heiress named Sherry Nola. She's working on a passage about Sherry ordering up bunch of "simple" desserts (including strawberry shortcake, French chocolates, and a dozen Charlotte Russe) when she has to stop because her mouth is watering. Her teacher had reprimanded her before about writing stories about being poor and hungry, but she realizes she's writing about poverty and hunger here as well, only in a roundabout way.
The Year of the Rat: Food is quite an important topic. Many meals are colorfully described. Some, though, may not seem so much of Food Porn outside the book's fantasy world: for example, a boiled crow with carrots...
Joanne Harris's novel Chocolat, as the movie.
Billy Martin's series of novels starting with Liquor, which makes sense since the books are about two chefs who start their own restaurant.
Many, many cookbooks, especially those designed in the UK; the ultimate, though, has got to be The French Laundry Cookbook by Thomas Keller, the greatest classical chef in the United States.
- 50 Shades of Chicken 👁 Image
  is a parody of Type 2.
  Spread the bird flat, breasts up, in an oiled roasting pan. Roast until golden and succulent, 40 to 50 minutes. Let rest for 10 minutes, then have your way with her, squeezing on lemon juice if she needs a tang.
Pretty much anything written by Roald Dahl. Notice a pattern here? This trope is particularly associated with English literature (as in the country, not the language), especially children's literature.
Several of Thomas Wolfe's works, notably The Web and the Rock. Especially the circus section in Chapter 3.
Books by Helen Fern Daringer use this frequently, especially Adopted Jane. (Since the protagonist grew up in an orphanage, it's unsurprising that she especially appreciates the food she eats when she's not there, even though it's not a bad place, and she always has enough.) The scene with biscuits and butter and honey is very memorable.
Prof. Paul Campos went into some detail on the subject in the nonfiction The Diet Myth.
The meal that, unfortunately, Raymond Trottle from The Secret of Platform 13 eats. The most loving and delicious description is lavished on the knickerbocker glory.
Most series by L. E. Modesitt, Jr., such as Saga of Recluce, will often delve into details about the meals being served and the accompanying drinks.
Neuromancer got its parody: "Gastromancer". The name already says it all.
Certain mentions of food in the Aubrey-Maturin series have a similar effect: The smells of bacon and coffee can always put Jack Aubrey in a good mood, and he tries to provide his officers with the best food available when they dine in his cabin.
This is the main theme of Italo Calvino's short story Under The Jaguar Sun. Set in Mexico, Calvino's describes the pleasure of eating as a substitute of sex, because is a shared sensorial experience, exemplified by the middle-aged couple the story focuses on. He also devotes a great deal of attention to the tradition and description of Mexican cuisine, which involves some incredibly sacred and dark origins. Nevertheless, you will crave mexican food after finishing it.
Cathy Kelly's novel Homecoming is all about this, connecting food and recipes to all manner of life experiences, human interaction, family history and self-discovery.
In Edgar Allan Poe's satirical story "How to Write a Blackwood Article", Mr. Blackwood launches into this while advising Zenobia how she could write a horror story about her sensations upon choking to death on a chicken bone:
Indeed what gentleman (or lady either) of sense, wouldn't die, I should like to know, for a well fattened capon of the right Molucca breed, stuffed with capers and mushrooms, and served up in a salad-bowl, with orange-jellies en mosaïques. Write! (You can get them that way at Tortoni's)
Chapter 6 of John Grisham's Playing for Pizza takes us through every step of a full-course dinner served at a trattoria in Parma, Italy, down to descriptions of how the dishes are made and which wines are paired with them. Do not read this chapter without ordering a pizza first.
In general, mystery books — especially Cozy Mysteries— will either have a detailed description about food, a detailed description of a character eating food, a delicious illustration of food, a recipe of food in the story, a food-based title (bonus points if it's a Pun), or all of the above. Many come with recipes in the back, and whole cookbooks have been made from the food in mystery books.
Zigzagged in The Worst Witch. Usually, the food is as dreadful as school food is expected to be, but Maud appreciates date pudding and custard after she has been put on a strict diet by her mother. In A Bad Spell for the Worst Witch, Mildred meets a magician transformed into a frog, who reminisces sadly about a proper old-fashioned tea, with crumpets, butter and honey.

Live-Action TV

On 30 Rock, after he has his heart attack, Jack asks Liz to eat a huge, beautiful steak in front of him so he can enjoy it vicariously. Of course she wolfs it down while his back is turned.
- There is also an episode with a plotline all about Sandwich Day, a once a year holiday where the teamsters give out sandwiches to everyone for free. Frank describes the day with the same level of awe a child would use when talking about Christmas. Towards the end of the episode, Liz eats her own sandwich (with obligatory dipping sauce) rather than chase after her love interest.
The Big Brunch showcases its contestants' brunch items lovingly, and the judges react enthusiastically to most of the creations.
Nadia always samples each of her dishes as soon as they're done on Bitchin'Kitchen. Cue the satisfied moans and description of how all the flavors and textures fit together.
Bon Appétit, Your Majesty: Naturally for a cooking drama, we're treated to plenty of delectable close-up shots of the meals Ji-yeong cooks, with brief overlays of the chemical makeup of the ingredients as she explains how she made them so appetizing. The real selling point is when her customers eat her meals and wild fantasies immediately play in the background of close-up shots of their mouths slowly chewing and savoring the dishes, following them being genuinely shocked by her expertise. Even the dishes of Yu Kun's contestants are no slouch either, for they evoke the same savory feelings in him when he taste tests them.
Ralphie May has a routine about watching Rachael Ray make a chocolate cake while he was on Celebrity Fit Club.
The Korean Drama Dae Jang Geum showcase different types of Korean cuisine. It makes sense given that the protagonist is a cook who serves for the royal family. MBC even made a video compilation 👁 Image
of all the food preparation.
Dexter has a weird example of what might be considered Food Gorn in its opening sequence... here 👁 Image
.
Giada DiLaurentiis takes this one step further. Not only does her show have close-ups of her preparing food, but the soundtrack would fit well in REAL pornography. Go on, listen to it; if you watched her show in the past, you will never watch it the same way again. It also doesn't hurt that she always cooks in low cut dresses. However, at least you'll be able to prepare many of the dishes Giada makes, both in their general simplicity and affordability.
Doctor Who:
- "The Two Doctors" has gratuitous Food Gorn, being as it is about a race of aliens that are slaves to the pleasure of eating to pretty extreme levels, and an allegory for how eating meat is wrong. The Second Doctor gives a long and graphic speech about eating meat which was clearly intended to Squick viewers out, but it's not uncommon for fans to find it makes them hungry.
- In "The End of Time", the Master's speeches about Christmas Dinner make either make you disgusted with it or really, really hungry.
- It has the beginning of "The Eleventh Hour", where the Doctor snacks at young Amy Pond's house after regenerating. First, she fried some really delicious-looking bacon, which the Doctor sadly rejected. Then she made what was probably the most beautiful-looking bowl of baked beans ever (though the sight of him spitting it out on the sink might put off some people). Then she gave him bread with some butter, which for some reason looks really mouth-watering. After rejecting it, the Doctor finally picks his snack of choice: fish fingers and custard. Oh, and he pours the custard to a big glass bowl. Mmm...
- The food that started off the whole sequence, one of most most delicious-looking and delicious-sounding apples ever, only to be promptly spat out, awwww...
Pretty much every show on the Food Network. The fact that some of the newer crop of hosts are also pleasing to look at doesn't hurt either. Ad slogans have included "Watch how food can arouse you," "This is... orgasmic," and so on.
Ina Garten springs for the most expensive ingredients ever but also manages to make a dinner into a "You have no choice but to run the dishwasher after this meal" affair. And everything is "fabulous" or so good "people will go crazy" for it.
Good Eats is one of the few modern shows to avert this trope — while the show does have staff who make sure the food looks good for the camera, Alton frequently makes a point of eschewing garnishes and overly fancy presentation and his camera work tends toward being quirky rather than pornographic.
The Great British Bake Off: The show never misses an opportunity to showcase the contestants' offerings in close-up, high-resolution, slowly-rotating shots that give the audience a good look at every individual flake of a pastry. And even when the food itself doesn't turn out quite as intended, they preface each challenge with a stylized drawing of each contestant's intended offering, which is often nearly as mouth-watering as the real thing, even collected into a coloring book👁 Image
full of all the bakes and set dressings.
- Biggest plot twist? The artist who creates the drawings has come out and admitted that he hates cake. The travesty.
Hannibal toes the line between Food Porn and Food Gorn, considering that some of it is probably made with human flesh. It says a lot that some of the meals are shot just as lovingly as some of the murders.
- Taken to the extreme in the show itself, as you'll probably think the food looks pretty damn awesome before being disgusted at yourself. For example, in season 2 Hannibal preps a Veal Ossobuco 👁 Image
  after cutting the shanks from a human leg.
- It's especially notable that, due to fan interest, the people behind food prep run a blog on the meals presented 👁 Image
  . While the dishes and recipes are implied/shown to made of human, the food porn shown isn't fake (or made from people).
This 👁 Image
How It's Made episode about sushi.
Interview with the Vampire (2022): In "...After the Phantoms of Your Former Self", the seven-course meal that is served to Daniel Molloy and was prepared by Louis de Pointe du Lac's personal chef looks absolutely gorgeous and delicious. They're the type of fancy dishes that you'd find at a very expensive restaurant.
Iron Chef (Japan and America) is this trope personified. Though IC Japan tends to mix in equal parts Squick and Values Dissonance; you know, just like actual Japanese porn.
iZombie has a tendency to show extremely well prepared meals in which the primary ingredient is human brain. In the first season Blaine even ran a gourmet meat store with a chef exploring the exciting new realm of zombie cuisine.
Kantaro: The Sweet Tooth Salaryman puts sweets on display heightened to such a degree that one can easily buy into the orgasmic reactions the main character has to all of them.
In The King of Queens episode Food Fight, Spence lucks out and gets a girlfriend who isn't only a gifted cook, she is a genius level chef. And she loves to cook for people. Naturally, Doug gets involved. Carrie walks into the bedroom to find Doug on the phone clearly talking to another woman. And the dialogue suggests he is on a sex chat line. Doug is talking to Spence's girlfriend, who is going into glorious detail about how she makes cheeseburgers and takes the idea to a new level. Carrie shakes her head resignedly.
Kodoku no Gurume follows a Japanese businessman as he visits various real-life restaurants in Japan and tries out their dishes, which inevitably involves sumptous close-ups and the main character's ecstatic Internal Monologues while eating the food.
Nigella Lawson makes everything she does on her cooking shows sound flirty and slightly dirty. The fact that it is entirely possible to make a porny-sounding audio-scene👁 Image
purely from the commentary she gives during one of her Christmas shows speaks volumes. One begins to wonder if her choice of words is intentionally done to have the most... effect.
- Dead Ringers showed her filling out income tax forms, using the same kind of visuals and language as her shows, ending with her pen... erm, well, spraying ink everywhere. Trouble is, the line "I'm going to stroke this box now" really wouldn't sound out of place on one of Nigella's shows.
- A scene from The West Wing features White House Chief of Staff Leo McGarry explaining to his secretary that something will have to wait until the morning, as he must leave now or he'll "miss his show". His secretary declares it to be "like soft porn", adding that "no one needs to massage oil into a leg of lamb for that long". Given the timing of the broadcast, it is very likely they were referring to Ms Lawson.
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: Adar takes dinner with Galadriel to discuss the matter of Sauron's return. The scene opens up with the table displaying impressive plates with fresh fruits and cooked meat.
The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House: A lot of emphasis is given to food preparation and cooking, and the camera often lovingly pans over Kiyo's finished dishes.
Man v. Food is the food-porn equivalent of a gang-bang, food porn taken to an extreme gonzo level. It does manage a lot of money shots on the way, as Adam Richman tours American eating places to see what they do best.
In Marry My Husband: Japan, Misa has terminal gastric cancer before she's sent ten years into the past. Finding herself back in a healthy body, she revels in being able to enjoy food again; the series contains a lot of loving, lingering shots of delicious-looking food, from the traditional Japanese sweets that Misa and Wataru enjoy to the meals that Yuto prepares and pretty much everything in between.
Nailed It!: Although the competition is about amateurs bakers failing at making grandiose desserts, the actual desserts they are basing themselves on are gorgeous and edible works of art capable of making any sweet tooth's mouth water.
No Reservations both exploits this and analyzes it, even dedicating two episodes 👁 Image
to the phenomenon so far (see page quote). However, Bourdain had written an article 👁 Image
on the subject as early as 2001, well before he became a TV host.
Jamie Oliver's food shows sound like a crossover with Top of the Pops. He's especially fond of Neneh Cherry's "Buffalo Stance" as backing music.
Our Miss Brooks:
- In "Carelessness Code", a Sound-to-Screen Adaptation, Miss Brooks has no money for lunch due to Mr. Conklin's arbitrary "carelessness code" fines. A lot of time is spent with Miss Brooks looking hungrily upon Harriet's cafeteria lunch of roast beef and mashed potatoes.
- In the "Thanksgiving Show", Walter Denton describes his typical thanksgiving dinner to Miss Brooks:
  Walter Denton: Well, usually Mom cooks a big turkey. And we have dinner at about four o'clock in the afternoon. Oh gosh, I'll never forget last year's meal. First we had a fresh fruit cup and then some delicious vegetable soup. And then this golden brown turkey was served with a special dressing of raisons and chestnuts. And then we had some candied yams with a baked marshmallow covering and...
Parts Unknown with Anthony Bourdain, a docuseries that follows chef Anthony Bourdain to various nations to sample the culture, history, and food of the locale. Being that the host is a renowned chef and that a key component of the show is the food of the region, the shots of the food he eats are highly embellished and lovingly framed to instill the most amount of food-lust in the viewer.
The Korean Drama Pasta is set in an Italian restaurant and features lots and lots of pretty plates of food.
Psych: Shawn sure loves to show off his pineapples.
In Pushing Daisies the shots at the piehole of all the different pies baked by the Piemaker are absolutely mouthwatering. Add to that the candy from another local business, Bittersweets, and you've got mounds of beautiful and absolutely delectable food on camera.
Gordon Ramsay's cooking shows, where the cooking sequences are filmed in music video style closeups to the food, energetic and somewhat frantic quick cuts and all set to rather groovy music.
And for you who like the genki-ish New Yorker thing, there's Rachael Ray.
Replacing Chef Chico: The Filipino and Filipino-fusion foods the fine dining restaurant creates for its guests are given a lot of attention. For example, in the first scene, Ella is shown painstakingly putting a plate of lumpiang sisig together, with the camera focusing on each ingredient being chopped before she puts it all together with stellar plating. For any foodies in the audience, they also make it a point to utilize ingredients and techniques unique to the Philippines, such as by emphasizing the use of the rare artisanal sea salt asin tibuok in one dish.
Done in the "Densha De Go!!" episode of Retro Game Master, where the narrator describes the five famous train station bento boxes that Arino and the ADs will compete for.
Samurai Gourmet may devote a higher portion of its screen time to Food Porn than some actual cooking shows. But it's not a cooking show; it's a light drama about a retired Japanese man and his daydreams about a samurai. Also, despite the title and the fact that Kasumi really enjoys his food, neither he nor the samurai is technically a gourmet.
Parodied in a fake Saturday Night Live bumper for the Food Network. The slogan: "Porn for fat people."
Alluded to by Seinfeld: "I find pastrami to be the most sensual of all the salted cured meats." More than alluded to in the rest of the episode: George begins involving food in his foreplay. His girlfriend of the moment, Tara, accepts things like strawberries, chocolate sauce, and honey, but balks when George tries to integrate a pastrami sandwich on rye with mustard. She breaks up after he not only keeps sneaking food into bed, but tries to watch TV during sex as well. Later in the episode, he realizes that he's conflated food and sex to the degree that food now makes him aroused. The subplot ends with the quote above, when he discovers that Elaine's friend Vivian has exactly the same kink: sex, pastrami, and TV, all at the same time.
The Sopranos is a delight for food-watchers, as they're eating in almost every scene. Chef Artie Bucco is a particular purveyor of this as he loves to discuss his ingredients at length.
Star Trek:
- In general, the 24th century shows, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and Star Trek: Voyager, featured the replicator, capable of generating any food(s) or drink(s) the characters desired, so sometimes, we see our characters enjoying certain dishes.
- Star Trek: The Next Generation: In "The Game", Riker meets Troi in Ten Forward, where she's enjoying a chocolate sundae, and goes into surprising detail about the way she eats it.
  Troi: It's not just a matter of taste. It's the whole experience. First of all, you have to spoon the fudge around the rim, leaving only ice cream in the middle. Then, you gently spoon the ice cream around the sides, like you're sculpting it. Relish every bite. Make every one an event. And then, with the last spoonful, close your eyes.
  Riker: I had no idea it was such a ritual.
  Troi: Chocolate is a serious thing.
- Star Trek: Enterprise devotes so much attention to the crew's meals that Evay of Triphammered 👁 Image
  devotes an entire section of her website (called the "Food Chain"👁 Image
  ) to chronicling what they eat in each episode.
In Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, all the fighters from the future eat and eat when they come back, particularly Riley and Jessie, who "can't stop eating" Chinese food from the food court at the mall. According to the DVD commentary, this is also Author Appeal, as the writer who wrote the line also loves food court Chinese food. Inverted with Sarah, as the only food she seems to be able to make is pancakes and PB&J.
Twin Peaks sure does love coffee, and pie, and donuts.
For the Latin-American with Casa Club in their cable service, Kristina Wetter 👁 Image
. Sure, her cooking on camera looks almost asceptic and chirurgical, but the results are absolutely mouth-watering. And let's not talk about her cooking books...
Young Sheldon: The opening of "A Brisket, Voodoo, and Cannonball Run" displays Connie's smoked brisket being served in loving detail.

Music

Psychostick's song "The Hunger Within" has descriptive verses of various junk foods as the protagonist is a hungry man who can't afford to buy food until his next paycheck in a few days.

Radio

J.C. Webster III 👁 Image
routinely rants about food porn when he calls into Coast to Coast AM.
In and Out of the Kitchen is a spoof of Food Porn writing.
Our Miss Brooks: In "Mr. Conklin's Carelessness Code", Miss Brooks has no money for lunch due to Mr. Conklin's arbitrary "carelessness code" fines. A lot of time is spent as Miss Brooks looks enviously upon Harriet's cafeteria lunch of roast beef and mashed potatoes.

Stand-Up Comedy

In his "Beyond the Pale" special, Comedian Jim Gaffigan describes the Food Network as porn when you're hungry. "'What are you watching?' 'Uh... uh, Food Network...' 'Why are your pants off?' 'I-I like food... a lot.'"
In his "Comedy Central Presents" episode, Gabriel Iglesias remembers phone sex with his former girlfriend, who shared his love of food. Instead of telling him what she was wearing she described what she was baking: "Chooooocolate... caaaake..."
A joke from the early Bill Bailey show Cosmic Jam has him relay the experience of standing in line at a local takeaway and realising that someone had to have taken all the photos of the food that the shop uses for advertisement. He muses on what the life of a food photographer must be like, before acting out a man photographing food while calling it a "Saucy minx".

Video Games

Many Castlevania games starting from Castlevania: Symphony of the Night include dozens of different food items to find on top of the standard Pot Roast, ranging from fresh fruit all the way up to modern dishes that shouldn't even exist in the depicted time period, each one with a well-drawn sprite and a brief description. The most exquisite food items provide large boosts of HP.
It makes sense that Cooking Mama does this, considering that it's a cooking game. From the games packaging, to the pictures that show the food being prepared in the minigames, to the pictures of the finished product when you successfully complete the recipe, each time it looks delicious.
Cook, Serve, Delicious! is a restaurant sim where every food item is drawn in lush detail. The sequel is even more intense, with over 150 items. Good luck playing either without getting hungry.
Final Fantasy:
- Final Fantasy XIV delves into this trope with the Culinarian job quests, where it starts out cooking out basic dishes for training, to cooking a feast for the Sultana, Nanamo Ul Namo herself. In the main story questline for Endwalker, there is the heroes' visit to Old Sharlayan, a scholarly city-state whose regional specialty is the Nondescript, Nasty, Nutritious archon loaf. So unsavory is archon loaf that one restaurant was opened in Old Sharlayan, the Last Stand, specifically to provide people with more palatable cuisine. The large dinner spread that the heroes have curtesy of the Last Stand's cooks looks scrumptious, with foods including cookies, sandwiches, and even cheeseburgers and pizza!
- Ignis in Final Fantasy XV frequently comes up with a new recipe and cooks food for the party. In-game, the foods give you stat buffs, but they're also notable for looking both delicious and extremely realistic 👁 Image
  . You can thank a dev team that has Shown Their Work for this as to get everything just right, they actually went outdoors with the kind of camping equipment the party packs and made the meals with the help of actual cooks 👁 Image
  then took pictures and rendered the meals in-game to make them look absolutely scrumptious.
Genshin Impact: The game draws and describes food items in so much detail that it can make you salivate. miHoYo even posts recipes on the Chinese website under the title "The Steambird | Teyvat Food Notes" for players to cook at home (provided one can read Chinese, of course). And over on the game's offical social media sites is their Liyue's Cuisine Collection series of videos where a chef prepares the recipes from Liyue.
In Golden Sun games, you can check out the ovens for stat-boosting food items or a short, appetizing description of what the locals are cooking. Or a short, alarmed description of the fried grubs. Or, in Dark Dawn, a short, tragic lament for a ruined oven that will never cook again.
Guild Wars 2 The Chef crafting discipline, a world of depth unto its own. There are hundreds of dishes to happen upon, with many of them requiring logical component parts. (Want cookies? Better make some dough first)
Many games by Gust, especially the Atelier and Ar tonelico games, feature a lot of delicious (and often bizarre)-looking foods, carefully and lovingly described.
Heroes of Might and Magic IV: One of the benefits of the game being text heavy as it is. The very first mission of the haven campaign features one of these during the introduction of one of the playable characters.
Kingdom Hearts III has the bistro in Twilight Town opened by Scrooge McDuck, with the chef being Rémy from Ratatouille, where you participate in cooking mini games to make dishes using the ingredients you can find while going through the Disney and Pixar worlds. On top of the stat buffs they provide, all of the dishes look delicious as well, with each dish having a unique and lavish description of its flavor, smell, and texture logged in Sora's Gummiphone.
The Legend of Zelda occasionally dives into this:
- The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening: The original couldn't fully accomplish this on a Game Boy screen. However, the remake for Nintendo Switch made some soup in the background of a particular house look really delicious for seemingly no reason; it's almost disappointing that Link can't actually taste any of it.
- The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask: Milk is a healing item in, and the item descriptions make it sound really good. In particular, the latter game has special milk variants that sound even more tantalizing.
- Grandma's Soup from The Wind Waker and the Superb Soup from Twilight Princess. Both are powerful healing items (the former even gives you an attack boost), they have mouth-watering descriptions, and Link definitely enjoys them; just compare his reaction to consuming soup to taking a standard healing potion.
- The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild leans the hardest into the trope. You can scavenge all sorts of ingredients to make all sorts of delicious and health-boosting food items. Your ingredients sizzling after Link dumps them in a pot is guaranteed to make the player hungry. Unless you use bad ingredients, in which case...
Like a Dragon features restaurants, bars, and convenience stores where you can get food and drink items to recover HP, gain EXP, and get other benefits. Food and drink are generally portrayed through real photos of the items, including a heavy amount of Product Placement, with Flavor Text to underscore it all. In particular, restaurants around town often have gorgeous photos of every menu item to help advertising like in real life. Occasionally some in-game cutscenes have more detailed animations of food being prepared and eaten.
Mario Kart World uses this trope as a gameplay mechanic. Whenever you drive to Yoshi's, you will receive a food item which boosts your speed and optionally changes your character's costume. The food varies between tracks, and there are separate tiers of food which provide different boosts; the bigger and more luxurious foods will have a stronger effect.
Metal Slug is prone to this. Some levels have a huge stock of foods for you to eat. Should you get fat, your firepower becomes much deadlier.
Monster Hunter: Because to kill an epic monster, you need an epic meal. Dining at the canteen serves you a hearty meal that your character eagerly chows down, and is even supplemented by their own food prep cutscenes. Monster Hunter World is a particularly famous example, with the Meowscular Chef and his crew cooking up a massive spread fit for a world-class hunter. See what we mean?👁 Image
Monster Hunter World: Iceborne brings in the Grammeowster Chef, which is this and utterly adorable, serving a cozy meal 👁 Image
that'll keep you full and warm. Meanwhile, Monster Hunter Wilds gives players the opportunity to cook meals for themselves while exploring, which they will eat on the spot. With so many combinations of ingredients to choose from 👁 Image
, there's something to suit every palate.
The Nancy Drew series has a blog 👁 Image
dedicated to its cooking minigames. An entire blog! That's the level of Food Porn we're dealing with here. (Special mention goes to the Icicle Creek game, in which Nancy is masquerading as a cook — the developers paid loving attention to mimicking the sound, the exact sound of Canadian bacon crackling on the stove, and the burn marks on well-cooked hamburger meat...)
Neopets has this in spades, although some of the food items are really disgusting Nausea Fuel. Most of them are so lusciously described it may make you hungry, perhaps the most decadent of Food Porn can be found at The Crumpetmonger, but you can find examples in nearly any store that sells food. Here is the description of the caramel apple bundt cake which can be found at The Crumpetmonger. "A golden vanilla cake topped with juicy red apples and caramel. Yum!"
In Overcooked!, the various foods you can make, though cartoony, are nonetheless designed to look appetizing. The Video Game Remake of the first game even improved the graphics for some recipes used in the first game, so the soups, once just bowls of flat color, now have delicate swirls of cream on top of a much richer-looking broth.
Pikmin:
- Pikmin 2: Once you get 100% completion, you unlock "Louie's notes", which describe in excruciating detail how to prepare every enemy in the game that's not poisonous. While most of these are humorous, the ones that get into genuine detail make them sound absolutely delicious.
- Pikmin 3 also leans into this. One of the game's main objectives is collecting fruit, both to sustain your characters and also to solve a famine back home. As such, the team seemingly went out of their way to make the fruit look as delicious as possible, even when fruit is converted into juice. Brittany's descriptions also help, though they're not quite as in-depth as Louie's.
Planescape: Torment has some food vendors and a barkeep where the Nameless One can buy several foods and drinks. You're then treated to a detailed first-person paragraph of him enjoying his meal. Feeling hungry yet?
Pokémon: When you're out and about in your adventure, it's good to take a break and have something to eat before you continue. From the six generation onwards, you can stop and grab a bite to eat somewhere.
- Pokémon X and Y: The waiters in the restaurants of Lumiose City (except the Sushi High Roller) give you some rather detailed descriptions of the restaurant dishes, though you are left to your imagination as to what's under the cloche of your entrees.
  - Restaurant Le Nah, while not nearly as fancy, has the most sensible, simple food descriptions that are reminiscent of cozy home cooking: Fresh ingredients, and minimally-seasoned so their flavors are the highlights of each dish.
  - Restaurant Le Yeah has outright WEIRD entrees, comparing their dishes with bizarre similes. The third course is "Azure Bay Slowpoke Tail [with] Payapa Berry crudités glazed in extra virgin Oran oil". While it does sound appetizing, the chef claims that "it has been described as the gastronomical equivalent of a Gastly glaring at a Hex Maniac". The fourth is cheese made from an Arbok's Toxic venom, aged up to 180 years; the chef claims that "simply biting into this blue cheese will give off an odor so foul, your nose hairs will burn." (Sure... sounds delicious.)
  - Then there's Restaurant Le Wow with its oddly specific ingredients and cooking process, such as the consommé made with a broth from a 3000-year-old Rare Bone that has been boiled for 100 days in water melted from the Frost Cavern's pristine snow. Sounds a bit pretentious, but at least they're more sensibly appetizing, befitting a very high-class establishment.
- Pokémon Sun and Moon has restaurants you can stop by, including eateries dedicated to Alola's local specialty malasadas. Eating at those restaurants gives you a detailed description on how the food tastes and enjoying every bite, except for the "Special Z-set" that's too unpalatable to finish.
- Pokémon Sword and Shield goes full into this trope with the Curry Dex. The whole thing is a cooking minigame where you combine ingredients to make curry on rice for your Pokemon and player character to eat, and the end result will be one out of 151 possible types depending on the combination. Needless to say, the illustrations and descriptions for all of them are very appetizing indeed.👁 Image
- Pokémon Scarlet and Violet has restaurants all over Paldea, all accompanied by eye-catching illustrations and descriptions. You can potentially make your own food porn with your custom-made sandwiches, provided you manage to keep all your fillings in place.
- Pokémon Café Mix makes this its main attraction, with all its Pokémon-themed entrees served front and center. The café offerings are cute, delicious, and makes you wish they were real.
The Pokémon FireRed ROM Hack Pokémon Sweet Version: Since everything in this game is a Level Ate, well, if you're a sweets lover, expect to go into a trance when you read the Pokésweets entries.
RuneScape has at least 62 different types of food, based on the wiki. These range from baked potatoes to cocktails to pies. In particular, Gnome-style cooking is described as Impossibly Delicious Food and real-world equivalents have been developed for sale in gaming conventions.
Masahiro Sakurai has a tendency to put photo-realistic food in his games.
The Interactive Fiction game Savoir-Faire is full of this. The protagonist starts hallucinating about various delicious foods when hungry, and one major puzzle is finding all the ingredients for a meal. (You can even go for a vegetarian version if you prefer to)
In the first Shepherd's Crossing, your in-game progress log has a "Dishes" section full of detailed illustrations of food and your Exposition Fairy, Brammy's, descriptions of them. You can't cook in the game, so this only exists for some gratuitous food porn. The second game does have cooking, and Brummy lovingly describes the taste of the various dishes you can make.
Then there's Sonic Unleashed, which seems to have an unhealthy fixation on beautifully rendered foodstuffs amongst cartoony Sonic graphics. An example here 👁 Image
◊ that it must be noted is in NO way altered. Then there are all the collectible foods in the game, each with its own graphic and description. And if you feed them to Chip, he'll even tell you how it tastes.
Sunless Sea: The finale for the Bandaged Poissonier's storyline ends with a massive, seven-course meal for the Fathomking and his court, and every last plate is lavishly described to the point that, even knowing what exactly went into that meal, you'd want a taste yourself. Starfish Alien has never sounded so delightful.
Super Mario Bros.:
- Mario Party Advance: Two of the Gaddgets exist purely to show off tasty-looking food sprites. "Dessert Menu" has you select a base dessert, a fruit, and a sauce, and shows you what the resulting dish looks like. "Cake Maker," meanwhile, lets you decorate a cake however you like, with decorations like cream swirls, fruit slices, and candles you can place wherever you want.
- Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story:
  - After Bowser defeats Midbus, he gets treated to a victory feast organized by Boos that Fawful brainwashed. It's an impressive display of cakes, giant hot dogs, turkey, doughnuts and ham which Bowser comments on when he first sees it. It makes him so fat that it unlocks new zones in his body for the Bros. to explore, but if the player brings him back to that room, he's still willing to eat more (thus allowing access to those zones again).
    Bowser: So many greasy, succulent, very unhealthy dishes! I've been craving this stuff like crazy! I'm gonna eat it all!
  - There's also the Snack Basket Bros. Move which involves filling up Luigi with cookies, doughnuts, cakes and other various desserts until he's fat enough to belly-flop the enemy field.
- In Paper Mario: Color Splash, there's a part where Mario must cook a steak for a picky restaurant customer. The steak is one of the few objects in the game rendered realistically and not in the game's papercraft style. According to the developer commentary in the manual, their goal was to make the model as mouthwatering as possible so that everyone who played the game wanted to eat the steak. They even went so far as to buy a super-expensive piece of meat as a business expense and photograph it incrementally to capture it cooking, photos of which can be found in the manual. And yes, they say it was delicious.
- Super Mario Party Jamboree: The steaks in the "Prime Cuts" minigame complete with sizzling effects, the myriad of sandwiches in the "Sandwiched" minigame, the sweet treats on the "Mega Wiggler's Tree Party" board, all of the food in the Rhythm Kitchen mode... all of it looks so ridiculously incredibly delicious and mouthwatering that you might suspect the developers just wanted to show off how good they could make the food look.
- Mario Kart World: Yoshi's Diners have the Dash Food items where the players can pick up which has a variety of delicious food of any kind from burgers, sushi, yogurt, pizza, etc. Eating them will cause certain characters to change into different outfits.
The Tales Series of games has food as healing items, each described in loving detail. If you have the materials and the recipes, you can whip up your own.
Subverted in Time and Eternity, whose nigh-universally praised visuals include artwork of the cakes made at the Ricardulce bakery, which are best described as Food Gorn.
Tomodachi Life gives you a large assortment of food items to feed to your Miis, each of which is accompanied by a photo of the food item and some (often-humorous) Flavor Text.
Vanillaware games are particularly notorious for their very eye-catching food. It's recommended that you're not on an empty stomach when you see it.
- Muramasa: The Demon Blade has your standard healing items, but it also allows you to cook your own, and visit restaurants. In the latter two cases, you get to see the food being prepared by invisible hands, then consumed, while the character comments on it. The visual style of the game only helps.
- Odin Sphere also features this to a lesser extent. But only in that the gorgeously crafted food sprites aren't right in your face in first-person view.
- Dragon's Crown continues the tradition of gorgeous-looking food in its Cooking Minigame, wherein your adventurer gets to prepare dishes using the various ingredients they came across on their journey, some of which having come off of slain bosses. Best part, there's an incentive for doing this beyond the visuals: each dish gives your plucky adventurer stat-bonuses for their dungeon run.
- 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim features many dishes and meals that the characters enjoy so much, which those scenes tend to make players hungry for those dishes, especially since they show the dishes in so much detail. As a celebration of the game's release on the Nintendo Switch, Atlus has uploaded recipes of 3 of the most popular dishes from the game on their offical website and as videos on their social media for fans to make for themselves.
- Unicorn Overlord features taverns where the members of the Liberation Army can partake in some mouth-watering cuisine. This has the benefit of increasing rapport between them, which will in turn give them stat bonuses when paired up in the same unit and unlocking optional conversations on the overworld.
The World Ends with You does this with ramen on the bottom screen. Three times. In one chapter. And even the low-resolution sprites of the other food items manage to become this when they're coupled with their detailed text descriptions.

Visual Novels

Far more love, gentleness, and caressing detail is given to the food in Fate/stay night than the sex scenes. Fate/hollow ataraxia actually has numerous scenes that do nothing but talk about food. Over and over. The sheer frequency is one of the criticisms leveled at it as the scenes in question all tend to be the same.
- The mapo tofu scene in Heavens Feel may be an intentional Food Porn equivalent of Fan Disservice.
Hotel Dusk: Room 215 and its sequel Last Window have a few shots of dishes, which Kyle Hyde finds to be as tasty as they are visually appealing.
The Letter features nice pictures of pancakes, cakes and many other dishes, often accompanied by descriptions of said dishes.
There is a lot of food in Strawberry Vinegar. All of it looks amazing. An example from the Steam page 👁 Image
. The descriptions alone in some scenes are enough to make your mouth water. On one occasion, even when Rie is describing shaved ice as "cheap" and "artificial" the photo still looks delicious 👁 Image
◊.
To a lesser degree in Tsukihime. It's an Author Appeal, it would seem. The sexual descriptions tended to more food analogies than many readers could comfortably stomach.
Whenever the Ushiromiya family in Umineko: When They Cry sits down to have a meal expect lots of Food Porn. Given the nature of the show, some particular scenes could even count as Food Gorn.

Webcomics

Used In-Universe in Daughter of the Lilies where the cast reads (or, rather, Thistle reads to everyone else) a penny-dreadful Sword and Sorcery novel^notethe comic itself being Swords-and-Sorcery turning the in-universe book into Historical Fiction titled "T'Fa'Nii the Clanless: a Season of Blades." After defeating an orc warband threatening a village, T'Fa'Nii is treated to a sumptuous feast described in a way that can only be called "laviscous detail." It makes Lyra hungry and Thistle has to skip that part.
Frequently crops up in Gourmet Hound, which overflows with lovingly-illustrated, mouthwatering pictures of the dishes being cooked by the characters.
Hang in There, Kogasa-san does this a fair bit, as Kogasa and several of "her" friends are major foodies.
In Heartcore, Royce's "muse" is food. The fancier and tastier the food, the better. Quite fitting for the demon whose sin is gluttony.
Terezi, of Homestuck, has a condition that allows her to taste colours, and her narration goes into much detail over this. Karkat's blood, for example, is 'sweet, sweet candy red.'
There are some elements of Food Porn in Nixvir. In chapter VI, there are some scones illustrated and the author does a decent job of at least making them good pleasurable.
Parodied, like so many other things, by Oglaf. "Sex with avocado! Sex with avocado!"
The many splash pages of sweets 👁 Image
in School Bites are often referred as "porn for girls".

Web Original

YouTube: the internet shows "Cooking Made Sexy by Tifa" and "Cooking With Cans". [1]👁 Image
, [2]👁 Image
Lampshaded and mercilessly parodied by the Sorted Food crew, who call the presentation of their finished dishes "Bring on the Sexies".
Lampshaded in the Homestar Runner Strong Bad e-mail "bottom 10", where one of the list's entries was "Chocolate desserts with dangerous names", accompanied with pictures of chocolate things thrown together ridiculously; one such creation included unwrapped Hostess brownies.
Food Porn Daily 👁 Image
. You're welcome.
A frequent ''raison d'être' for many food blogs. Witness the food porn category 👁 Image
at Slashfood 👁 Image
as an example.
Then, there's the FailBlog relative, EpiCute 👁 Image
, which presents outlandish but mouth-watering desserts... And truly breathtaking, spectacular, or even adorable presentations for just about everything else. Including vegetables.
Just about every Phase story in the Whateley Universe. Phase is a rich kid with a phenomenal palate and maybe a decade of experience in fine dining all over the world. He grew up in a mansion that had two master chefs, plus sous-chefs. He is always wheedling fine cuisine out of the Whateley Academy chefs, and then giving loving reviews of everything about the food. Possibly the originator of the word "foodgasm".
The "Sunday Sweets" on Cake Wrecks. Link for your viewing pleasure 👁 Image
. The rest of the blog can sometimes fall under Food Gorn.
Epic Meal Time, but can border on the Squick side sometimes because it is not the kind of soft, loving and tender porn; Epic Meal Time is the manly, bacon filled, made of meat food porn for you perverts out there and one of these men is a trained chef. Think about that for a while. Almost as if completely Lampshading themselves, videos came to feature a bevy of attractive ladies eating in a much more sensual fashion alongside the super-carnivores... well, as sensual as you can be when eating a bacon big mac wrapped in bacon stuffed inside a pizza and covered in more bacon, then deep fried.
French Baguette Intelligence: At the end of Should science be morally ethical?👁 Image
and Should Atheists Celebrate Christmas?👁 Image
, Harry randomly posts a picture of an excellently-prepared dinner that he made. Posting 'sirloin steak with triple-cooked, Parmesan-coated chips, spinach and Béarnaise sauce' in the former and 'chicken breast with crème fraîche and chive-topped fondant potatoes, courgettes and white wine sauce' in the latter.
Look at this article for a chocolate espresso cake with chocolate cinnamon glaze 👁 Image
, It was almost sexual the way he keeps showing the photo of the cake and describing how sensual it is.
The Flickr photo group 👁 Image
.
Polyvore 👁 Image
, a fashion website, has lots of Food Porn in it. Just search 'food' in the Collections search engine.👁 Image
It doesn't hurt to mention that most of them are pastry, confectionary and sweets. You can also try searching with words like 'sweets', 'hungry', etc.
Reddit has an entire board devoted to this concept. It is named, appropriately(?), FoodPorn 👁 Image
. YMMV as to the quality, though, as many of the photos are user-created and -submitted.
This tumblr 👁 Image
is just amazing.
The Brian & Jill Show, co-host Jill Whelan is described as a "foodie" who loves her recipes.
The Food Adventure Program For Awesome People FAPFAP episodes of Eat Your Kimchi explore the cuisine of South Korea. These often include a short segment of artfully shot close-ups of the food being manipulated with chopsticks or broken open to the same jazzy-ish tune.
In Welcome to Sanditon, Thursday episodes are fillers and they consist either of cut fan-submitted videos or Clara's recipes. Clara is an owner of local ice-cream shop Sanditon Scoops. Her recipe is usually something very sweet, topped with her delicious ice-cream. For instance, she showed her viewers how to make chocolate brownies sandwiches with nuts and fudge and ice-cream filling.
Grandma's cooking from around the world.👁 Image
The only porn with grandmas you'll ever want to see.
The concept is discussed on the now-defunct cooking blog Culinary Brodown, to the effect that feeling vaguely ashamed is part of the experience of traditional pornography, and that food porn should be no different — so glamorous food photography should not be called "food porn" unless it's greasy, sugary, unhealthy junk food that makes you feel guilty.
In a morbid but still mouth-watering twist, photographer Henry Hargreaves did a series of Food Porn images out of Last Meals requested and eaten by Death Row inmates.👁 Image
He explains how disturbingly easy it was to feel kinship and connection with the murders in spite of their violent crimes just by looking at their meals, and laments Texas no longer offers the Last Meal privilege to its inmates.
The Honest Trailers episode for Final Fantasy XV, found here 👁 Image
, makes fun of the game's use of this trope (skip to at 3:18).
Because we all know what you're really here for, anyway... lovingly rendered fantasy soup.
Parodied in The Katering Show episode "Food Porn" (naturally).
As a cooking show, Binging with Babish features this a lot, particularly when cross-sections of burgers or sandwiches are shown. There's also the fact that a common theme in the show is to reproduce food porn from other media as faithfully as possible. Seeing fictional food porn come to real life? And be given a recipe with how to create it? Chef's. Kiss.
Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, as befitting the name, includes gorgeous close-up shots of coffee beans brewing.
Steve1989MREInfo: Steve's channel focuses on foods that wouldn't typically be considered glamorous, specifically military rations— usually at least several years vintage and sometimes bordering on Squick with his Bizarre Taste in Food allowing him to eat and seemingly enjoy obviously expired meals. But, sometimes he comes across particularly noteworthy rations and cannot contain his excitement as he eagerly eats them. Bonus points for being especially well preserved after decades of storage. The overall presentation, with Steve's soft voice and the close perspective of the camera above the tray of food which makes it seem almost as if you're at the table eating these things, has been likened to ASMR.
The Victorian Way: The episodes are usually titled "How to make X — The Victorian Way". The show presents various delicious recipes of classical British cuisine in the Victorian way. The videos are beautifully shot with lots of details on ingredients and the final product.
Tolkien's aforementioned penchant for food porn is parodied in Something Awful's "Rough Drafts: The Hobbit 👁 Image
":
Great big juicy peaches, fresh hot waffles, cheeses of every sort, barrels of mead, cupcakes as big as your head - no! control yourself, Tolkien, or everything you've built will come crashing down around you
ChefClub 👁 Image
presents the finished and oft-unhealthy dishes in mouth-watering ways, cutting to show the fillings, repeatedly playing pouring melted cheese... one case has the comment section deeming it as this trope in a too literal sense, as a whole carrot being inserted into a chicken was played thrice!
The Hard Times: "Man Only Watches Anime for the Food", which describes a guy who enjoys the food depictions in shows like Food Wars! and Penguindrum, but completely ignores the plots.
Can You Spare a Quarter?: Food is repeatedly described in great detail, including its layering, components, associated cutlery and the cooking process. There are entire paragraphs focussed on cooking.
Nick DiGiovanni is full of this trope. Considering that he's a finalist in MasterChef, it's not hard to see why he would excel in this area.
One Kittisaurus Villains episode of Cream Heroes features a slow motion shot of a strawberries and cream cake Claire is about to eat. It's little wonder Dodo's response to it is an emphatic "Wow!"

Western Animation

One episode of Adventure Time depicts Jake cooking some beautiful, realistic-looking Korean food to share with Finn, who doesn't want to eat it because he thinks it smells weird. What a Philistine.
- The episode "Time Sandwich" shows Jake creating an ultimate sandwich which looks really great (though adding the soul of a lobster is a bit extravagant).
The Amazing World of Gumball has a literal example in "The Shell". When Gumball ends up at Banana Joe's house while chasing after Penny, he accidentally walks into his bedroom, where he's watching an orange get peeled on his computer with a creepy grin on his face. Gumball, understandably, closes the door.
Avatar: The Last Airbender has some delicious-looking food, particularly in the Fire Nation (check out the shots of the buffet table in "The Beach"). In the DVD Commentary for "The Blind Bandit", Mike and Bryan even mentions how the food drawn by a certain background artist always made them hungry. Some things, though, like the stewed sea prunes and Sokka's smoked sea slug, are very Squick, unless you're a Southern Water Tribe native.
The Tex Avery cartoon "What's Buzzin', Buzzard?" addresses its WWII-era audience enduring meat rationing with two hungry vultures, one of whom rhapsodizes about how he'd love a steak, going into descriptive detail while the screen shows a beauty shot of a steak — then a title card reading "5 Minute Intermission for Drooling"(which lasts about two seconds). Then, at the end of the cartoon an announcer breaks in with "Ladies and gentlemen, due to overwhelming popular demand, we're going to show the steak again!" and back to the beauty shot.
Disney has proven that they are quite capable of making a drawing still look delicious.
- Case in point: the 1948 short Three For Breakfast. You'll be dying for pancakes afterwards.
- Another food porn accomplishment for Disney came about during a Disney Channel special called "The Plausible Impossible". In it, Walt Disney himself describes in mouthwatering detail the food on a table (as it is being enticingly animated) to Donald Duck in order to draw him into into demonstrating for the audience. See here 👁 Image
  for the...tastiness.
- The Silly Symphony short The Wise Little Hen 👁 Image
  has this towards the end. With the titular hen's cooking from her corn harvest looking quite appetizing too bad Pete Pig and Donald Duck (in his first ever appearance) refused to help the hen by faking a stomachache or else they would've gotten some instead of Castor oil.
Doug has its fair share. It's expected since the kids would hang out at a burger joint. One notable instance is an episode where Doug spends the weekend with his Grandma, who lets him eat cake, pizza, sundaes, donuts and so on, but unfortunately ends up putting on some weight as a result.
DuckTales (2017):
- "The Living Mummies of Toth-Ra!" did this with burritos.
- With chili cheese dogs in "Timephoon!"
Family Guy:
- They did this with pancakes in the episodes "Love Thy Trophy", "Jungle Love", and "The Man With Two Brians".
- Done with apple pie in the episodes "The Man With Two Brians" and "Barely Legal" (although the latter had some of Meg's hair in it).
The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy did this with pizza in "Nergal's Pizza".
Liberty's Kids: Any scene with Henri that isn't played for comedy will probably include this. "Green Mountain Boys" is a good episode if you like pancakes.
Little Bear does this to the Nth degree. With titles like "Father's Flying Flapjacks", "Applesauce", and "Little Bear's Sweet Tooth", you can tell it's pretty much a trademark of the show.
In a Looney Tunes Foghorn Leghorn cartoon, Miss Prissy lays out a really nice spread for Foggy.
- In Birds Anonymous, Sylvester vows to give up eating birds. Back home he sits down to the TV and is immediately faced with a cooking show beauty shot of a roast turkey with an announcer's florid descriptions making his stomach growl.
After-a basting, you find your bird turns out golden-a brown. Every succulent morsel will simply melt-a in your mouth. See how easily the white-a meat-a slices, eh? Yum, yum! Doesn't that-a look...
The Looney Tunes Show: Elmer Fudd extols the praises of the grilled cheese sandwich... like Barry White with a speech impediment.
If you love candy and tend to have a major sweet tooth, then The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack is a show you gotta watch.
- The show also did this with pancakes and maple syrup in the episode "No Syrup for Old Flapjacks".
Molly of Denali: The prepared salmon in "King Run" looks as delicious to the viewers as it does to the characters.
The My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic episode "MMMystery on the Friendship Express" has the cake Marzipan Mascarpone Meringue Madness ("MMMM" for short). Not only does it look tasty, but it is constantly described in a manner that motivated Rainbow Dash, Fluttershy and Rarity to each take a bite whilst no-one was watching. The same goes for the rest of the other bakers' desserts which were eaten by the bakers themselves.
The Regular Show episode "Weekend at Benson's" is great if you're a fan of spicy food (or really, just hot peppers in general).
Rugrats does this at times whenever Angelica (who is a major Sweet Tooth) indulged on cookies, cakes or other such sweets.
The Scooby-Doo franchise is famous for this, thanks to Scooby and Shaggy's extreme hunger.
The Simpsons:
- When Homer becomes a rude food critic, a bunch of local Springfield chefs hires an assassin to kill him. The assassin decides to kill him with a poisoned eclair. The description and picture of the eclair he provides is so tempting that the chefs start drooling and try to grab the picture.
- In one episode, Homer is seen watching a cooking show and the female speaker in the show is talking as if she were a phone sex operator.
- Then there's the time Homer's Vegas wife shows up at his house, so Marge exiles him to the treehouse. The Vegas wife comes up there and starts making him a giant sandwich, to which he reacts exactly like it's a striptease. The gag is topped off by Marge hearing his exclamations...and knowing exactly what's really going on.
- Watch "Fatzcarraldo" if you're a fan of chili dogs.
- "Lisa Sings the Blues" has a compilation of realistic-looking New Orleans cuisine.
- For those really into apple pie, "Forgive and Regret".
Parodied in the South Park episode "Creme Fraiche", where Randy Marsh gets obsessed with cooking and literally gets turned on by it thanks to the Food Network, going as far as to masturbate to it and have a phone chat with them.
Randy: Oh yeah.. glaze the fuck out of that chicken...
- That being said, since the show started to have more detailed art, the food also started to look very detailed and tasty (this includes the episode mentioned above, even if the characters complained that the food did not taste good). The food is especially detailed for Western Animation standards and especially for adult cartoons.
SpongeBob SquarePants:
- "Grandma's Kisses" is good episode to watch for this if you happen to be a fan of chocolate chip cookies.
- The irresistible Krabby Patty as seen in episodes like "Plankton!" and definitely "Just One Bite".
- "Club SpongeBob" spends a good minute dedicated to SpongeBob and Patrick gobbling up mouth-watering picnic food dropped from a falling plane as a "reward" from the Magic Conch Shell for doing nothing.
- A verbal example comes in "Squilliam Returns", an episode where Squidward attempts to pass off the Krusty Krab as a 5-star restaurant, which SpongeBob accomplishes by some miracle the moment before Squilliam shows up. The dish SpongeBob serves to him, the "Krabby Newburg", appears to be an appetizing roulade, and SpongeBob's extensive verbal description definitely helps sell how fancy it is.^note"We take the finest cuts of aged, imported kelp, stuff them with herbs from our garden, wrap them in parchment with our award-winning shallot tapenade, slow-roast them for six hours in our wood-fired, clay-filled oven, or kiva, and serve them with a garnish of wilted coral on a mahogany plank."
Steven Universe:
- The camera closes in as Onion pulls out a hamburger and Steven says "Hey, good lookin'."
- In-Universe example: in "Open Book", Connie rails about the ending of her favorite book series: not only were the main characters Strangled by the Red String, the book spent 50 pages talking about their wedding cake! Steven awkwardly agrees that it deserved 20 pages at most. "It didn't even have strawberries!"
Wakfu sometimes delves into this, with for example Yugo's blanquette or the feast at the end of the Gobbowl arc. And then there's the whole of episode 8 and its bakery contest; even its Monster of the Week can make you salivate.
In We Bare Bears, the show tends to do close-ups on several foods in the show and shows great details on them.

Real Life

Older Than Steam are still life paintings from The Middle Ages, and The Renaissance. Although they look lovely to look at with all the mishmash of common grocery objects and to see the lives of the people who ate them, and how food we see it today looked like, they also carried hidden allegorical messages from each food item, such as bread for wholesomeness and humility, oysters for lust, grapes for both devotion and decadence, peaches for abundance and love, lemons (which were expensive at their time) for earthly luxury, dead fish for memento mori, artichokes for Paradise, and a mishmash of these can contain hunger, gluttony, and the transcience of wealth.
Bento. Here 👁 Image
◊ are 👁 Image
◊ a 👁 Image
◊ few 👁 Image
◊ examples 👁 Image
◊.
For that matter, Japanese cuisine in general. Traditional Japanese high cuisine places a much higher emphasis on plating skill than European cuisine does. And considering how particular the latter can be...Related to the note in television, compare the presentation scores for Japanese chefs to European ones on Iron Chef. On IC America, Morimoto consistently has the best presentation scores of any chef that appears. Even fast food in Japan is much more neatly packaged than in the U.S.
While Japan does indeed have good Food Porn, other countries do pretty well too. Most if not all countries on the globe have at least a handful of talented professional cooks and people who cook at home and do a decent job at creating something yummi and appealing.
Any high-end restaurant is most likely going to spend time making sure their food is as visually pleasing as it is delicious.
- Alinea 👁 Image
  , Grant Achatz 👁 Image
  's first restaurant in Chicago. The restaurant places so much emphasis on being as visually stunning as possible,👁 Image
  ◊ you're willing to forgive 👁 Image
  ◊ its stereotypically small portions.👁 Image
  ◊ (Achatz's second restaurant, Next 👁 Image
  , serves somewhat larger portions, but they are also well-plated; this comes at the rather interesting cost that instead of making reservations, you buy tickets to eat at a particular time, with the effect that if you want to eat at a peak time it costs quite a lot.^noteThat is to say: you can eat dinner there for an arm and a leg at 7:30 Saturday evening, or just an arm at 4:30 Friday evening, or actually something reasonable at like 3:30 Tuesday afternoon. )
Hello Kitty's food products are all about this, even something as simple as macarons.👁 Image
Touristy areas in Mexico know how to work this perfectly. Mostly with limes, lemons,👁 Image
coconuts 👁 Image
, and lots of drinks.👁 Image
Roland Barthes discusses this in his essay on "ornamental cookery" in the book Mythologies. He contrasts the elaborate dishes presented in Elle magazine, aimed at a working-class readership, to the simpler dishes in L'Express, which catered to a more affluent audience that could actually afford to prepare the food.

Statler: Kids these days never have to learn that looks don't matter the hard way.
Waldorf: You tell me. At the very least, they won't have to gag upon tasting my uncle's delicious-looking clam chowder!
Both: Do-ho-ho-ho-hoh!

URL: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FoodPorn

⇱ Food Porn - TV Tropes

Food Porn
47 Following

Examples:

Video Example(s):

Hatsuayu makes good paella
Share Video Copied!

Previous

Index

Next

Hatsuayu makes good paella

URL: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FoodPorn

⇱ Food Porn - TV Tropes

Food Porn 47 Following

Examples:

Video Example(s):

Hatsuayu makes good paella Share Video Copied!

Previous

Index

Next

Hatsuayu makes good paella

Food Porn
47 Following

Hatsuayu makes good paella
Share Video Copied!