'Food porn' trend dates back hundreds of years: study

A new study suggests that our desire to capture rarefied meals and show them off to the world predates Instagram by half a millennium or more.

Cornell University’s Brian Wansink and his co-authors looked at 140 paintings showing typical family meals between 1500 and 2000

They included works from five countries: the Netherlands, France, Italy, Germany and the United States and excluded paintings that showed banquets.

They found the most commonly depicted mealtime foods were exotic and expensive fare, while commonly consumed foods were far less likely to be immortalized.

For example, the meat depicted most often was shellfish, followed by fish and ham.

Shellfish was present in about 22 per cent of paintings, fish in about nine per cent of them and ham in about eight per cent.

Chicken -- the most common meat over the period -- was only in one per cent of paintings.

In Germany, where the vast majority of people lived too far from the sea to consume shellfish until recently, lobsters and the like showed up in four of 20 mealtime paintings, while chicken wasn’t in a single one of them.

When it came to fruits, the most commonly painted were lemons, which showed up in 31 per cent of all the artworks.

Paintings form the Netherlands had the most lemons – 51 per cent of paintings -- even though they didn’t grow there and were therefore too expensive for most people to consume.

In Italy, where they grow easily, lemons showed up in only 16 per cent of paintings.

Wansink believes the people commissioning the paintings were simply looking to show off -- just like when people nowadays snap a cellphone photo at a restaurant, add the hashtag “foodporn” and share it with their followers on social media.

“Taking pictures of food is one way to tell others you are experiencing something out of the ordinary,” he said. “It shows that you’re a person of means that can afford new cool experiences.”

The study’s authors note other reasons why some foods showed up more often than others in the paintings, including symbolism. For example, Catholics might see the presence of fish as a reference to going without during Lent, “thereby conveying the importance of self-sacrifice and humility,” they write.

Or artists may have chosen to include artichokes -- the most commonly-depicted vegetable -- because they are more challenging to paint than onions or cucumbers.

But above all, according to Wansink, food paintings were “a way of saying, ‘Look at me, I can afford to consume something and experience something that is notable.’”