Food Porn



""It is a matter of physics, a scientific fact that the human body reacts in very similar ways when anticipating food and sex. Capillaries swell, lips and membranes become engorged, saliva thickens and the pulse rises. It's no accident that the two pleasures have become... confused.""

- Anthony Bourdain, No Reservations, Food Porn special

Food porn is two things:


 * Food artfully portrayed in a manner reminiscent of the way one would show 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, 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 about the food in a similar manner.

The production of professional, high-octane food porn is an involved process. These articles 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 plugging the term into a Flickr search will quickly illustrate.

Alas, as in real porn, many of these orgasmic delights are photo shopped or faked. This is especially true in commercials, but it is also necessary: under hot studio lights, frozen foods will melt, hot foods go cold, cereal gets soggy, 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.

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.

Compare Impossibly Delicious Food, Supreme Chef, Erotic Eating (where the act of eating the food is a blatant Visual Innuendo), Delicious Distraction (In-Universe version). See also Costume Porn and Scenery Porn.

Contrast Alien Lunch.

Advertising

 * These ads for M&M Premiums combines Food Porn appeal with regular sex appeal, complete with reaction shots of the other M&M characters. (Well, you know what they say about the green ones...)
 * The Marks and Spencer advertising campaign, 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 voiced by Matthew Macfadyen is also pretty sexy.
 * This is a fine and shining example of radio Food Porn.

Anime & Manga

 * If the food in Ouran High School Host Club didn't make you drool at least once, YOU HAVE NO TASTE BUDS.
 * Oishinbo is filled with drawings of food that invoke this trope.
 * Any anime or manga involving a cake or any kind of pastry featured more than once, like Antique Bakery and Black Butler. Especially Antique Bakery.
 * One episode of Black Butler even revolved around a curry-making contest for good measure.
 * Yumeiro Patissiere has sparkling pastries that send their eaters on adventures.
 * The Wallflower: Half the manga revolves around mealtimes, with panels devoted to displaying Sunako's culinary creations before they dig in.
 * Dragon Ball: Imagine how hungry people get after seeing all the yummy food Goku got to eat.
 * Yakitate!! Japan deserves a mention as it consists mostly of baking duels.
 * The entire point of Cooking Master Boy, plus cooking tournaments and duels.
 * Kami no Shizuku 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". What Do You Mean It's Not Awesome?
 * One Piece: Sanji's cooking, and other fancy dishes...
 * Ristorante Paradiso revolves around a restaurant in Rome. Naturally, lots of attention is put into both food and wine.
 * Victorian Romance Emma: 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.
 * Toriko: The manga itself regularly spends at least a third of each chapter simply having people eat. The genius of tha artist is that somehow it manages to make you salivate—even when the food is fictional and in black-and-white!
 * 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.
 * Historys Strongest Disciple Kenichi 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...
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * Sailor Moon has a lot of this. Especially evident whenever Usagi got to eat something.
 * D.Gray-man: Whenever Allen eats something or thinks about food we get to see a lot of it in all its delicious detail.
 * Fushigi Yuugi had this in its first episode when Miaka thought about the food she wanted to eat. And in a few episodes beyond.
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * Although Oh 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.
 * It is impossible to watch an episode of K-On! without drooling over Tsumugi's cakes.
 * Most of the dishes in Tamayura are presented nicely, but extra points go to the sweets prepared by Fuu's grandmother.
 * Boku No Sexual Harassment has Yaoi porn and this porn. Specially in regards to wine and, um, corn.
 * Surprisingly, given the nature of the show this comes up more than a few times in Monster.
 * Kinou Nani Tabeta, appropriately translated into "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.
 * Kaichou wa Maid-sama: Usui is an exceptionally good cook. You will be drooling by the end of chapters in which he cooks.
 * Hell Girl: In episode 9, "Sweet Trap," the desserts that Hiromi makes are simply divine.
 * Sometimes shows up in D.N.Angel like in episode 15.
 * Any meal that shows up in Mawaru Penguindrum is pretty much this. Some examples: Yuri's picnic lunch, Himari and Ringo's bento, a stew-based dinner, cookies and tea, a certain fancy dinner...
 * 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.

Comics

 * 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.".

Films -- Animation
"Other Mother: (opens a box) They're cocoa beetles... from Zanzibar! [takes a bite]"
 * Disney's Beauty and the Beast features Food Porn during the "Be Our Guest" musical number when the servants treat Belle to dinner.
 * The Pixar animators that worked on Ratatouille 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.
 * It's a bit of an unusual example, though, as most of the other entries on this list are solely about the pleasure of eating. Ratatouille emphasizes the artistry involved in cooking the food.
 * The Princess and the Frog contains way more of this than you'd expect, even considering that the female lead wants to open her own restaurant.
 * 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:


 * Spirited Away - A lot of the food, particularly what the parents were eating in the beginning.
 * Aaand it gets turned on its head a few minutes later.

Films -- Live Action

 * Matilda. Mmm... chocolate cake. This turns into Food Gorn pretty quickly, though.
 * Titanic (1997) featured some Food Porn during the scene where steerage passenger Jack joined the first-class passengers for dinner as a reward for preventing Rose from almost falling off the boat.
 * Willy Wonka and 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.
 * Although if you've seen the Riff Trax interpretation of that scene, you'll never be able to get it out of your head.
 * Tampopo - though it blurs the line between Food Porn and Fetish Fuel 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.
 * Inglourious Basterds: The strudel scene.
 * Julie and 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.
 * Just like Julie.
 * Waitress: The shots of not just the gorgeous pies, but how lovingly they were made.
 * 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.
 * Marie Antoinette (the 2006 movie) contains several displays of mouth-watering desserts.
 * 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. I walked out of that movie hungry.
 * The Princess Diaries (2001) film had this 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.
 * 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.
 * The 1980 movie Fatso. Let there be cake!
 * Idiocracy parodies it with a video of a girl cutting a piece of steak with her feet on the porn channel.
 * 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.
 * In Hook, the feast of imaginary food, which once Peter begins to believe in it, is seen by the audience in full splendor.
 * Avatar has a flicker of this when Avatar Grace tosses Avatar Jake a Pandoran fruit and, well, let me put it this way: "He takes a bite of her big, juicy fruit."
 * In 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.
 * The Pale Man in Pan's Labyrinth sits in front of a table full of fresh, tantalizing food. Do not eat any of it.
 * Captain America: The First Avenger: Golly, that steak looks good...
 * Sometimes shows up in Harry Potter, like during the feasts at Hogwarts or that pudding that Dobby ruins in the second movie.
 * The nacho-eating scene from Death Proof. If that didn't give you a major hankering for nachos, you're lying.
 * The recent arthouse documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi 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.

Literature
"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..."
 * In the Harry Potter books 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 been 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.
 * Redwall. Let it suffice to say that there is at least one grand (vegetarian) feast every book and woodlanders really love their food, enough to inspire some people to have tried to convert them to real life recipes and there's an official Redwall Cookbook.
 * The Famous Five books famously described all the kids meals to meticulous detail.
 * "And lashings and lashings of Ginger Beer!"
 * Just about any Enid Blyton book is bound to feature this. It's a wonder the girls in her boarding school series can even move after one term.
 * The Temeraire series, especially past the second book. Laurence actually hires a Chinese cook to feed Temeraire, who has taken a liking to having his cows more prepared than 'freshly slaughtered and raw' and the cook's delicacies are often described in fine detail.
 * 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
 * Now that Food Porn is being reproduced in rapturous reproducible detail
 * Joanne Harris's novel Chocolat, as the movie above.
 * Poppy Z. Brite's series of novels starting with Liquor, which makes sense since the books are about two chefs who start their own restaurant.
 * Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House 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 when she was a child, resulting in her considering a decent meal to be a sensual and special experience.
 * This trope appears in, of all places, Homer's 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.
 * 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.)
 * All of the Vlad Taltos books by Steven Brust contain loving description of food, wine, cooking, and Yendi both starts and ends with an extended "onions" metaphor.
 * The James Bond novels. Ian Fleming must have had a serious food fetish. He did start the series when Britain was still on rationing. Think on that, now imagine how powerful the food porn would have been
 * CS Lewis uses Food Porn as an analogy in his essay Mere Christianity to explain his theories about 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 Fifties at that) of being undersexed. (See the Quotes wiki for the full quote):


 * Lewis also discusses Food Porn briefly in The Screwtape Letters, calling it "gluttony of delicacy," an overly sensuous concern with the taste and appearance of food that doesn't involve overeating.
 * Robert B. Parker's 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.
 * 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.
 * Metafictive/literal example: Kurt Vonnegut's 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.
 * Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe is a gourmet (among other things) and employed 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.
 * Robert Heinlein's 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 ordered in I Will Fear No Evil.
 * In Friday, the breakfasts the title character had at the Bellingham Hilton and with the Hunters.
 * 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.
 * JRR Tolkien was extremely descriptive of the foods served in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
 * Ella Enchanted has a lot of this. Especially pronounced seeing as how one of the character's (Mandy) is an excellent cook.
 * The Inheritance Trilogy has descriptions of not one but two feasts in Eldest within the space of a few chapters.
 * 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.
 * A Series of Unfortunate Events: As Sunny has habilities to cook, food descriptions are frequent.The yummiest is the brunch at the beginning of book 12.
 * But the most outlandish is in Book 10, where Sunny is forced to make breakfast for the villains with what basically amounts 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.
 * In his mock book review 'Sexplosion', Stanislaw Lem describes the rise of literal food porn after most people become uninterested in sex due to overexposure.
 * All meals in Jack Vance's Dying Earth series are described in exquisite detail, and all are either lavishly this trope or nauseatingly inedible with no middle ground.
 * Christina Rossetti's poem Goblin Market spares no detail in describing the succulent fruits the goblins sell.
 * 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 goes into a lot of detail 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.
 * Thief of Time has a mouth-wateringly detailed description of a high-class chocolate shop.
 * Anton Chekhov's The Siren is full of lush descriptions of Russian cuisine. It also overlaps with Delicious Distraction in this case.
 * Moby Dick had one chapter titled "Chowder".
 * 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.
 * Inquisitor Eisenhorn manages to turn this into an interrogation tool in Malleus. He deliberately enjoys a fine glass of vintage amasec and a lho stick 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.
 * Several of Thomas Wolfe's works, notably The Web and the Rock. Especially the circus chapter.
 * Like Water for Chocolate practically swims in it.
 * In Dead Souls. Those squires like to eat.
 * Ishq And Mushq has a lot of food porn with the Indian food Sarna cooks, especially in the early chapters.
 * Sport by Louise Fitzhugh has a scene in which Sport's stepmother-to-be cooks dinner for him and her fiance. Sport all but drools over it.
 * 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.
 * Suzanne Collins has a field day with it in The Hunger Games. Justified both in that the Capital is flamboyant in everything (including meals), and it's narrated by a girl who spent most of her life with barely anything to eat.
 * Nonfiction example: Prof. Paul Campos went into some detail on the subject in The Diet Myth.
 * Jelly Belly has this in spades. It's to be expected when your narrator is a preteen boy who loves to eat!
 * Susceptible readers may gain five pounds just from the description given of the "work of sheerest culinary artistry" Adam in David R. Palmer's Emergence prepares for protagonist/narrator Candy in the course of one day. Like Candy, Adam is eleven years old.

Live Action TV

 * 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.
 * Parodied in a fake Saturday Night Live bumper for the Food Network. The slogan: "Porn for fat people."
 * Ralphie Mae has a similar routine about watching Rachael Ray make a chocolate cake while he was on Celebrity Fit Club.
 * 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.
 * ElGourmet.com channel and the cooking shows in Utilísima.
 * 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.
 * ... but at least you'll be able to prepare many of the dishes Giada makes, both in their general simplicity and affordability. Ina Garten, on the other hand? Not only 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.
 * No Reservations both exploits this and analyzes it, even dedicating two episodes to the phenomenon so far (see page quote). However, Bourdain had written an article on the subject as early as 2001, well before he became a TV host.
 * 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.
 * Subverted in Man v. Food. The food certainly looks delicious even if it isn't tarted up for the cameras, but the gigantic portions involved make dishes seem very imposing and even a little threatening.
 * Not to mention how many times the host makes himself noticeably ill in the process of tackling a food challenge. There's even a term for it: the "meat sweats."
 * Nigella Lawson - she makes everything she does on her cooking shows sound flirty and slightly dirty, to the extent that comedy show 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 fact that it is entirely possible to make a porny-sounding audio-scene 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.
 * For the Latin-American with Casa Club in their cable service, Kristina Wetter. Sure that her cooking in camera looks almost asceptic and chirurgical, but the results are absolutely mouth-watering. And let's not talk about her cooking books...
 * And for you who like the Genki Girl-ish New Yorker thing, there's Rachael Ray.
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * Dexter has a weird example of what might be considered Food Gorn in its opening sequence... here.
 * Gordon Ramsey'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.
 * Doctor Who 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........
 * Don't forget 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...
 * In The End of Time, the Master's speeches about Christmas Dinner make either make you disgusted with it or really, really hungry.
 * In a literal example, the CSI New York team once investigated a murder that traced back to an exclusive party dedicated to Erotic Eating, complete with obligatory chocolate-sauce-covered-model strawberry-dipping scene.
 * 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.
 * The Korean Drama Pasta is set in an Italian restaurant and features lots and lots of pretty plates of food.
 * On Thirty 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.

Radio

 * J.C. Webster III routinely rants about food porn when he calls into Coast to Coast AM.

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 special "Hot and Fluffy" 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..."

Video Games

 * Then there's Sonic Unleashed, which seems to have an unhealthy fixation on beautifully rendered foodstuffs amongst cartoony Sonic graphics. An example here that it must be noted is in NO way altered.
 * Oh, ho ho! That's just the tip of the Food Porn iceberg in Sonic Unleashed! You're forgetting 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.
 * 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 by Vanillaware, 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.
 * One of the benefits of Heroes of Might and Magic 4 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.
 * Completely (and surprisingly) averted by the Iron Chef video game.
 * 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.
 * The description of most of the dinners you eat at any of the inns in Quest for Glory I through IV may qualify. Subverted to the point of Nausea Fuel in V (and some of the meals in III), though it compensates with appetizing rations like fruit and gyros.
 * 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.)
 * 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.
 * 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 having for dinner. Or a short, alarmed description of the fried grubs.
 * Or, in the Darker and Edgier parts of Dark Dawn, a short, tragic description of a stove that will never cook again.
 * Once you get 100% completion in Pikmin 2, 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 the these are humorous, the ones that get into genuine detail make them sound absolutely delicious.

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.
 * It's not nicknamed Unlimited Food Porn for nothing.
 * And 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 read.
 * And speaking of Fan Disservice, the mapo tofu scene in Heavens Feel may be an intentional Food Porn equivalent.
 * Whenever the Ushiromiya family in Umineko no Naku Koro ni 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

 * The many splash pages of sweets in School Bites are often referred as "porn for girls".
 * This shows up a lot in Hang in There Kogasasan, as "Kogasa" and his wife are cardinal foodies.

Web Original

 * YouTube: the internet shows “Cooking Made Sexy by Tifa” and “Cooking With Cans”., , ,
 * 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. You're welcome.
 * A frequent ''raison d'être' for many food blogs. Witness the food porn category at Slashfood as an example.
 * Subversion; James Lileks' Gallery of Regrettable Food. Think of it as FailBlog for vintage attempts at Food Porn.
 * Then, there's the FailBlog relative, EpiCute, 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.
 * Also, possibly the originator of the word "foodgasm".
 * The "Sunday Sweets" on Cake Wrecks.
 * Link for your viewing pleasure.
 * This YouTube Poop.
 * EPICMEALTIME, but can border on the Squick side sometimes because it is not the kind of soft, loving and tender porn; EPICMEALTIME 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 for the past few months have much more frequently featured 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.
 * Look at this article for a chocolate espresso cake with chocolate cinnamon glaze, I felt like I had to take a shower afterward, it was almost sexual the way he keeps showing the photo of the cake and describing how sensual it is.
 * The Flickr photo group.
 * Bad Lip Reading: "I'm damp for the easy muffin."
 * Polyvore, a fashion website, has lots of Food Porn in it. Just search 'food' in the Collections search engine. 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.
 * In fact, a collection search of any food will almost always get you at least some Food Porn.
 * Reddit has an entire board devoted to this concept. It is named, appropriately, FoodPorn. YMMV as to the quality, though, as many of the photos are user-created and -submitted.
 * This tumblr is just amazing.

Western Animation
""Oh yeah...glaze the fuck out of that chicken...""
 * Family Guy did this with pancakes in the episodes "Love Thy Trophy", "Jungle Love", and "The Man With Two Brians".
 * Also done with apple pie in the episodes "The Man With Two Brians" and "Barely Legal".
 * SpongeBob SquarePants: "Grandma's Kisses" is good episode to watch for this if you happen to be a fan of chocolate chip cookies.
 * Not to mention the irresistible Krabby Patty as seen in episodes like "Plankton!" and definitely "Just One Bite".
 * Rugrats does this at times whenever Angelica (who is a major Sweet Tooth) indulged on cookies, cakes or other such sweets.
 * 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 18:10 for the...tastiness.
 * The Silly Symphony short The Wise Little Hen 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.
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * 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.


 * Time Squad: When combined with Freud Was Right, this trope was taken to an almost literal meaning, as most of the food shown was either phallic (French bread, sausages, carrots, Cheez Whiz from the can [which Tuddrussel shakes up and squirts into his mouth on "Day of the Larrys"], and the always-popular banana [which Larry used twice to trip Tuddrussel as seen in "The Clownfather" and "Hate and Let Hate"]), vagina- or womb-like (pies [none of which was cherry], a turkey which Larry pumped full of gravy on "Ex Marks the Spot" [even the gravy stains all over the walls, Larry, and Tuddrussel's hands looked...off], muffins [Tuddrussel ate one on "Sandwich By Any Other Name" and said, "My tongue feels like it's wrapped in a lace doily and headed off to the ballet!"], an ice-cream taco on "Forget the Alamo" [probably one of the few things that had a cherry on it], and an actual cherry on "Ex Marks the Spot," which was put on top of a gravy-smothered turkey, then sank inside of it), testicular-looking (grapes, olives, and nuts), or resembled ejaculate (the aforementioned Cheez Whiz from "Day of the Larrys" and the aforementioned gravy from "Ex Marks the Spot.") In fact, the beginning of "Ex Marks the Spot" in particular is an extended metaphor for sex, all done with the use of food.
 * The Looney Tunes Show: Elmer Fudd extols the praises of the grilled cheese sandwich...like Barry White with a speech impediment.
 * 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 . The same goes for the rest of the other bakers' desserts.
 * In one episode of The Simpsons when Homer became a rude food critic, a bunch of local Springfield chefs hire 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.

Real Life

 * Bento. Here are a few examples.
 * 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, note the presentation scores for Japanese chefs compared to European ones on Iron Chef. In IC America, Morimoto consistently has the best presentation scores of any chef that appears.