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Food

Fast Food Porn Is Packed with Sexual Latency

There’s something rather natural about seeing a weiner dutifully placed inside a tight warm bun.
Photo via handout

Of the five stages of psychosexual development, as proposed by Sigmund Freud, the anal and phallic stage seem to have—in these waning stages of late-Capitalist marketing—subconsciously found each other in the sodomization of food. "Don't shit where you eat," goes the saying, but feel free to fuck what you eat. There's something rather natural, perhaps even cathartically complete, about seeing a weiner dutifully placed inside a tight warm bun, case in point the "bagel dog," whose tip protrudes like an uncircumcised penis breaching its foreskin.

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As easy as it is to deride lowbrow food porn, we may all be stuck in Freud's latency period, as marked by repressed sexual urges which find their expression elsewhere in more perverse ways. Add to the mix "reward perception" hormones ghrelin and dopamine, whose receptors spark in the brain when hungry and satiated, respectively. And so it may not be a huge surprise that dopamine (along with the love hormone, oxytocin, which goes amuck after orgasm) are also involved in feelings of warmth, contentment, and a sense of security. Food porn, then, is not so much a modern invention than simply the overlap nature between biochemistry and psychology.

Lowbrow food porn, as opposed highbrow's daintier pastel palette—e.g. sous-vide lobster bathed in morel foam, candied rhubarb carefully planked across vanilla, red beets and shaved fennel folded into yogurt and dusted with chia seeds, ceviche scallops dotted with basil oil and whitefish roe—has a tendency towards saturated yellows and rich burnt umbers, perhaps as prophetic signifiers of fat. The association with porn is not glib, but a recognition of their similar aesthetic: uncanny explicitness, almost clinically described, and rendered with fantastical excessiveness.

If the hot dog's happy repose inside the pizza crust is code for culinary copulation, then the pizza's topping, with all its globs of cheese strewn about with abandon, may just be the messy orgasm. Pizza Hut's 'Hot Dog Stuffed Crust' pizza successfully embodies the entire experience of coitus, from the cheap date with a cheap date, to the mechanics of passionate hydraulics, to the inevitable ecstasy cometh. That we feel the need to stuff our sausages into everything may point to some deep oedipal loneliness, which in lieu of maternal affection and paternal usurpation, is reduced to finding solace in the subconscious rectal lining of a pizza's crust.

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McDonalds', Burger King's, and Carl's Jr.'s logos are all anchored around red and yellow, the colors most associated with lust and anxiety. There's a theory that such logos, as vectors of psychological climate, were designed to get heated patrons in the door while keeping them pensive enough to quickly leave. The drive-thru is at once both convenient and, more indicatively, coldly inhospitable. They never wanted you over.

Those who prefer anatomical cut-out views akin to scientific illustrations may enjoy Taco Bell's "Waffle Taco," whose three-tier vaginal contraption seems ready for amorous attention. That which is missing a phallus implicitly becomes a potential fleshlight, its labia-like folds swollen and glistening.

Fast food product shots—unlike other industries (furniture, kitchenware, clothing) whose products are usually contextualized within their ideal environment—seem to actively prop the orphaned item in front of blank space, as if to further endorse the feeling that nothing else matters.

A Google image search for "waffle taco real" will betray the reality of the mess it actually is, though—something vaguely post-coital and angrily violated. The anger here, oddly, is Taco Bell, despite their impressive profit margins. If the objectification of this Waffle Taco is a metaphor, she starts off already raped.

So it may be ironic that our target demographic—depleted people basically self-administering dopamine—suffers decrease in libido in direct proportion to food consumption. All addiction eventually strips neurological reward receptors in the brain. The worse you feel, the more desperate you are to feel better.

If the marketers behind Cinnabon Delights™ were not thinking "cum balls" when they devised these cream-filled testicular drops of consumerist tea-bagging, then maybe we're the sick ones. Probably not, though. A friend describes them as tepid, or auspiciously body temperature. One serving comes with four balls, which gives us two men. CINNABON®'s frosting is known—as best accounted in Louis CK's "Shameless"—for its seminal sheen, each one with their own unique bukkake design to it.

That men are the primary demographic of fast food porn, and that its aesthetic is built around glistening secretions, then is there not a clandestine homoeroticism at the core? With every fellatio-inspired bite, how far back in our minds do we need to push castration complex?

If the genital stage is the final expression of sexual development in a healthy adult, then may we look to fast food porn to protect and host our most dormant instincts. While women are definitely allowed to join the party, and no one is calling anyone gay, these foods seem uniquely male in preoccupation.

Like a dick pic, it's just in your face, and wants to be loved.