Snack Chat: Appetite Adornment
On foodie fashion, grocery girl trends, foodcore, and what have you.
TW: This post mentions eating disorders in a general way. Please take care of yourself.
My closet is full of food. In the past four or so years, I’ve acquired a pair of socks with bread on them; a tee-shirt with a Sohla El-Waylly recipe for chocolate cake on the back; a silk shirt from an LA designer with a shrimp pattern; the linen pasta shirt that was briefly but embarrassingly (to me) on an extra in the Italian season of the White Lotus; and a baseball cap that bears the name of a restaurant in New York City. I also own a lamp that’s made of an actual croissant. Let’s ignore for now that all but one of my tattoos could technically be culinary.
I should be a mark for the recent explosion of clothes and fashion accessories with food on them. I’m talking about the pasta, caviar, green beans, seafood towers, and, yes, tomatoes, from Rachel Antonoff. More pasta and the kind of seafood tableau I grew up eating only on holidays from the Casa Vasca in Newark, from Lisa Says Gah. Cookies and bananas from Puppets and Puppets, and chilis, cherries, and fruit salad from Reformation; tinned sardines from Staud; shrimp cocktail and olives from Susan Alexandra; apero hour from Clare V; and a croissant from Lemaire.
I could go on, but you get the picture. I am not cool or young or on TikTok or “X” anymore and so please tell me if there is a new word to describe whatever nexus this is of “tomato/lemon girl,” “foodcore,” or “grocery girl,” but for now, I’m going with “food aesthetic.” (Con appétit?) The point is, even for me, it is a lot.
But all in good fun, right? Dopamine dressing, yay. Not everything has to be sinister — sometimes it can just be stuff people like. (Please note that I would buy almost all these things as birthday presents to give to my friends. I’m not trying to say I don’t like it or get it.)
But I’m curious about the explosion, surely at its saturation point by now, because this food aesthetic is exploding in clothes and accessories that are marketed towards women, or that seem to signify a femme aesthetic. (A real can of worms to open, I realize.) All while diet culture, or at least skinny / Oz*mbic culture, is back on the rise, whose “self-improvement” target is, as it so often is, women and girls.
More to the point, I’m curious about my old affinity for the food aesthetic. When I look back on my appetite for the food aesthetic I’ve amassed, the bread socks and the croissant lamp, I would not buy any of it today. This doesn’t make me a good person — it means I’m divorced and on a tighter budget than I once was and my taste has gotten more pragmatic, more bisexual, less femme, and more boring. I would also argue that I know myself better, but I’m aware that this is delusional; we all think we have arrived at some forever until we look back on our camera rolls and see we’re always changing. So why did I spend money on these socks and shirts not so long ago?
When I look at this stuff, I see myself in yoga teacher training and, later, in the latter stages of the pandemic as the world expanded but mine continued to feel restricted. First, I was in a hardwon, pleasurable relationship with food again, but found myself surrounded by the kind of “clean eating” culture that felt dangerously close to a sanctioned road to orthorexia. Then, I felt frustrated, isolated, but also optimistic and ready to shake things up. I wanted to pop in somewhere new to sample a croissant, or travel taco truck to taco truck, bistro to bistro, as my friends were doing, but time and again, a celebrated bakery or favorite lunch spot added my life-threatening allergen, peanuts, to the menu. My food aesthetic purchases were not-so-subtle notes to self to own the optimism in my relationship to my appetite, even when it was only in theory.
When I think of this, I wonder if defiance is a sizable part of the market for this moment of peak food aesthetic — because so many of us seek resolution or comfort through shopping. Our bread socks can be a bit of counter-identity in the face of diet culture, a flare sent up to say, I unsubscribe! Do you?
But I can’t help but wonder how the notable explosion of food fashion might reflect our culture’s fetishization of food as fatphobia and pressure to look skinny double down again. We’ve collectively left pandemic sourdough behind. This is an aesthetic about theoretical appetite, rather than the actual preparation and enjoyment of food as an act of care, both personal and shared.
On some level, the excess of it all — the sky-high price of the Lemaire croissant bag, the glut of pricey caviar on the Rachel Antonoff puffer jacket — seems like it’s seeking the pleasure and nostalgia of foods without being about eating them. That it is in fact expressing a deep longing for food that feels forbidden or whose innocence has been lost amidst rising awareness (and anxiety) about climate change, labor practices, global capitalism, microplastics, forever chemicals, and ultra-processed foods.
I am suspicious of my old desire to sate an appetite through fake food, rather than look for what the appetite wants to tell me about my own body, my own safety, and my own freedom.
The semester of college when I stopped eating was the semester when I discovered the vast young world of food blogs. I read them obsessively, and, as I wrote for BuzzFeed Reader in 2018, they changed my life. They taught me to cook and reminded me that I was a writer. I found them by searching photos of food, which I did obsessively when I was barely eating, feasting on the images of futomaki and donburi, oozy slices of blueberry pie à la mode, pert stacks of pancakes.
I was never as rapturously into food, nor as propelled to cook for my friends, as I was when my precious attention was hijacked by eating disorders. My passion was as much symptom as it was savior, and I am still not entirely trusting of its motives. It was entirely focused on food as occasion, not feeding myself as daily life. It was only later, when I chose to make a life with someone, when I began to reshape my relationship to food as something far more mundane, far more profound. Pancakes became pancakes again. Toast became toast.
I think there is a way in which putting a picture of toast on your body can feel safer than eating it. Most of the time, shopping for images of food to adorn our bodies is pure fun, self-expression, and I think sometimes that’s what it is. There’s nothing wrong with that! Probably, that’s what it is for you, if you’ve bought any of these pretty things. But for myself, I am curious — even suspicious — when food shows up with abandon in aesthetics while eating food remains fraught. I am suspicious of my old desire to sate an appetite through fake food, rather than to look for what the appetite wants to tell me about my own body, my own safety, and my own freedom.
Sometimes I miss the version of me who used to launch into ambitious cooking projects, who would bake pie for my roommates and throw dinner parties that somehow included paella. But I’m grateful to be where I am, snacking on Triscuits and drinking PG Tips tea and frying humble eggs for the one I love. I’m not a better person, but I am, I think, a better cook.
Snacks
Jessica Defino has written about food imagery in the realm of beauty and skincare in her newsletter The Review of Beauty, fka The Unpublishable. I didn’t know about “glazed donut skin” but now I do.
My Sohla El-Waylly chocolate cake recipe tee is from Cake Zine, a print mag exploring the intersection of culture and sweets.
It’s nuts to even recommend Smitten Kitchen at this point but it is truly the food blog that taught me how to bake and saved my life, and I am continuously comforted by the fact that the design has barely changed.
Anyone is welcome to buy me this, no matter what I say.