One of this year’s best headlines was, ‘Pantry porn’ trend rooted in racist, sexist behavior: Loyola Professor’ At first glance, being somewhat dyslexic, I read the title as ‘Panty Porn’. You can imagine my disappointment when it turned out to be ‘Pantry porn’. I read the article anyway, as I don’t doubt many people did who would otherwise skip over articles about food storage.
My takeaway was,”This dame knows nothing about pantries.”
She knows a lot about marketing, though. She’s a marketing professor. Marketing is the business of getting people to buy stuff they don’t need with money they don’t have. Worse, her specialty is digital marketing. I think a politician who ran on a promise to hang a marketing executive once a week while in office would win any election by a landslide. The hottest topics on the internet are pornography, racism, and sexism, more or less in that order. Her short article for ‘The Conversation’ in which the word, ‘porn’ appears 22 times, hits all three. It also points out that 87% of new homes over 3,500 square feet have a pantry, celebrities have pantries, and organized pantries are people’s way of making believe too much stuff is okay so long as the stuff isn’t cluttered.
To be fair, not using social media, television, or radio leaves me ignorant of almost everything Professor Denten is talking about. The gist, as I understand it, is that there’s a socially manufactured trend for rich people to acquire and stock pantries as status symbols. She posits that racism and sexism are behind this nefarious trend because obsessively tidy white women do the work with the apparent implication that other races can’t or won’t follow suit.
Couple points:
*In ‘Travels with Charley’ John Steinbeck observed that, “Where the rich go, the poor will follow, or try to.” And so, if the poor see the rich are putting up food stores, and the poor follow suit, what’s wrong with that? The professor bemoans that the poor can’t afford great big walk-in pantries. So what? She offers no alternative solution. What does she think poor people should do? Say “We can’t,” give up, and hope the government will save them? Most of the world stores food in closets, under the bed, in the living room…yes, in the living room–like a chest freezer for example. In food emergencies, you don’t need a pantry per se. You need food.
*She says, “In my research, influencers who produce pantry porn are predominantly white women who demonstrate what it looks like to maintain a “nice” home by creating a new status symbol: the perfectly organized, fully stocked pantry.” I would counter that her research is lacking. She is lazy and has not looked beyond her own biases. For regular households, including ours, men are often the driving wheel for stocking pantries. Hunting, fishing, gathering, shopping, cooking, canning, cleaning, stocking shelves… Which is sensible because men have to eat, and traditionally, whether college gender studies professors like it or not, for millenia men have been held responsible, both by themselves and by society, for keeping their families from starving.
*Decades before digital marketing, regular people of all colors, who never owned a home even half of 3,500 square feet, always kept a pantry. Not for status, but because they’d lived through the Great Depression when so many people went hungry.
*She pooh-poohs organized pantries but it’s essential to organize pantries so they don’t end up with food dating back to the Regan Administration. Rotating food is not for status, it’s to maintain nutritional quality.
*She, the rich people she describes, and the ‘professional organizers’ the rich people hire to create pantries in their McMansions, all miss what any prepper knows.: 1) you don’t want clear containers because they let in light which is an enemy of stored food. 2) You want to store sealed food with oxygen absorbers and dessicants. 3) most, if not all, of the food showcased in articles about her pantry porn hypothesis picture non-organic, corporate food-like substances, loaded with preservatives, cooked to death in metal cans. Better than nothing but not better than what you could put up on your own.
*If you search for ‘pantry porn’ you probably don’t want to do it at work. Apparently there’s a whole lot of shaking going on in pantries around the country.
https://nypost.com/2023/03/16/pantry-porn-rooted-in-racist-sexist-behavior-loyola-doctor/
