Precisely aligned glass spice jars with printed white labels. Wicker baskets filled with bundles of pasta, cookies and snacks. Rows of flavored seltzer water stacked in double-deck plastic bins.
In today’s consumer culture, “a place for everything and everything in its place” isn’t just a mantra; It’s a big business. Nowhere is this more evident than in a kitchen pantry.
Most people can relate to finding half-empty cereal boxes shoved away in the cupboard or letting produce sit for far too long in a refrigerator drawer.
But for a subset of social media denizens, such desecrations of their feed will never blossom.
As someone who studies digital consumer culture, I’ve noticed an uptick in flashy, stylized, fully stocked pantries on TikTok and Instagram, giving rise to a type of content I call “pantry porn.”
How did a perfectly organized pantry become so ubiquitous in the digital age? And what do you say about the expectations of being a good housewife?
When the stores became beautiful
The pantry—which comes from the Latin word for bread, “panis”—was originally a hidden place to store food. It was purely functional, not a place to show off to others. In the late 19th century, the butler’s pantry emerged as an architectural trend among high society. This small space, wedged between the kitchen and dining room, was a sign of status—an area to hide both the food and the people who prepared it.
Over the next century, storehouses began to be built in middle-class homes. When open floor plans became popular in the 1950s, kitchens came into plain sight. This shift in design paved the way for many modern American pantries to feature floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall cabinetry, and ample storage space.
Today, more than 85% of new homes built in America over 3,500 square feet have a pantry, said to be the most attractive kitchen feature for new homebuyers, according to a 2019 report.
Celebrities can be credited — at least in part — with making the pantry a modern-day status symbol. The Kardashian-Jenner family has long been a role model for #pantrygoals and former “Real Housewives” star Yolanda Hadid has social media fan pages dedicated to her refrigerator.
In the digital age, social media influencers have stepped in as sporadic tastemakers translating celebrity culture codes into accessible markers of status for the rest of us.
Neatly arranged pantries appeal to middle-class sensibilities: You probably can’t have a designer kitchen, but you can spruce up bulk pantry.
Go Beyond Food Porn – Make Room For The Porn Store
Throughout the 2010s, pornography dominated social media. The so-called “camera eats first” phenomenon introduced user-generated images of cooking, eating, and food preparation.
Consumers’ controversial obsession with food photography has led some restaurants to ban smartphone photography while other companies have created true food-inspired selfie wonders like The Ice Cream Museum and The Egg House.
New technology didn’t invent food porn, but it did stimulate it in new ways. Consumers armed with camera phones can suddenly enjoy meals for the voyeuristic pleasure of their friends and followers. The view-and-be-watched dynamic is a defining feature of modern digital consumer culture in which non-sexual objects are linguistically associated with porn: pornography, travel porn, porn books, porn real estate. The association of social media content with the descriptor “pornographic” serves as shorthand for approval, gratification, and stares.
Pantry porn is a mixture of infotainment, how-to, lifestyle content, and ASMR, a form of sound-driven content intended to relax viewers.
Influencers film themselves shopping for supplies, preparing food, refilling containers and organizing their pantries — often paired with hashtags like #pantryrestock, #pantryASMR, and #pantrygoals. they transfer dry goods from store-bought bags into matching glassware; They stock their in-house coffee pods and flavored syrups; they refill stackable boxes with single-serving snacks; They make multiple types of ice cubes – each with its own freezer section. Much of this pantry porn is performed against the backdrop of rhythmic ASMR-inspired shrieks, thumps, clips, rips, and thumps, engaging viewers’ pleasure centers.
Screenshots of the snack drawer restocking videos on TikTok. Tik Tok
Like its pornographic predecessor, pantry porn thrives on everyday lifestyle in exaggerated ways. But where pornography sparks the desire for voracious bingeing, pantry porn evokes a different cultural desire: the orderly order of plenty.
An increase is bad, but an orderly increase is a good thing
The past decade has seen a home organization revolution.
An entire cottage industry of blogs, books, and TV shows have introduced people to terms like “undoing,” “minimalism,” and “the simple life.”
Simplicity was once a countercultural lifestyle rooted in anti-consumerism: use less, buy less, own less.
But if pantry porn is any indication, New Simplicity means more is more, as long as more isn’t messy. Consumers don’t need less, they need more: more containers, more labels, more storage space.
Storing spices in coordinating glass jars and color-coordinating dozens of spray containers might seem trivial. But order is intertwined with status and chaos is laden with assumptions about personal responsibility and respect.
Cleanliness has historically been used as a cultural gate-keeping mechanism to reinforce status distinctions based on a vague understanding of “niceness”: nice people, with nice yards, in nice homes, make for nice neighborhoods.
What lies beneath the surface of this anti-anarchy-niceness stance is a history of class, racial, and sexual social structures. In my research, the influencers who produce pantry porn are predominantly white women who demonstrate what it’s like to maintain a “nice” home by creating a new status symbol: the perfectly organized, fully stocked pantry.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, pantry porn found its footing during the COVID-19 pandemic, when supply chain shortages increased. Keeping things close at hand has become a symbol of the resilience of those who have the money and space to do so. This allure of strategic stocking is evident in other collecting subcultures such as doomsday preparations and extreme vouchers.
The perfect kitchen pressure
The labor required to restock, refill, and reset the kitchen is a staple of daily porn production.
In my research, I have found that this work often falls to the women in the family. One TikTok mom goes on a “snack strike,” saying she won’t restock the pantry until her kids and husband eat what they already have.
Magazines like Good Housekeeping were once the perfect home business brokers. Internet pornography now sets an aspirational standard for becoming a perfect mother, perfect wife, and perfect woman. This arose from the shift towards an ideology of intensive motherhood which equated being a good mother with time-intensive, labor-intensive and financially intensive care work.
Sure, all those baskets and boxes serve a functional purpose in the home: Seeing what you need, when you need it. But the social pressure to organize a perfect pantry may cause some women to work overtime. They can’t just shove boxes of store-bought snacks into the locker; They have to carefully place the snacks in a fully stocked pantry that rivals a boutique corner store.
Pantry porn, as a status symbol, relies on the promise of making everyday housework easier. But if women are largely responsible for the work required to keep the pantry perfectly organized, it is crucial to ask: Easier to whom?
Gina Drentin, Assistant Professor of Marketing, Loyola University Chicago
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.