Food-Porn: Philosophical and Psychoanalytic Approach to Contemporary Alimentary Practices

Abstract

The paper deals with two contemporary alimentary phenomena (food porn and mukbang) in order to understand the basis for researching such phenomena in the social and anthropological sciences about food. As conceptual approaches, we choose the conception of hyperreality of J. Baudrillard and the modern version of psychoanalysis (structural psychoanalysis of J. Lacan). Based on these two approaches, we demonstrated one of the key complexities of the methodology of contemporary research on alimentary practices. It consists in the problematic choice between the search for basis in the global representation of society or in anthropological models. We also need to consider such phenomena not only in the perspective of meaning, but also in terms of pleasure.