Food porn: Food blogs exploding at an incredible rate

Quintuple Chocolate Fudge Brownies

Let's try Googling "food porn" today. YIKES! Google just brought up almost 9 million results! Now, don't get scared and go running off. The term "Food Porn" is not what it sounds like. Remember the Google search I did on "food blogs" in a recent article, Rhode Island food blogs take the cake? That term resulted in more than 81 million results.

According to Wikipedia, "Food porn is a sarcastic term variously applied to a spectacular visual presentation of cooking or eating in advertisements, infomercials, cooking shows or other visual media, foods boasting a high fat and calorie content, exotic dishes that arouse a desire to eat.....Food porn has become particularly prevalent in blogs relating to food, where it is a term for photography and writing about food that is done in a decadent and borderline erotic style."

Thanks, Mr. Bourdain!
Thanks to Top Chef, Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations, Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares and Hell's Kitchen, Rachel Ray, Nigella Lawson and many other celebrity chefs, beautiful photogenic food has gone way past the glossy magazine cover and made its way into our living rooms. With larger-than-life, flat screen, hi-def televisions making the food look so real, you can literally smell the steak as the fat drips onto the hot coals!

Now, go one step further. All this edible photography is all available 24 hours a day, at work, home or play, with just a click of the mouse, on your desktop, laptop, even your iPhone! In fact, a StumbleUpon button makes it even simpler, allowing the obsessed foodie to sit and push that button like a Vegas slot machine, bringing up one sinfully rich food blog after another. That's food porn in its purest form. How can you resist? Surely, you have time for one more piece of Key Lime Pie!

Food Photography Sites
Food porn sites like TasteSpotting (34,500 photos), Foodgawker (around 17,000 photos) and Serious Eat's Photograzing, have helped throw virtual bacon grease on the fire by encouraging bloggers to submit their juiciest photos for publication. These professional and amateur food photographers are hoping to compete with hundreds of other irresistibly delicious photos to make it to the front page and get noticed for a book and/or movie deal. Don't mistake this for child's play. Food blogging can be very competitive and cut-throat!

How Many Food Blogs are There?
Let's do the math. BlogHer has by far one of the most impressive lists. Even though some aren't food related, at more than 18,000 blogs, they're in a league all their own. The Foodie Blogroll brags about having almost 3500 food blogs. Their daily stats are averaging 372,721 hits, and this month alone have already hit 10,063,469 page views! Another major player, the Daring Bakers, has well over 1000 members, and Tuesdays with Dorie has upwards of 300 bakers. While some blogs may overlap with one or more groups, add to that all the rest that don't belong to any particular club, and you've got tens of thousands of food blogs to keep you up till all hours of the night licking your computer!
 

Bottom line?
Free blog sites like Wordpress and Blogger are making it easier than ever for loads of new food blogs to start up every day. Because of food porn sites like TasteSpotting and the like, food blogs are exploding at an incredible rate. The phrase "Food Porn" has been used loosely to describe this growing phenomenon. It's not a dirty word, just a delicious one.

Food Porn Sites to Drool Over

• TasteSpotting
• Foodgawker
• Photograzing
   

Baking Groups

• Tuesdays With Dorie
• Daring Bakers

Celebrity Food Blogs

• Anthony Bourdain
• Gordon Ramsay
• Martha Stewart
• Nigella Lawson
• Rachel Ray

Food For Thought
Have you heard the term "Food Porn" before? Yes? No? Leave a comment, tell me what you think!

Featured Recipes

• Key Lime Pie
• Fresh Strawberry Tart
• Quintuple Chocolate Fudge Brownies

The copyright of the article Food porn: Food blogs exploding at an incredible rate, and photographs are owned by Donna Diegel. Permission to republish Food porn: Food blogs exploding at an incredible rate in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.