When Winny Hayes joined TikTok, she thought the social video app was mostly for lip-synching and dance trends. She wasn’t yet privy to its food content: creamy vodka pasta, mouthwatering birria quesatacos, and anything and everything dropped into an air fryer. “I was like, ‘This is amazing,'” Hayes recalls. “And now most people I follow are food content creators: barbecue, pizza, I follow someone who only makes bagels. That’s amazing. I’m addicted to them.” Food content and the internet go hand-in-hand, and online users can’t get enough. We live in the era of “phone eats first” – capturing images of your food before taking a bite, and the hashtag #foodporn has nearly 267 million posts on Instagram.
Why are we so addicted to videos of food?
Your food porn obsession is explained. Hayes, an Atlanta resident with 1.1 million TikTok followers, is known for making vibrant, creative meals for her family, composed in short how-to videos that help viewers brainstorm their meal ideas. “Adopt me, please” comments flood the page, and that’s the other side of online food content: Though much of it serves home-cooked meals, there’s also an aspirational element. “Food porn,” commonly referred to, can also go viral not because we want to know how to make it but because we jant to eat it.
“It’s pleasurable. It feels good to look at pictures of food,” says Rachel Herz, a Brown University and Boston College faculty member with a Ph.D. in neuroscience. She’s the author of “Why You Eat What You Eat,” which explores the sensory, psychological, and social factors that go into our experiences with food. “It makes us instantly – happy is a bit of a loaded word – but it does in a very loose way make us feel happy because it’s making a neurological effect to trigger feelings of reward and pleasure,” she says.
Herz notes that simply looking at photos or watching videos of food triggers the same activation of dopamine and other chemicals in our brain as seeing food in person does. And it isn’t by accident that the phenomenon was dubbed “food porn.” Being drawn to delicious-looking food is driven by our biology. Specifically, a region in the brain called the nucleus accumbens involves pleasure and reward. “Food is one of the two greatest pleasures of being alive – the other being sex – and we have to eat multiple times a day to stay alive,” Herz says. The bottom line: Our brain tells us that looking at food feels good, so we continue seeking more images we know can do the trick.
What we can learn from more thoughtful food content
Over the last few years, viral food porn has done more than trigger a psychological response or make us wish we had a cheeseburger or a big bowl of pho. At a certain point, food porn can become “stale,” Hayes says. She prefers the dynamic nature of YouTube videos over stills on Instagram, but she doesn’t always have the time to watch a 15-minute cooking video. Enter TikTok — food content that allowed for eye-catching, informative videos that were more easily digestible but still satisfying.
