This is your brain on ‘food porn’
When Winny Hayes joined TikTok, she thought the social video app was mostly for lip-syncing and dance trends. She wasn’t yet privy to its world of 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 the majority of people that I follow are food content creators: barbecue, pizza, I actually 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” – that is, 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?
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 own meal ideas.
“Adopt me, please” comments flood the page, and that’s the other side of online food content: Though much of it serves as inspiration for home-cooked meals, there also is an aspirational element. “Food porn,” as it’s commonly referred to, can also go viral not because we want to know how to make it, but because we just want 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 myriad sensory, psychological and social factors that go into our experiences with food.
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, Herz says.
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 involved with pleasure and reward.
“Food is one of the two greatest pleasures of being alive – the other being sex – and we actually have to eat multiple times a day in order to stay alive,” Herz says.
Over the past few years, viral food porn has done more than trigger a psychological response or just make us really wish we had a cheeseburger or a big bowl of pho right now.
Amid racial justice protests this past year, sharing photos and videos of local restaurants also became a way to show support for Black- and Asian-owned businesses.
Food videos serve a bigger purpose. “At the end of the day, what brings us together is food,” Hayes says. “What the internet has done is open our eyes to different types of food that we don’t normally eat, or we don’t normally know how to make. These content creators make it so accessible.”