Everyone’s talking about... Pantry porn

IF YOU dream that one day your messy kitchen might not look as if it’s recently been scavenged by a pack of ravenous bears, you need ‘pantry porn’.

It’s nothing explicit – unless you’re slapdash when googling it – but the trend for lusting over well-regimented rows of jars with elegantly handwritten labels and carefully stacked Tupperware, storing food supplies on open shelves almost as if they were museum exhibits. Lockdown exacerbated the trend, with householders needing to accommodate bulk buys, and having time stuck at home to finally tackle the storage nightmare. Almost 10,000 posts are tagged #pantryporn on Instagram, and growing.

So how do you achieve a ‘porn-worthy’ pantry?

Minimalist tidying queen Marie Kondo suggests discarding outof-date food and storing what remains in an upright position by category, such as seasonings, pulses and pastas. The key is jars, jars and more jars – plus the occasional basket – as sealed containers help cut food waste and look tidy and uniform. Another tip: leave space around everything so items are easy to grab.

Is it all about aiming for maximum neatness?

The upmarket Architectural Digest says that as well as storage, a pantry ‘can do double-duty as a bar or a secondary prep area for food and floral arrangements’. For, of course, everybody needs a dedicated zone to artfully place daffs or tulips into a vase. Their other suggestion is to use pantries as a showcase for collections of glassware and china.

That’s going to be hard in my one-bedroom flat…

That’s where the ‘porn’ part comes in. Spacious, ordered shelves is an unachievable fantasy for most of us, so we venture online and dream of what might have been, especially those obsessed with order. Some call it ‘larder lust’, too. ‘We all romanticise [the pantry],’ style guru Julie Carlson has said. ‘Isn’t a separate space for storage the ultimate kitchen luxury?’ Though with the cost-of-living crisis, the ‘ultimate kitchen luxury’ might soon be something much simpler: food.