I live in Cairns and I am writing a cookbook for the tropics in Australia Tropical Cuisine: Cooking in Clare's Kitchen.  I have three hopes for the cookbook: that it encourages increased use of local tropical produce in the north of Australia; that the cookbook creates increased national interest in tropical produce so that local producers gain greater market access; and that more local people in the north of Australia take up planting food plants and fruit trees in their own gardens that thrive in this part of our world.  I have created my own blog following my process of developing the cookbook.  The following is a recent post, and I am interested in the perspectives of live local members on my musings...thanks for reading...

I’ve been somewhat restless as my blog develops, but initially couldn’t pin down what was bugging me.  Then I saw the interview with Gaye Bilson on Compass ( Sunday nights ABC TV Australia ) and much of what Gaye had to say articulated what has been stirring in me.

I am a passionate home cook, I love to feed people, nurture through food, share the love of good food, and share food together at the table.   I am writing my cookbook for home cooks, some of whom may be passionate gourmets able to turn out a presentation as good as any restaurant, and many who simply like to make and enjoy good food with people they love (and of course we can be both).

In building my blog, and wandering around the Internet, I am unsettled at times by that delicate but crucial balance between image and flavour.  A great meal is a feast of all the senses,  including visual pleasure.   But at the table, the visual pleasure of food is shaped by the aromas, flavours, and the living textures which we can appreciate when food is before us, and which are simply not available in the same way in a captured image.   So at the table I know a brown beef burgundy, or a browny-yellow curry can give me immense visual pleasure as all my senses imbibe at once and bring together an omnisensory experience of the meal.  But a browny-yellow curry or a brown beef burgundy doesn’t do the same thing when it is an image on the page.  Nor can you see and feel the presence and energy of the people at the table; talking, imbibing, enjoying.

So, images of food for the page are constructed in ways to power-up the impact of the visual to compensate for the lack of other sensory input.  A great food photographer can also set a shot in a manner that evokes other senses; the skin-dampening steam rising from a pot; the blur of people in the background of a shot; a meal in the process of being eaten; a meal completed, replete.

But when it comes to moving a recipe from page to kitchen to table, what are most home cooks looking for?  I suspect they are looking for what I and my loved ones look for; a satisfying meal with a balance of flavours and textures, that delights and nurtures the people present at the table.  When a recipe and it’s image can bring this into being, it is a great thing.  But if a recipe and it’s image are constructed in such a way that the cook feels stressed and inadequate by the time they have served up their home cooked version of the meal, then it is detrimental because it acts to alienate the cook from the joys of creating and giving.

In the end, it also raises the question of who we, as recipe developers, food writers, cooks, chefs, food photographers, are creating the recipe and it’s image for.  For ourselves?  For home cooks?  For the food industry?

For this reason I am not interested in the elements of the online world that focus heavily or entirely on images of food as the end in themselves.  Different if those images are present in gallery settings where the explicit focus is the presentation of art.  But images in food media should function to engage and tempt the viewer into creating and giving.  Images can also be very useful in their simple functional role of helping a cook to identify ingredients and finished products.  Once they lose these functions they are truly food porn; disengaged, alienating, distancing us from the imperfectly visceral and heartfelt delights of creating and sharing food.

© Clare Richards 2009