Food porn, much like actual porn, is fun to watch, but ultimately best left to the professionals. Because for every immaculately lit, professionally-scored, high-definition shot of sizzling meat on Cooked, and pastry fortresses on The Great British Baking Show, and feasts made from nothing more than dirt and fire and chickens on strings on Chef’s Table, there is someone holding a limp microwave quesadilla, watching that food porn, wondering how it all went so wrong, and why life is always so much uglier when it is not on a television screen.
Maybe this person was you. Maybe this person is you right now. The fine folks over at Foodbeast are addressing the wide chasm between the food porn we watch on television and the decidedly non-food-porn food we eat with their new web series Jeff’s Table. Jeff’s Table gives boring/depressing/essential foods like Jiffy and Smuckers on Wonderbread the glossy “Chef’s Table” treatment that they so very much do not deserve. That means the same close-ups, the same staging, the same quasi-pretentious voice over, and they even nudge over the hurdle of parody law to use the same theme song.
The first episode of Jeff’s Table premiered yesterday, with more on the way soon. And hopefully, one of those episodes will feature microwave quesadillas. Because if there’s anything that can distract from the inherent sadness of a microwave quesadilla, it’s aggressive classical violin.
