Time Porn

There is a Kilgore Trout story in Breakfast of Champions, I believe, about a space traveller who visits an alien planet. Here's Vonnegut's description of it, in its entirety (courtesy of Marek Vit's Kurt Vonnegut Corner):

It was about an Earthling astronaut who arrived on a planet where all the animal and plant life had been killed by pollution, except for humanoids. The humanoids ate food made from petroleum and coal.

They gave a feast for the astronaut, whose name was Don. The food was terrible. The big topic of conversation was censorship. The cities were blighted with motion picture theaters which showed nothing but dirty movies. The humanoids wished they could put them out of business somehow, but without interfering with free speech.

They asked Don if dirty movies were a problem on Earth, too, and Don said, "Yes." They asked him if the movies were really dirty, and Don replied, "As dirty as movies could get."

This was a challenge to the humanoids, who were sure their dirty movies could beat anything on Earth. So everybody piled into air-cushion vehicles, and they floated to a dirty movie house downtown.

It was intermission time when they got there, so Don had some time to think about what could possibly be dirtier than what he had already seen on Earth. He became sexually excited even before the house lights went down. The women in his party were all twittery and squirmy.

So the theater went dark and the curtains opened. At first there wasn't any picture. There were slurps and moans from loudspeakers. Then the picture itself appeared. It was a high quality film of a male humanoid eating what looked like a pear. The camera zoomed in on his lips and tongue and teeth, which glistened with saliva. He took his time about eating the pear. When the last of it had disappeared into his slurpy mouth, the camera focused on his Adam's apple. His Adam's apple bobbed obscenely. He belched contentedly, and then these words appeared on the screen, but in the language of the Planet:

THE END

It was all faked, of course. There weren't any pears anymore. And the eating of a pear wasn't the main event of the evening anyway. It was a short subject, which gave the members of the audience time to settle down.

Then the main feature began. It was about a male and a female and their two children, and their dog and their cat. They ate steadily for an hour and a half--soup, meat, biscuits, butter, vegetables, mashed potatoes and gravy, fruit, candy, cake, pie. The camera rarely strayed more than a foot from their glistening lips and their bobbing Adam's apples. And then the father put the cat and the dog on the table, so they could take part in the orgy, too.

After a while, the actors couldn't eat any more. They were so stuffed that they were goggle-eyed. They could hardly move. They said they didn't think they could eat again for a week, and so on. They cleared the table slowly. They went waddling out into the kitchen, and they dumped about thirty pounds of leftovers into a garbage can.

The audience went wild.

When Don and his friends left the theater, they were accosted by humanoid whores, who offered them eggs and oranges and milk and butter and peanuts and so on. The whores couldn't actually deliver these goodies, of course.

The humanoids told Don that if he went home with a whore, she would cook him a meal of petroleum and coal products at fancy prices.

And then, while he ate them, she would talk dirty about how fresh and full of natural juices the food was, even though the food was fake.

Wasn't that an amazing story? I distinctly remember reading that story in 8th grade and being really affected by the concept. Vonnegut was saying that pornography meant taunting yourself with something one couldn't have, which, Vonnegut believed, was intimacy. At that time I thought this was about the wildest thing ever.
Well we now have food porn to watch, in fact it's very popular. We can see it on the food channel. It differs from cooking shows of yore because they were mostly about the process of making the food, whereas today's shows are mostly about eating food. To extend our analogy a bit, the cooking show of old is the titillating health film strip or ostensibly 'educational' nudist camp film to the modern cooking show's Real Sex on HBO.
But the food shows here in Korea, and also in Japan, put anything on the Food channel to shame. They match Vonnegut's description exactly, the slurping, the moaning, the tight shots of glistening lips and bobbing adam's apples, it's all there and people love to watch it. The recipe portion of the show is collapsed into less than ten seconds. A typical recipe would be "Sugar, red pepper powder, ginger, garlic, salt, vinegar. Oooh, rub it on that meat and grill, grill, yeah, grill it some more. Oh yeah!" The bulk of the action is all juices dripping down chins. In the world of food porn, Japan and Korean make barely legal hard core bukkake.
But today I've discovered a new kind of pornography. I'm talking about time porn. That's what people who live busy modern lives indulge in when they discuss the merits of slow food, labor intensive ways of doing anything, and the good life that they perceive people who live rural or less technologically dependent lives lead. Jean Feraca has led me into this world, but it extends in every direction. There are all sorts of people out there fantasizing about taking their sweet-ass time doing things, which, I suppose, is only natural in a world of busy people. As natural as food porn in a world of McDonald's. Perhaps both forms of sexless porn point to a greater problem of joyless abundance that we as Americans face. We've been trying to shove more and more into our holes and sense organs in an attempt to gain more satisfaction, but we've run up against the wall of diminishing returns. We can't be happy with more food, it has to be more intricate, fresher, more exotic. We can't be happy spending our time vegging out or reading a book, we have to spend our precious and hard earned time doing something that takes a lot of time. Neither of these desired routes to greater satisfaction is easy to come by. Usually people only fantasize about eating an authentic Moroccan feast or taking off the summer to renovate a sailboat, so they console our unsatisfiable cravings by reading books about hiking the Appalachian Trail or by watching some guy eat kebabs in turkey. That is the porn of our time, among those who desire such things. That said, I take it the regular porn will continue to be enough for the rest of the less rarefied, more easy to please balance of mankind.