The Pantry as Panopticon

When intentionally messy spaces go public

Pantry Drop, as of March 2023—with only an arrested attempt at minimalism.

My house is a bit of a mess this week—between the return to work from my last research trip, my class’s upcoming recipe testing session, and my daughter’s school break, tiding up has taken a bit of a backseat to, well, everything. It’s not hygiene that the issue—the dishes and laundry still get done, thanks to Josephine Cochrane and Alva Fisher—but the general question of tidiness and organization has gone unanswered. In the earliest days of parenthood, I used to be intensely preoccupied with everything being in its right place, to the point where I’d end every day sitting on the floor, arranging my daughter’s picture books spines out and aligned, from largest to smallest trim size. At the time, even though I knew it was a futile gesture, it was hugely important to me—a chance to facilitate a mental reset for myself, a way to demonstrate that, despite the uncertainty of each day, I could create a semblance of harmony and intentionality in my own home. Now I’m happy if they just generally end up in the right room, or anywhere other than on the floor.

I was thinking back to my organizational mania earlier this weekend when I fell down the well of this excellent piece at The Conversation by Professor Jenna Drenten of Loyola University, all on the new content genre of “pantry porn,” and the impulse to build kitchens, pantries, even snack shelves as a showcase of intentional living. Drenten notes that, especially across culinary-focused channels of TikTok and Instagram, more and more users are contributing snapshots and videos of how they organize and stylize their pantries. I am extremely susceptible to this content, and have more than once been lulled into a stupor by short videos of people organizing their “coffee corners,” their snack drawers, assembling a week’s worth of mason jar salads and overnight oats. In particular the inherent ASMR appeal of these videos—the work of organizing, cleaning, and meal-prepping set against what Drenten calls the sonic “clinks, glugs, snaps, rips and thunks that appeal to viewers’ pleasure centers”—acts like a slow dopamine drip directly into my brain. Drenten notes that the sharing of this content works in direct opposition to the history of the pantry, intended as an entirely functional space never meant for showing off. Indeed, status used to be associated—and in many ways still is—with high-end kitchens that can easily conceal and disguise the actual work of food preparation. The cabinetry has always been part of that conceal-or-reveal negotiation, and so we stash ingredients more often than not behind solid doors, both to keep them protected from excess light and, perhaps more importantly, from prying eyes.

So then what does it actually mean to reveal what’s in our pantries? Is it simply one more step into the voyeuristic impulse to peer into someone else’s grocery cart? What does it offer those who present their pantries for public consumption? The organization Pineapple Collaborative has been inviting notable food figures to share their pantries for years, and what strikes me is that no two kitchens are ever the same. In fact, they all feel intensely specific, each one laying out its own organizational and culinary logics in a way that feels deeply informed and intensely human, not fundamentally aspirational. And yet the TikTok/IG explorations of this arena are different, particularly in how they are explicitly devoid of cultural referents. Despite the fact that the Kardashians are of Armenian descent, almost nothing in their pantries (yes, there are multiple features on their kitchen pantries) speaks of any relationship to Middle Eastern cuisine. Indeed, the entire design and contents of these pantries speaks, if anything, to a desire to replicate the experience of walking through a branch of Whole Foods almost anywhere in urban-suburban America. It equalizes and neutralizes all aspects of the kitchen to the point that nothing actually contains any more meaning than anything else. Indeed, when “Backstock Collagen and Protein,” “Cookbooks,” and “Backstock Ziploc” are all housed in the same sad, shallow shoeboxes, somewhere the many women that contribued to the character of Betty Crocker are rolling over in their graves. The dominant pantry aesthetics are rootless, devoid of texture, all shiny and easily cleaned plastic. Even for those that are Mason jar dominant, there is no explicit appeal to the Southern home cooking or New England farmsteads of yore, or even to the broader “cottagecore” movement of the 2010s; just a set of glossy, bulk-purchased containers. The desire is to showcase, transparently, what one has, but in a way that is actively stripped of all origin stories. Perhaps then pantry porn indicates a natural backlash to trends such as the highly curated bar cart; where eclecticism used to be the barometer of taste, now intentional (and expensive) minimalism reigns supreme.

More than anything, these pantries are intended to give the impression of controlled abundance—with a strong emphasis on the former. (As Drenten notes, “Excess is bad, but organized excess is good.”) Privilege is no longer about having freedom from want, but also being able to buy one’s way out of the chaos of ordinary life. Whether or not this trend should really be called “pantry porn” is somewhat debatable—as Anne McBride noted in her piece on food porn for Gastronomica*, food porn is defined not only by what makes a direct visual appeal to the eye of the consumer, but what markets itself by way of its inherent excess and unattainability. By making her pantry visible on social media, the pantry owner has a chance to reveal her innermost selves—literally, what she puts in her body—in a way that creates an illusion of intimacy and knowability. Yet by curating and organizing pantries in a way that leaves almost nothing to chance, and offers no signs of a personal history or emotional center, we are left feeling like we’ve been sold an empty bill of goods. The Kardashians have become experts on selling themselves, and specifically experts in the sleight of hand that produces the feeling of intimacy and specificity, even if everything you get comes in a vacuum-sealed container.

I can’t say that I’m immune to the allure of this content, both because my lizard brain is soothed so effectively by scrolling through it, and because I still hope there’s a day I’ll be asked to contribute a Grub Street Diet, constituting its own genre of lifestyle porn. But I hope that when I am (eventually) asked to do so, I won’t be afraid to show the chaos within my own brain, and the many, many contradictions between my own consumer politics and culinary practices. I hope the reader will gaze into my pantry—currently a cluttered amalgam of taralli, matzah, seaweed snacks, and applesauce pouches—and see a life being fully, if messily, lived.

* Re: Gastronomica, I disclose that I do have a part-time gig as the journal’s managing editor. But that never required me reading through its past issues, where I found and fell in love with this article long ago.

Recommendation: I spend more time than I should trying to find the right working (reading and writing) playlists, and usually need something to first ramp me up before I can settle into my own thoughts. While scrolling through Spotify’s 70s Road Trip playlist (inspired by my current obsession with Daisy Jones and the Six), I heard Stevie Wonder’s genius cover of “We Can Work It Out,” and it’s earning a permanent spot on my roll-down-the-windows car playlist. (Really I just want a truly excellent playlist of Beatles covers, which would inevitably include two takes by Joe Cocker, on “With a Little Help from my Friends” and “Come Together”. So someone please curate this for me, so I can be brought fully up to speed.)

The Perfect Bite: The really excellent Tajadas con Carne Molida from the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it restaurant Las Amigas in Watertown. Tajadas are, like tostones and maduros, made from plantains, but are more like steak-cut french fries, cut on the bias and fried into chips. As such they have a dense but slightly crunchy texture, perfect in this loaded-nachos-like dish, topped with ground beef, shredded cabbage and pickled onions, and a drizzle of crema and salsa rojo.

Cooked & Consumed: It’s been a classic late winter/early spring indecision season in New England, and so this past Wednesday, I took advantage of the slightly chilly weather and made a big batch of vegetable minestrone and a loaf of Georgian cheese bread. The recipe I used came direct from the alumni bulletin at my alma mater, where this was a favorite dish at the local parish’s Friday cafe, which every week served up a delicious meal of a cheesy casserole, green salad, soup, and dessert, complete with coffee and whipped cream, for the student-friendly price of five dollars. (This was a tradition so beloved by so many students, including me, that we wouldn’t even bother taking classes that met from 12-, lest it meant missing a Friday Cafe.) I’ve made a few tweaks to the recipe over time, including using a mix of Muenster, cheddar, and mozzarella cheese and letting the yeast and sugar bloom in the milk mixture, but it’s never lost its great decadent appeal.