Michael Westen, boned duck and porn

I was watching the New Year's Eve Burn Notice marathon the other day, and it made me think of porn.

Now, normally, regardless of how attractive the exiled spy-nice-guy lead character is, dram-coms on the USA network don't usually make me think of porn. But I'm not talking about human porn -- I'm talking about food porn. Gratuitously drippy, candlelit, steamy tight shots of cakes, roasts, donuts, ice cream, french fries, etc. -- that's the porn of which I speak.

Burn Notice made me think about food porn because of the explicit lack of food usually involved in the plot. In fact, the lead character rarely eats more than yogurt (and those of you familiar with the show know that Gabrielle Anwar, who plays Fionna Glenanne, can't possibly eat anything more than cabbage and filtered water at every meal). At worst, Sam, the fat buddy, has a beer every now and then. But one episode ends with Michael and Fionna eating (ha!) at a restaurant and featured the same steamy, candlelit shots of food highlighted frequently in other shows, and that got me thinking.

Two recent films, Julie and Julia and It's Complicated, make my point precisely. Neither film contains any very explicit sexual scenes (although I must note that It's Complicated contains WAY too much footage of a wildly overweight and very furry Alec Baldwin); however, in both films, sexual relationships are insinuated through food. Meryl Streep, at the height of a nice date with Steve Martin, bakes chocolate croissants, which they eat slowly with entwined arms. Pre-sex, she and Alec Baldwin relive the early days of their relationship by eating croque monsieur (as near as I can tell, drippy fried cheese sandwiches), and then, post-sex, order room service. At best, food is stimulous.

In Julie and Julia, as if the analogy need be any clearer, Julia Childs refers to some very warm type of pasta or dumpling as . . . well . . . it's not really appropriate to repeat. And Julie often begs out of sex with her husband by asserting that she needs to cook something, as if food and sex are really interchangeable.

In exactly the way that throwing pots is not really about throwing pots in Ghost, with food porn the emphasis is not really on the food. And the reason that I mention this here is that these sensuous food-but-not-REALLY-food scenes almost always feature something made with wheat flour and dripping with butter.

It's no wonder that America's children, under assault from abstinence-only programs and pelted with food porn, fatten up!

Fortunately, that just means that those of us who are wheat-free can replace food porn with . . . ! (kidding, Mom).