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Pantry porn is the story of America

Today I learned about a new fad on Instagram: pantry porn. But it's not what you think, so get your minds out of the gutter for just one second, you filthy perverts.

Ahem. Anyway, pantry porn is the name given to carefully curated photos of lovingly stocked and organized pantries. And Jenna Drenten, a marketing professor at Loyola University Chicago, is having none of it:

This is the semi-disheveled pantry at the Drum residence. It's just one of the ways we support anti-racism in our personal lives.

Storing spices in coordinated glass jars and color coordinating dozens of sprinkles containers may seem trivial. But tidiness is tangled up with status, and messiness is loaded with assumptions about personal responsibility and respectability. Cleanliness has historically been used as a cultural gatekeeping mechanism to reinforce status distinctions based on a vague understanding of “niceness”: nice people, with nice yards, in nice houses, make for nice neighborhoods.

What lies beneath the surface of this anti-messiness, pro-niceness stance is a history of classist, racist and sexist social structures. In my research, influencers who produce pantry porn are predominantly white women who demonstrate what it looks like to maintain a “nice” home by creating a new status symbol: the perfectly organized, fully stocked pantry.

There you have it. Pantry porn isn't just a harmless fad that will quickly disappear as fast as it popped up. It's a disturbing reminder of how white women prop up systemic classism, racism, and sexism by promoting supposedly color-blind virtues like cleanliness and niceness. Shame on them.

54 thoughts on “Pantry porn is the story of America

  1. iamr4man

    My pantry is way more anti-racist than yours. In fact it’s the Pig Pen of pantries. After I straighten it up it magically disorganizes itself.

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  2. cmayo

    I mean, that's not incorrect. And it's not just pantry porn. It's basically any kind of homesteading posting culture. It's very normative towards WASPy suburban family culture.

    But the probable audience for those white women is basically other white women. IOW, a bubble.

    1. Art Eclectic

      I disagree. Organization culture is firmly rooted in people living in small spaces. Yes, the better off you are economically the more stuff you need to organize and only someone with a large enough space can even have a pantry. But, man, why dog people who like to be able to see what they've got, how much of it, and whether it needs to be on the shopping list for the week?

    2. lawnorder

      Even if it's "normative" I fail to see a problem with people acting according to their own norms and posting pictures of themselves doing so. All kinds of subcultures do that, and it's generally not construed as "racist". Hunters and fishers post pictures of their catches. Car enthusiasts post pictures of their cars. Those who care about their personal appearance post pictures of hairdos, manicures and clothes. Some people post pictures of their "bling". Some people post pictures of their flower gardens, which demand even more time and resources than well-organized pantries.

      I'm a bald man, and my clothing norm can be summarized as "subdued", especially when it comes to formal wear. Are women who post pictures of their new hairdos and manicured fingernails being "normative" and sexist? Are people who post pictures of their bling being "normative" in a way hostile to me? Are my pictures of camping trips in the great outdoors to be construed as hostile to city dwellers who have never seen wilderness and have no desire to? I don't feel discriminated against nor do I believe I'm discriminating against others..

  3. jvoe

    Hopefully ChatGPT can write better articles than this...or better articles for the NYTimes oped page. Really they should just put it on the payroll now and have a weekly feature from ChatGPT. Brett Stephens would lose his job....sorry, in full digression mode.

  4. Dana Decker

    Kevin mentions classism, racism, and sexism but left out the one-size-fits-all term of disparagement: stratification

    Doesn't matter what axis you are dealing with: financial, educational, athletic, gender - there will be differences. Ordering them (stratification) denies equal merit (which is essential in combatting institutional oppression).

  5. Salamander

    It seems insane to me for anyone to take spices out of their original containers and stuff them into identical, neatly coordinated bottles. Are the spices ever used?

    (yeah probably to make picture-perfect "scones" and other hoity-toity veddy English foods)

    1. cmayo

      I do this for several reasons - but mostly because I buy spices from multiple brands/sources and they come in different-sized containers.

      Plus the shaker-tops of most of the modern spice containers do not function very well.

      It's just easier to have your own universal size container with lids/tops that you prefer to use. When you're running low or you run out, you just dump the new stuff in there and recycle the now-empty container.

      Another reason is I often make my own blends, especially for BBQ rubs.

    2. dmsilev

      For the spices I use regularly, I do exactly that. I have a spice rack out on the counter, and a bunch of bottles (that came with the rack) all nicely arranged. Not so much because it looks nice, but more because keeping them in alphabetical order makes it so so much easier to find what I'm looking for.

  6. Doctor Jay

    The hyper organized pantry is a form of conspicuous consumption, it seems to me. Someone - usually the white woman of the house - has enough time and resources to do this because she doesn't have to hold down a full-time job.

    That said, I'm sure there are people who get a charge out of this sort of thing from an entirely different, more benign, place. More of a "this is one thing I have control over and I can make into something that's exactly what I wanted".

    1. jte21

      This is probably true in some cases, but if you cook a lot, like I do, an organized pantry is an efficient one: you know where everything is and can grab it and put it back with relative ease. You can also see at a glance what you need to replace, what you should use more of, and end up wasting a lot less. Cooking dinner or baking with a disorganized or messy pantry is a huge frustration.

      1. Doctor Jay

        Yeah, so you are in category 2 that I mentioned. I'm guessing you aren't posting pictures of it on social media, though.

      2. mandolin

        Not to mention that if you share the kitchen with your wife or whatever it could lead to total frustration looking for every little thing that's just placed randomly in the cupboards. In fact, it won't work.

    2. mudwall jackson

      i don't go nuts organizing things, nor do i particularly care how my pantry looks. but like jte21 says, there are quite practical reasons to keep things in their place. there is nothing worse than preparing a dish and find out mid way that the can of whatever you thought you had isn't there. it's particularly true with making rubs and you come up short on a spice or two.

  7. painedumonde

    I've worked and inspected commercial kitchens, if it's not clean, like obsessively, compulsively clean, then I would advise you to never, ever visit the kitchen of your favorite establishment so that the myth you have of the food you treat there remains intact.

  8. jte21

    So what would a more "woke" pantry look like? Just a bunch of shit thrown together in a trash bag? Or sitting out all over the counter?

    Joking aside, however, it's fair to say that "neatness", particularly when it comes to homes and property, can become a cipher for class and race. My (Latina) wife, growing up in LA, remembered her working-class family talking about "white people lawns", which were always lush and well-manicured. Of course poor people and non-whites care about neatness too, but good property maintenance and domestic tidiness tend to be a function of 1. owning your property and thus having an incentive to maintain it and 2. having enough spare time and energy to spend organizing and repairing things (or paying someone like a housecleaner/landscaper to do it). Those are two things (wealthier) white people have tended to possess more than other groups in this country, and also use to maintain their privilege in certain contexts.

    1. mudwall jackson

      i bought my home at a time when the neighborhood was in transition from owner occupied to white flight and rentals. the neighborhood quickly became run down because the renters didn't have incentive to care for the places in which they lived and the landlords wanted to squeeze every dime they could, only making repairs that were absolutely necessary. over the last decade or so, it's swung back slowly to owner occupied, still largely minority but vastly improved in appearance. ownership makes a difference regardless of race/ethnicities.

  9. cephalopod

    Anti-clutter content and videos of organizing/restocking of highly manucured storage spaces (watching some woman put tide pods into a glass jar with a decorative label) is a shockingly large part of social media these days.

    What I find especially interesting are the reactions to videos of more realistic family homes (this is a much smaller genre). A living room littered with dirty clothes and toys plus a dining table covered in dirty plates and half drunk sippy cups (basically, a home with toddlers after an hour of them being awake) is treated by most commenters as if it is a sign of severe mental illness, and not just normal life with small kids.

    Social media has made the personal public to an extent we've never done before, and in a society that judges women for their family's home, that creates some pretty judgy content and comments that hit women particularly hard.

  10. name99

    Right.
    Call people who like making their houses beautiful racist.
    Call cleanliness classist.
    Hell, for extra insanity, call women who like to show photos to other women sexist (???, uh, wot???). Maybe they should have been more with it and called them transphobes?

    This is the story of the Left since 1960 -- never losing a chance to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Because, while this nonsense will definitely get Jenna Drenten some cool virtue signaling points from her friends, how exactly do you think it will play politically? I can just see some Republican waving this and asking
    "You thought we were joking? You thought we were exaggerating? Well, this is what it's about now. If you want to have a nice house, that's being racist, that's being sexist. Well, let me tell you, if that's what the definition has come to, I and my wife are racist. We are sexist. And we are PROUD of that"

    But what the hell do I know? I try to keep my house nice and organized, so I guess I'm also a hater.

    1. lawnorder

      You, and a lot of other right-wingers, really , really need to learn the differences among "woke", leftist" and "stupid". No two of those words are synonyms.

      1. Leo1008

        There is indeed a great deal of tragic overlap among the woke, the Leftists, and the stupid. That’s exactly why articles such as the one kevin is making fun of get written.

        1. lawnorder

          No, it's eminently possible to be woke, left, and stupid, but they're not in any way synonyms. In the same way, it's possible to be tall, brown, and old but the terms are not in any way synonymous. What is very difficult is to be rightist and not-stupid, or rightist and woke. "Right" is typically associated with "stupid" and "bigoted"

          1. Leo1008

            To be an “anti-racist,” for example, is synonymous in my mind with being an ideological extremist. They may very well mean well, they may be on the Left, but they’re extremists just the same.

  11. spatrick

    a history of classist, racist and sexist social structures.

    There's probably a computer keyboard out there somewhere which has these words on a single key one can push because it seems like one can never read such an article without such words in it, all together. It's beyond parody. Do such people say anything else?

  12. J. Frank Parnell

    The latest news is that Florida man is proposing a bill to allow local citizens to sue anyone guilty of pantry porn.

    1. dilbert dogbert

      California used to be what future murika was going to look like. Now FloriDoh! has taken the Blue Ribbon!!!

  13. bharshaw

    Nothing to do with racism: whoever has the money and power in a society sets the standards. For example, in Downton Abbey, remember the staff setting the table just so? It's a historical accident that those with power and money in American society happen to be mostly white.

      1. lawnorder

        It's not at all clear who invented distillation, but the Chinese were the first to acquire gunpowder; they used it to do all sorts of interesting things, including but not limited to military things, with rockets. Europeans were the first to invent guns.

      2. shapeofsociety

        Hard liquor was invented in the Islamic Middle East, where alcohol bans under Islamic law created the classic incentive to concentrate the drug for ease of smuggling. The word "alcohol" is derived from Arabic.

    1. shapeofsociety

      I do sometimes wonder how our history would have played out differently, if African, Arab, or East Asian sailors had found the Americas before Europeans did!

  14. cld

    Just because WASPiness may be a style doesn't make it racist, and just because a thing is more expensive doesn't make it racist.

    Some people will do anything to keep the churn going.

    Oh, look, table manners, so abusive.

  15. kenalovell

    I am fully in accord with Professor Drenton, living in a street where a few lawn Nazis can barely conceal their contempt for anyone (like me) who declines to spend hours every week meticulously trimming nature strips with geometric precision.

  16. D_Ohrk_E1

    I have most things in big ass bins so that I can stuff way more shit into my cabinets and shelves than would otherwise be allowed by presentable tidiness.

  17. Zephyr

    Neat homes give me the creeps. It indicates someone who is wasting their life or else paying someone else to waste their life. Go someplace, do something, see something, cook something messy and tasty when you get home and clean up tomorrow. It's good for your soul and the universe.

    1. aldoushickman

      "It indicates someone who is wasting their life or else paying someone else to waste their life."

      Wow--pretty judgy. If somebody gets a kick out of being tidy, what business is it of yours? I know people who are mathematically precise in their cooking, who are very fastidious about how their kitchen is run, and whose houses are extremely neat and clean, but I would never accuse them of wasting their lives simply because they enjoy doing things in a way that I do not.

      People enjoy all kinds of stupid nonsense--let 'em.

        1. aldoushickman

          I certainly don't expect everyone (or indeed, anyone) else to like it. But what you are doing is different--you're making a normative claim that people who enjoy neat houses are wasting their lives and are doing things that are bad for both their souls and the universe. That's a hell of a lot different than saying "huh, that thing you enjoy is not for me"--you're being a judgmental scold.

  18. shapeofsociety

    Tidy spaces are more functional and more pleasant to live and work in than messy ones. Whenever I move into a new workspace, I almost compulsively tidy it up. Tidiness is a nice thing to have.

    Rich people have more of all nice things - including tidiness - because they have more resources and can afford them. Poor people have less tidiness because they have less space in their time-and-energy budget for it, being constantly occupied and drained by trying to solve all the problems that poverty constantly throws at them.

  19. Heysus

    This reminds me of the idiots who organanise their books by colour... Please, bet they haven't read one of them. Mine were never by colour or size but then, I am a reader.

  20. Heysus

    This reminds me of the idiots who organised their books by colour... Please, bet they haven't read one of them. Mine were never by colour or size but then, I am a reader.

  21. bouncing_b

    You would probably think my pantry looks messy but I do usually know where everything is and can grab it quickly.

    What isn't messy (though not photogenic) is my computer cables. I HATE a wuzzle of wires! I have all manner of clips and wire wrap things to keep the electronic pathways organized and obvious at a glance. If a cable is long, in my house it is coiled and wrapped.

  22. rick_jones

    With the possible exception of what looks to be a jar of Trader Joe’s bolognese, there doesn’t seem to be a single store brand in sight.

    One might argue I suppose Trader Joe’s is its own name brand.

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