In this essay, I examine how Masumoto"s distress over his possible food-porn writing sheds light on a food movement that, while entertaining a sensuous approach to food and eating through visual and verbal exploitation of images of food, intricately blends gustatory pleasure with ethical and political eating and defines the flavors of food through white, elitist conceptions of health and sustainability. His attempt to claim authority over the (organic) food infrastructure through first-person, nonfictional narratives, or documentary film of "real lives and real stories," unravels a cultural milieu in which the appeals of the cultures and ecologies of farming have lost ground to that of food in the U.S. because of the unprecedented growth of the urban population in the second half of the twentieth century. In this so-called "food" movement, the geographical and ethical-political distances between urban consumers and the sources of their food, established by the capitalist food industry, conspire with both the desire for, and the fear of, the cultivation of intimate personal or bodily relations with the immanence of food and agricultural production. And, for Masumoto, this estrangement and disconnection from the "real" and the immanent has propelle&d the reading of his intimate and visceral approach to food and farming as pornographic-that is, as sexually seductive and culturally expensive and extravagant.
