This Week in Food Porn: Curry, Coffee, and Chiffon Cake

Over 75 million people use Instagram each day. That’s 150 million mayonnaise-heavy thumbs greasing over their screens, trying to show the world what was once laid across their table and has now been made flesh. A whole of food life exists in there.

But you, my work-weary and fickle-fingered friends, you simply do not have time to scan the cables, clouds, and connections that bring us such culinary delights. You’re too busy making life happen.

So, allow us to save your wrists and knuckles from the strain of overuse. Because here is This Week in Food Porn: the heartiest, hungriest, homeliest, and most handsome food photography from the last seven days.

Ripe for the plucking and ready to serve.

I’ve never been terribly sure who exactly is getting thanked when 140 million people chow down on over 46 million turkeys, nor have I ever had a truly concrete idea of how this makes up for the sins of colonialisation. Putting that aside, just look at that pumpkin soup, right? Right guys?

Talking of Americana, this ridiculous tart feels like one of those simultaneous alternative universes where Vermeer actually moved to Missouri, bought a duplex, got a job in Walmart, and now mows his lawn for exercise.

Coffee is all fun and games until your boss asks you into the breakout area to discuss your “professional attitude” and you realise you have wood shavings in your teeth from gnawing through an entire pencil before lunch.

Remember when “curry” meant a TK Maxx saucepan of carrots, peas, and onion, lightly dusted in raisins and a four-year-old packet of garam masala? Never such innocence. Never before or since. Thanks be.

OK, what are we actually looking at here? It looks a bit like a desk tidy covered in gravy. Or maybe one of those “funky” loo roll holders you buy for your Secret Santa on the way to the printers on the morning of the Christmas party. But, then again, it is served in a spoon. So maybe it’s like a medical thing?

Fly my pretties! Fly, fly!

Second only to KFC’s endearing habit of assuming that what we all want from dinner is to lubricate ourselves up to the wrist and eat out of a “bucket,” surely a “chocolate puddle” is one of the most unexpected names to ever slide into your recipe book’s index.

My family managed to keep hold of an allotment for precisely one year during which we spent about 11 months trying to dig up the layers of old carpet left by the previous owner to keep down weeds, and the other month farting our way through a wheelbarrow of Jerusalem artichokes—the single crop our little patch of this sceptered isle actually produced. There was an ill wind in the Frizzell home that month, I can tell you.

And so the brittle bones of our summer’s harvest lie beneath a blanket of mist, the golden flames of your last breath crackling in the air.

Nailed it. Nailed it shut.