“It’s only after you’ve lost everything you’re free to do anything.” – Fight Club
When a well-kept pantry is deemed racist, how close are we to the moment where white women collectively have their Tyler Durden moment?
‘Pantry porn’ makes obsessively organized kitchens a new status symbol, Fox59.com, March 16, 2023
Every heard of pantry porn? No, it doesn’t mean making the beast with two backs in amongst the cans of baked beans.
There is a recent TikTok trend of showing off perfectly organized and styled home pantries. That is “pantry porn,” apparently. Well these videos are rooted in a history of classist, racist and sexist social structures, according to a Chicago professor.
Associate Professor of Marketing Jenna Drenten at the Quinlan School of Business noticed a recent uptick in what she calls “pantry porn,” a plethora of social media videos where women show off their fully stocked kitchen and methodically organized home supplies.
Drenten, citing her research, claims these videos of uniformly labeled and symmetrically placed supply bins, ingredient containers and shelves are created by predominantly White women and act as a “new status symbol”
Drenten also claims this “pantry porn” obsession also sets the societal standard for an ideal mother, wife or woman.
“Pantry porn, as a status symbol, relies on the promise of making daily domestic work easier. But if women are largely responsible for the work required to maintain the perfectly organized pantry, it’s critical to ask: easier for whom?”
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.
Perhaps it’s not surprising that pantry porn found its foothold during the COVID-19 pandemic, when shortages in the supply chain surged. Keeping stuff on hand became a symbol of resilience for those with the money and space to do so. This allure of strategic stockpiling is evident in other collector subcultures like doomsday preppers and extreme couponers.
If you’ve married a white lady who engages in ‘pantry porn’… well, you’ve committed a revolutionary act against the ruling elite. Keep it up.
