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Pantry Porn: Is the latest TikTok trend putting pressure on Middle Class?

TikTok's 'pantry porn' has become all the rage in home kitchens
PUBLISHED MAR 17, 2023
TikTok’s latest fashion of lovingly organised pantries (@thelittlewhiteedit/instagram)
TikTok’s latest fashion of lovingly organised pantries (@thelittlewhiteedit/instagram)

TikTok has helped cultivate a fanatic need to curate the most incredibly and outrageously organized pantry. "Pantry porn" is the name being given to carefully curated photos of lovingly stocked and organized pantries. It has become common practice to showcase the pantry and how food is arranged in containers and with labels on Instagram and TikTok.

This gives the middle class an illusion that they can upgrade their bulk food storage even though they may not be able to afford a designer kitchen. Fashion also establishes the ideal of what it means to be a good wife, mother, and woman. Let's find out more about this trend!



 

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What is 'pantry porn'? 

According to The Conversation, Dr Jenna Drenten, an associate professor of marketing at Loyola University, the recent obsession with organizing kitchen and pantry spaces, a TikTok trend she dubbed “pantry porn”, is pushing societal standards which the average American cannot keep up with while tricking consumers into spending more money. According to Drenten’s research, the social media influencers who push 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.”

She said, "White women who portray what it looks like to keep a "good" home through the creation of a new status symbol—the immaculately arranged, completely stocked pantry—are the social media influencers who promote pantry porn".

The tendency is now being promoted even by celebrities. In 2020, Kim Kardashian displayed her enormous walk-in refrigerator, along with two additional smaller ones of similar size, which were dotted with glass jars with various toppings for frozen yogurt.



 

Sister Khloe Kardashian boasted about her opulent pantry last year, which is stocked to the roof with goods on shelves. Pictures demonstrate that the majority of the items, including pasta, fig newtons, and goldfish, are kept in glass containers, while other things that are wrapped in plastic are kept in wicker baskets.

Pantry porn: A trend or pressure?

The aspirational norm for becoming an ideal mother, ideal wife, and ideal woman is established by internet pantry porn. This resulted from a shift in parenting philosophy towards intensive mothering, which connects being a good mother with time-consuming, labor-intensive, and expensive care duties.



 

Seeing what you need when you need it is the practical purpose of all those baskets and containers in the home. But other women might put in more effort because of the social obligation to have a pristine pantry. They must carefully arrange the grab-and-go snacks into a fully stocked pantry that mimics an upscale corner shop rather than simply shoving boxes of store-bought snacks into a cabinet.

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 say! Is it a trend or rather a pressure?

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