Professor in Chicago claims that white women nowadays use “pantry porn” as a status symbol.
One Chicago academic argues that the contemporary TikTok fad of showing off immaculately arranged and designed home pantries has historical roots in classist, racist, and sexist societal institutions.
Associate Professor of Marketing at Loyola University Jenna Drenten has observed a rise in “pantry porn,” or films posted to social media in which women boast about the abundance of food and household goods in their homes.
According to Drenten, “new minimalism” indicates “more is more,” so long as it is not unclean or messy, while the traditional minimalist design was associated with an anti-consumerist philosophy of using less and spending less.
According to Drenten, a person’s ability to be responsible and respectable is often inferred from how neatly their living space is kept.
Drenten argues that “cleanliness has historically been utilized as a cultural gatekeeping device to perpetuate status disparities based on a nebulous concept of ‘niceness'” (i.e., “pleasant people, with nice yards, in lovely houses, make for nice neighborhoods”). A history of classist, racist and sexist societal institutions underpins the “anti-messiness, pro-niceness” perspective, as the author puts it.
Drenten places the butler’s pantry as a symbol of affluent architecture in the late 1800s.
This “little chamber,” located between the kitchen and the dining room, “was a symbol of class — a place to hide both the food and the people who created it,” as Drenten puts it.
Drenten believes, backed up by data, that the “new status symbol” of what it means to keep a “beautiful” well-kept home is viral videos featuring neatly labeled and symmetrically organized supply bins, ingredient containers, and shelves.
She goes on to say that it’s hardly unexpected that pantry porn became popular during the COVID-19 epidemic when supply chain shortages were at an all-time high. For the well-off, “keeping items on hand became a show of fortitude.”
Drenten argues that this fixation on “pantry porn” determines what constitutes an ideal woman in society and hence what constitutes an ideal mother, wife, and citizen.
“Status symbols like pantry porn rely on the idea that they will make your life at home simpler. Yet since women are the ones who often do the effort of keeping the pantry in tip-top shape, the question must be asked: simpler for whom?” When Drenten explains.
According to a 2019 survey, a walk-in pantry is the most desired kitchen feature among new homebuyers, and as a result, 85% of big new houses being constructed in the United States now include one. The Kardashian-Jenners, the Hadids, and other social media influencers are partly to blame for the pantry’s rise to “modern-day status symbol” status, as argued by Drenten.