The pantry is an installation
Unpacking aesthetics via Khloe Kardashian's pantry
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I’ve been staring at these beige lifeless photos of Khloé Kardashian’s pantry that someone posted to Twitter, in intervals, wondering what it is about one’s possessions that appeal to everyone else. So far, I’ve been lost. There are two tall jars containing bucatini and spaghetti that each share cabinet space with decanted quinoa, fried onions, two types of bread crumbs, and bouillon cubes. Cookbooks are in wooden trays alongside ziplock covers, collagen, and protein (also stored inside trays). Hot sauces, readymade salad dressing, and other sauces in lazy susans, then rows of tinned food stacked in faux wicker baskets below. Jars of peanut butter and bottles of maple syrup as far as the eyes can see… and my eyes are fatiguing. The photos currently have 8.5M views on Twitter alone. Someone has helpfully commented: “this isn’t a pantry, it’s a fuckin aisle at Whole Foods”. I’ve been to the latter in London, fuelled by a curiosity to gawk at something I never grew up with (a supermarket), and even Whole Foods had more warmth than this pantry.
If the photo is meant to reflect a kind of aesthetic — organised, in control, aspirational, or even object permanence — the only aesthetic that stares back is that of overconsumption. I’m extremely late to this photo, but not late to this phenomenon, even as it’s burgeoning across classes, signalling to consumers of social media content that this is inherently a performance of domesticity before it is an essential requirement. Does Khloé Kardashian need five jars of biscuits? Does she even eat biscuits? Should I even bother mentioning Ozempic that she’s accused of taking (alongside other celebrities) — a drug that has laid bare our relationship with food and morality?
Aesthetics, which is concerned with beauty, derives from the Ancient Greek ‘aisthetikos’, relating to sensory perception and sensibility. Beauty came next, after it was reappraised in the mid 18th century by German philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten with the development of art as a commodity that was linked to the nouveau riche across Europe. Today, it is simply a perception of beauty and taste, and, in particular, good and bad tastes, both of which are changeable notions, aren’t universally standard, and are used to establish culture and cultural hierarchies. Why is it that certain foods, cooking styles or even sweeping pantries come to confer social status upon consumers, while others do not?
The grids of this pantry make me think of Instagram grids, which is another place for performance1 — both domestic and public. Kelly Pendergrast writes in Merchandizing the Void, “The one thing after another-ness provides freedom from hierarchy and difference. This is the freedom granted by the garage-sized pantry grid or the infinite scroll of the digital spreadsheet. There’s space to put everything, and each space is as good as any other […] The possibilities are endless.” Both the pantry and Instagram grids are commercials for a certain lifestyle™️ that affords endless choices aided by a corporate algorithm. It’s giving bougie retail experience(!), when one is so tied into capitalism that all one wants is to consume, procure, organise, and stage. I say stage because I see the whole thing as performance, as theatre.
For Serviette, I wrote about the theatre of dinner parties in the 70s featuring absurd centrepieces — eggs carved into tiny babies, bananas shaped into vague dildos, igloos of meat covered in mashed potatoes, cursed seafood mousses — and how such creations were a way to display wealth, art, and class, even if they were all horrifically bound in gelatine. Today, the display of status in food has metamorphosed differently: swanky espresso machines, name brand cookware and tote bags, glazed donuts that conjure up skincare, tinned salmon, a global pantry, finding the hidden gem restaurants while on holiday… Cue Seinfeld voice: not that there’s anything wrong with that, where that stands for trying to find small pleasures amidst the gruelling daily grind. What I’m looking for is silliness and macabre in equal bouts, as well as anarchism in food. But making, and perhaps unmaking, the self in a material world tends to expose the moralities in consumption whether we like it or not.
If it is performance, it is also commodity — a reliance on processed and industrial foods comes by way of amassing global and cultural capital, even if the roots of the items in the pantry are untraceable. Instead, the focus is only on aesthetic via curation. We are living in the age of the global pantry, wrote Navneet Alang in Stewed Awakening, tracing its shift since the covid-19 pandemic that “forced most of us to stay home and make the most of our kitchen skills” and show off our pantries online, supercharging a “form of aspirational desire”. What has curation led to in this case? An impersonal space which is bare-ass, neutral, and ostentatious that may be personal to the pantry owner in question, but uniform when viewed en masse.
This culture shift towards uniformity is everywhere: from cookbooks to monoculture in agriculture or the internet. I see my mother hooked onto countertop organisation and kitchen storage reels where housewives buy the same trays, trolleys, dividers, and plastic containers from the inexhaustible supplies at Amazon and Meesho for as little as Rs 99 ($1/90p) and transfer every food item into a container and set on display so it’s a visual aesthetic and architecture, but alienable. Label makers add to the ritual. Everything becomes merchandise stacked obsessively inside a warehouse. As Alicia Kennedy writes, “wealth, though or the appearance of wealth, the appearance of excess money, is what undergirds the entirety of social media food content creation”. But with the presence of websites like Amazon and Meesho, it’s no longer just about excess money: it is a globalised homogeneity reinforced by supply chain capitalism. Labour is cheap, overheads are less, warehouses are cramped (unlike Khloé Kardashian’s pantry), items are mass produced and affordable, propping up the stimulating act of shopping.
I noticed this fetishisation with uniformity and of consumption (playing out differently) during the pandemic when I was hooked onto watching a few English influencers record their everyday activities. Besides the similitude of their lives, one thing stood out: they were all drinking vast amounts of orange wine. For all their eloquence in recommending that everyone else also drink orange wine (hence becoming aspirational tastemakers), there were no talking points on why they were promoting it besides a feeble “it’s great”. What made it great? Why was it trending now? And what was orange wine actually? In my conversation with Rachel Hendry, we waded into its cloudy waters and how it found rebirth at the hands of certain gatekeepers.
No doubt, it’s a “great” wine to drink. But what beyond that? Hendry mentioned its resurgence has been exciting and interesting because “by drinking it [it] says something about people in that they know what it is, and they're drinking something different. Again this discussion about taste, distinguishes them and separates them from other wine drinkers because they know what orange wine is and they discovered it […] become a signifier of someone who understands trends and fashions, when actually it is just a very tasty way of drinking wine”. Or (a mandatory hat tip to Bourdieu here), that food is incorporated into the body in highly class-specific ways, making the body “the most indisputable materialization of class taste”.
I’m back to staring at the pantry for answers. The more I gaze at it, the more I am disillusioned: the logistics of endless restocking is so divorced from the sensation and sensibilities of value that it’s more trite than aesthetic. It turns culture into commerce. It suppresses the work that goes into it; after all, we only see hands decanting boxes into clear containers. The body is nowhere to be found. And a pantry this big requires more than the labour of domesticity.
The pantry is an abstract architecture of commodities, a bland simulacrum of wealth.
The pantry is an installation.
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There are five Tuesdays in July so this will be the last free newsletter for this month, followed by a paid newsletter on Saturday, 20 July. The next free newsletter will be sent out on 6 August. I might also change around the schedule for my newsletters, sending the free ones out on the first and third Tuesdays of the month, and paid subscriber newsletters on the second and last Saturdays of the month. Let’s see.
Ironic because as I write this, I’m also plugging this newsletter’s Instagram account. So make of that what you will.
I deactivate IG, Facebook, and Twitter a couple of months ago. I am in wine and your points are perfect. I often hang around natural wine people thinking, 'There is no way people like this' when drinking an obvious badly made mousey pet nat.