Life's Pleasures Quote by Janet Street-Porter

A plate of food becomes a hat and, in that quick swivel, Janet Street-Porter is doing what she’s always done: puncturing the pieties of taste. The line reads like a throwaway gag, but it’s a compact manifesto against the solemnity with which we treat consumption. Food is supposed to be earnest now - artisanal, moralized, photographed, argued over. By imagining it as millinery, she demotes it from sacred object to raw material for style, performance, and mischief.

The intent is playful, but the subtext is pointed: desire is slippery, status is staged, and “good taste” is just taste with better PR. A hat is public. It’s worn to be seen; it’s an announcement. A plate is private (even when it’s posted). Street-Porter flips them to suggest that the contemporary obsession with food is less about hunger than about self-presentation. If it could do more work as an accessory, why not? The joke is also a small act of defiance against the tyranny of appropriateness: eat it, wear it, repurpose it, laugh at it.

Context matters. Street-Porter comes out of British media’s sharper tradition - punk-adjacent irreverence, tabloid-savvy provocation, a willingness to treat lifestyle as politics by other means. Her humor isn’t escapism; it’s a way to expose how quickly culture turns pleasures into commandments.