The popularization of food porn in the 20-aughts led to the eventual development of Taste-o-vision, which allowed images of food to be tasted by the viewer. Cooking shows skyrocketed in popularity.

The files are quite large, as each pixel of a taste-o-vision- encoded photo has 5 extra bytes worth of flavor information: sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami.

A popular prank is to encode a picture with a different taste than what is expected. For instance, a picture of a hamburger is encoded to taste like mothballs. A box of chocolates tastes like pickles. Some popular diets sprung up using aversion therapy as a central strategy, but these were largely abandoned once their participants tired of biting into a delectable photo of fried chicken, only to taste an ashtray instead.