The Camera Eats First: Has Social Media Photo Posting Reshaped the Way We Eat?
You get to a restaurant and order your meal. It is a fancy place, and the presentation of your first course is breathtaking. So, in the moments after your plate is placed in front of you, and before you take the first bite, with steam coming out of your food and your nose perceiving the ingredients, you take out your cell phone, and snap a photo.
Sometimes, the photo even makes it to Social Media before the person takes the first bite. It’s like posting about the food is more important than eating the food, like showing your food to the world is more important than actually getting fed.
It seems innocent. It feels now like the ‘normal’ thing to do. It serves as evidence that you went there, and ate that. Yet, I believe the phenomenon is more complicated than that. Social Media has turned us into guardians of appearance while actually not enjoying the important things in life.
Today, thousands of people who call themselves “influencers”, but whose only influence relies on making people imitate their behavior and fake lifestyle online, fill Instagram and TikTok reels with how they wake up, what they eat for breakfast, what products they put on their hair or skin… In many cases, what they wear and the beauty products have a financial motivation: they are getting paid for it. But when it comes to food sometimes it’s about making people follow their lifestyle.
What makes things worse is that they actually do, but not with the healthy-eating (or whatever it is some people want to call the trend of eating only vegetables to stay on a certain weight frame). The trend that is imitated is the one that makes appearances the most important thing: it is not about whether you liked what you ate or not; it is about you posting about it and showing it to the world.
The phenomenon has reached the toast-making moments. If a ‘Boomerang’ is not recorded properly before taking the first sip, it has to be repeated until the person with the iPhone actually gets what they want. By that time, the meaning of the toast is gone: the spirit of the drink vanishes, the ice melts, and some people involved in it may even forget what they are drinking to.
As someone who started experimenting with still-life photos in Covid-ridden 2020, I can see the importance of photographing food. I have made coffee only with the intention of photographing it, I have poured rum for the same reason, I have made a cocktail for the same reason. In a society now ruled by visuals, it is important to know how to photograph food, as a restaurant may easily be willing to hire you to photograph their plates for either their website or their social media.
Honestly, I have taken advantage of the drinks I have made for the sake pf photography by actually having them. I benefited from my desire to take a certain photo, not giving priority to my photo over my craving for a good coffee or cocktail.
There is a time and a place for everything, though. One thing is to do it once in a blue moon, another thing is to actually make your phone camera take the first bite of your every meal. For instance, the owner of the restaurant where I worked in Connecticut brings videos to his social media, showing a course he just made and making a 20-second explanation of what it contains. That is a whole different thing: the goal in this case is to lure potential patrons into asking for that particular meal, and it is a very effective strategy.
Even though some restaurants will give a free drink to those who leave their phones away, this trend is very unlikely to stop or be reversed. Today, people want to document every single aspect of their lives, and bragging about where and what they eat is part of it. I have even taught some of my students how to take more compelling photos of the drinks they get at Starbucks using their phone… which makes me complicit to the phenomenon in a way.
Do I like it? No. Will I ever fall into that? Hell, no! Do I understand it? Unfortunately, I do.
