When the owner of the restaurant I was working at several years ago told me we were teaming up with Foodspotting, a social media app specifically designed to share pictures of food at restaurants, I scoffed at the idea thinking who would want a social media app for food? So little I knew. I had no idea “foodporn” would take off the way it did. Suddenly, everyone was a professional food photographer. There are websites after websites that provide useful tips to get better photographs of your food: how to plate your own meals to enhance the image, where to place lighting, the types of plates to use for certain foods…it’s a little overwhelming.
Obviously, photographing food is nothing new; nearly every professionally produced cookbook has pictures, and I’m leery of the ones that don’t, to be honest. But why the sudden explosion of food photography on social media sites like Instagram? I started diving into the dark webs of Google, clicking onto the second, third, and super-rare fourth page of the search engine to try to find out. It turns out, there are a lot of reasons that journalists, social scientists, and neuroscientists have come up with.
Which is true? Probably all of them.
One major aspect that has changed that accounts for food pervading your timeline: the availability of cameras. No longer do cameras require film (or silver or glass, if you want to go really far back), developing, chemicals, and darkrooms—millions of people carry good quality cameras on their phones. The photos can even be edited immediately without uploading them to a computer in their RAW format for adjusting on Photoshop. The photo features of cameras have become selling points for every new camera that is released. Additionally, people now have platforms to show their food off; with the right hashtag, the audience is there and ready to devour your foodporn.
Additionally, savvy restaurants and chefs have embraced the hashtag hype. What better way to get images of your food out than to hundreds of millions of people who are ready and willing to follow the food hashtag? Restaurants that have embraced this new trend are generally recognized by social media users that follow food. This exchange perpetuates the hype of the restaurant and the usefulness of posting more food to social media.
Photos of food are multi-sensory. Seeing the food, especially something that has been eaten before, reminds us of previous experiences and the tastes from those experiences: our brains connect those two. In some research, participants claim that the food actually tastes better after it has been photographed. [1] So, does this brain-trick explain the fascination with food photos? Maybe. Additional research has shown that food photography leads to unhealthy eating.[2] How often do we post food on “cheat days”? If the brain makes connections between pictures and eating, it only makes sense that we would make that connection to actually eating that 3-tiered chocolate cake.
With the continued growth of social media websites, increased quality of cameras on phones, and ubiquitousness of both in our lives, food photography is not going anywhere anytime soon; I mean, there are even hashtags of people taking pictures of their food. And while Foodspotting, that app that I doubted the purpose of so many years ago has shuttered, it’s purpose has flourished. Like it or not, the hashtag “food” is here to stay…and judging by some of the pictures, I’m here for it.
[1] “The Art and Science of Insta-worthy Food Photography – Infogr8.” https://infogr8.com/projects/the-art-and-science-of-insta-worthy-food-photography/. Accessed 3 Apr. 2019.
[2] “Eating with our eyes: From visual hunger to digital … – Science Direct.” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278262615300178. Accessed 2 Apr. 2019.
