Food in the Age of Social Media

Remember going out to brunch on a lazy Sunday morning? Maybe your family forced you into it, maybe you wanted to spend time with your friends, maybe you just like brunch. Remember the excitement of a meal that is not quite lunch or breakfast, but somewhere hidden in between?

It’s so exciting, in fact, that we constantly feel the need to take a photo of our meal before we eat it. And then that photo is so pretty we post it on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, you name it, just so all of our friends can see how beautifully presented our meal is. It’s free publicity for the restaurant: they get some of their signature dishes shared with hundreds of people who, before that day, might never have heard of them.

It seems as though a large portion of the Internet is food photos. Food is one of the most impermanent things that humans create. It almost doesn’t make sense to spend that much energy to make something look so good only to have it completley destroyed a few minutes later. All of that work, now in the customer’s stomach. In that sense, it makes perfect sense that we all document every meal. Apart from the memory of how happy our taste buds were, there is no other way to remember just how much fun brunch really is.