Pictures of Food

Music for today’s post

The FUSSYlittleBLOG is gloriously free of pictures. Well, mostly. And if you ask me why, you may get a variety of answers.

As opposed to other food blogs, the FLB isn’t a chronicle of what I eat. It’s about trying to change people’s perceptions about what it means for food to be good, with the ultimate goal of improving the overall quality of food around the Capital Region. And pictures can be a distraction.

But really, pictures are mostly a pain in the ass. It’s not that I can’t take them. I do. And you can see my images on All Over Albany and on the Chefs Consortium. But taking these pictures takes me about as much time as writing the post. Sometimes it even takes longer. I think about setting up the shot, composition, lighting, and backgrounds. And then I take lots of different images, with different depths of field and different levels of exposure. Later, I’ll sort through all the pictures to find the one or two that don’t completely suck.

There is a lot of bad food photography out there. And like bad food, it kills me.

Given my distaste for running pictures on the blog, it would be reasonable to assume that I’m not like one of those maniacs who takes pictures of all his food before he sits down to eat it. Reasonable, but incorrect.

I take pictures of food all the time. In fact, much to my great shame, if you look at the photo library on my phone there are exponentially more pictures of food and food-related things than my children.

So what do I do with them all, and why do I even take them?

Well, it’s a long story. Sometimes they are for notes. They remind me about the different elements of a dish, or the price or ingredients of a product in a grocery store. Sometimes they are for the small screen of twitter, in which case I’m less concerned with the quality of the image. Sometimes I take pictures with the idea that someday I’ll put them on Yelp in the context of a review. But I’m woefully behind on that front.

Regardless why I’m taking pictures of food, other people around the country are doing it in droves. It’s becoming a thing. And as a thing it’s developing a backlash.

However, I heard something recently that I want to share with you which really put a new spin on what I’ve previously considered to be a nasty habit. Especially because it came from such an unlikely source: my mother.

She suggested that taking pictures of your food before you eat it fulfills the same impulse as saying a blessing over your meal.

Stop and think about that for a second.

Instead of just hungrily digging into the dish that’s set before you, you stop, delay your own gratification, and take a moment to truly appreciate what you are about to eat. Sure, there is no higher power involved in the act of live tweeting your tacos, but it gives you pause and allows the chance to reflect on your food.

It’s the secular grace before the meal. And in many circles I suspect there might be eye rolling at a dinner if someone wanted to say grace, much like people are losing patience for pre-meal photographers.

Clearly most people are in a hurry to eat. I mean, that’s why we have microwaves and McDonald’s. So in many ways it’s not surprising that people resent those who slow down their meals. But taking some time to appreciate your food is a great thing.

So don’t hate all the amateur food photographers because they are vaingloriously trying to capture all their meals for posterity. I only hate the ones who take terrible pictures and run them on their blogs anyway taking up precious bandwidth I could be using to stream Arrested Development.