Why do people photograph food?

 Why do people photograph food?  For any number of reasons.

Mainly because it’s free.  Before digital photography you had to first pay for film and then pay again to get it processed, so people took a lot less photographs.  It was not unusual to see for the first and last photographs on the same roll of 24 exposures to be of Christmas – and not the of same Christmas (although chances are that ‘The Sound of Music’ would be visible on telly in the background in both shots.  ‘The Sound of Music’ at Christmas, ‘The Great Escape’ at Easter, those are the correct films for the major Christian festivals in the calendar).

In addition to cost, getting your film developed meant others saw your photographs (before the invention of digital photography the only way a 17 year old would see a picture of your drunk girlfriend naked was if he worked in Boots), and nobody wanted to be known as the Guy Who Takes Pictures of Chips.

With the advent of digital photography, we are free to take pictures of food, then e mail them to our friends to torture them by pointing out that they are not about to tuck into a huge portion of egg and chips.  Yum!  Or the weapons-grade variation, taking a picture of a mid-morning pint when on holiday and e mailing or texting it to a friend at around the time when you know they are at their most frazzled.

To a certain extent, the growing trend of photographing food has been driven by the illustrations in the growing pile of celebrity chef cookery books that continually clutter our kitchens.  Food porn is not, as you might rationally suspect, something to do with cucumbers or a bloke holding up a melon without using his hands, but a term used to describe luscious pictures of food intended to make the food look delicious, like the photographs in fast food joints convincing you that what’s in the cardboard container you have just been handed is luscious and plump and full of flavour, rather than simultaneously limp yet full of flavourings.

There’s something of an OCD aspect to all this too.  I can quite understand the pleasure one can take in, for instance, taking a picture of the occasional tasty looking dish or, even better, a surprising looking offering on a plate or, jackpot! a rudely shaped scoop of mash, and then e mailing it to your mate to compound the monotony of their day, but I can also imagine that there are people that delight in documenting everything that goes in their mouth. 

Knowing something of human nature from the internet, I strongly suspect that there are probably people who equally delight in documenting the other end of the process.  The next time you get all self conscious when you hear the distinctive click of a camera shutter in the next stall over in a public lavvie, just remember it may not be you who has just become an addition to some pervert’s album.  But it probably is.  In either case, screaming is perfectly acceptable.

The next step is blogging about your food and while there are probably a gazillion blogs where foodies exalt excellent cooking while pretending to be restaurant critics in the same way that kids wrap their sheds in tin foil and pretend to be astronauts, the most entertaining ones focus on the rougher end of the culinary experience, such as the ‘traction man’ blog that highlighted the problems with hospital food (starting with it being the last thing anyone feeling under the weather would want to be confronted with) or the excellent ‘no second helpings’.  Both blogs took pot shots at the establishment and attracted the attention of the national press in the way that some twat who wrings 1,000 words out of couscous never will.  I hope.

Food is life and people are recording more of their lives than ever, even the intimate – eating is putting something in your mouth – experiences.  On balance then, I’d rather see a recording of a pie than a sex tape, especially if it’s made by the sort of people who like pies.