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.

A bloggable offence - kebab couple

So what goes in a blog? Easy, if you have a themed blog, reviewing sandwiches (especially exciting at seasonal holidays when festive flavours and 'special editions' are on offer, who can forget the 'Sandwich Nook' festive offering from Christmas 2008; the 'Lapland loaf' that, when the filling was discovered, became known as the 'red Rudolph' and known to parents as 'the reason my child cried to the point of dehydration'. Ill advised as it was to use an animal that appears on Christmas cards as a sandwich filling, that was as nothing to the fuss their 'Wind in the willows' triple decker caused. That, and the surprising discovery many made that lots of people are allergic to badger, is the reason you don't see any 'Sandwich Nook' shops on the high street any more) or something where your stimulus is supplied on a regular basis. More problematic where the blog is about as focused as a fog bank, but less of a problem if your supply of happy pills has dried up and you can find something to be articulately outraged about on a daily basis and use the blog as a therapeutic rant which doubles as an economic measure, relieving you of the necessity of purchasing a stamp to mail your paranoid ramblings to the Daily Telegraph, or more likely from the stress-inducing deadlines one faces as a columnist on the Daily Mail.

I like themed blogs. I love those blogs that review things, like toilet roll or instant pot meals, and really love the enthusiasm and delight that the writers convey when, having exhausted the supply of martial on the shelves of national chain supermarkets, they discover regional chains and independents selling different brands, then start buying foreign brands on the internet. I'm not sure what I'd like to review least, an instant pot meal from an unlikely country with a GDP measured in goats that hasn't had an election since the British packed up and left, or toilet roll from the sort of place where the President gets driven around in a stretch tractor and the currency is a root vegetable. All I know is, if I had eaten the former, I'd be grateful for a large supply of the latter.

Ultimately, when not blogging about something; a favourite television show, books, films, comics, chocolates, rabbits, hinges, wigs, shoes, ducks, being left handed in a right handed world, having one of those blogs where you record a something-of-the-day like your poo or your kids' paintings or something else that really, really, really, is only of interest to you and even then should not be of that much interest, or if you just post occasional pictures of kittens, then blogging tends to be about nothing. A random thought, experience or image captured forever and recorded for posterity.

Like the other night, in the kebab shop.

I like my kebab shop. I know the chaps, the chaps know me. We grunt our greetings and at Christmas exchange mumbled compliments of the season. I don't go to the kebab shop for social intercourse, I go to the kebab shop for a kebab, or occasionally a burger, and for chips. The kebabs really are excellent and I should clarify that they are not purchased when I'm drunk or consumed when weaving down the street leaving a trail of dropped onion slices, the snail trail of the kebab consuming inebriated, but rather provide a delightful alternative to cooking ones own dinner and, importantly, bring a touch of that 'going out for dinner' sensation but with the added bonus that one can eat dinner at home (and my idea, Dragons, is for a restaurant chain where the seating is not the traditional table and chair set up, but rather a sofa, a telly and a couple of trays, and which will serve customers who wish to wear pyjama bottoms).

This night the couple ahead of me in the kebab shop looked young, groomed, and in that stage of their relationship where personality kinks are endearing rather than bloody irritating. Giggling like freshly medicated loons and touching each other like a pair of grooming monkeys, they eventually made their choice of supper.

A kebab.

To share.

It was, I think, difficult to decide what it was about their behaviour that I found most contemptible, hence the blog entry, to order my thoughts.

That a man would share his kebab is bad. That any self-respect woman would be seen with a man who would share his kebab is bad. That when faced with the 'let's just order one portion and two spoons' challenge, the bloke folded, is bad - but understandable, he will learn later that it's better to put a stop to that kind of behaviour early on rather than have to explain at some later date that he ordered the cheesecake because he wants a slice of cheesecake, and that if she also wants cheesecake, then please tell the nice man with the order pad that she wants cheesecake, not an extra spoon, unless she intends to help herself from food from a neighbouring table, because she sure as hell isn't getting any cheesecake and...why are you crying?

Written down, I realise that my thoughts were as mean as they were unnecessary. On balance it's better that young couples touch each other in kebab shops and, presumably, feed each other morsels of kebab once home. I expect to find kebabs, burgers, chips, a warm welcome and slightly shameful fellow customers at the kebab shop, I don't expect to find romance. So maybe my reaction was shock.

But I maintain that it's a bad idea to share your kebab.

Branded for life

It's not surprising that the economic prosperity of your town, village, hamlet or postcode can be linked the sort of shops you have on your high street and the number of boarded up windows among them. What might be more of a surprise is that it is a sign of economic prosperity when you have a KFC in your post code rather than the sort of fried chicken shop that aspires to be a KFC. Rule of thumb - when you see a Dallas Fried Chicken place open, it's time to worry and when you see something called Tennessee Fried Chicken set up shop, it's time to Google 'estate agents' and when you see your first 'Alabama Fried Stuff' it's time to Google 'petrol bombs' and reclaim your neighbourhood.

Why this snobbery though? Presumably they fry chicken in places in America other than Kentucky, and probably do it quite well. Any Southern state will probably be no stranger to fried fowl. What might be more worrying is an incongruity such as 'Vermont fried chicken', although that's more intriguing than anything else, standing as it does next to 'Paris rolled sushi'. (Yet who could resist nipping into a place called 'Alaska Fried Blubber', and asking for seal and chips?).

Where does this brand snobbery come from? There is a genuine gap in the market between the global brands that dominate food and drink - peddling mass produced stuff that's made in a giant factory that, if the conveyor belt were to be set up in a slightly different way, could probably just as easily knock out tractor tyres - and the artisan brewed beverage or humanely reared (and presumably Swiss clinic slaughtered) beefburger. This is the gap plugged by local or national, but not international, brands, that try and look like their global step-parent.

If that's the case we're in trouble because it means that coke is an aspirational drink. (it's always coke that the local competition seeks to emulate, never pepsi. I think this is because coke is the more readily recognised international brand and comes in those jolly red and white cans and iconic bottles whereas pepsi...isn't that the one Michael Jackson drank? Best example of a local cola I ever tried was 'Corsica cola' which actually tasted way better than coke).

Today, the competing beverages such as Panda Pop or whatever have been more or less replaced by supermarket own brand value versions of cola, lemonade and so on. If you want to find local competition you have to try independent local shops and even then you're more likely to come across the global brand, but the foreign version that's been brewed up abroad. And it does taste different. Which is odd because the supposed strength of a global brand is that you can drink a coke in Thailand and it'll taste the same as it does in Manchester. Of course that's rot, the recipe for fizzy pop is syrup, gas and water but when the water comes via a bucket from a river where children are washing goats upstream, then the third world version is doing to have a special tang. And that's something we should be thankful for.

But it's odd that rather than celebrate diversity, the preferred business model appears to be to emulate uniformity. Possibly this is because you're more likely to go into a place that looks sort of familiar because, having been there once, you're unlikely to return. Luckily, the other aspect of the business model for these places is to stay open after the pubs are shut and sell chips to very drunk people.

Maybe this snobbery can be traced back to the emergence of chain burger places on the high street. Prior to the arrival of macdees the national chain was Wimpy. Crockery, cutlery, waitresses. It could never last. About seven seconds after the burger chains started to establish themselves the emulators arrived; 'starburger' being just one. Starburger was where you went to eat if, horror of horrors, if your town was not considered worthy to have a chain burger place. You could sit in starburger and pretend you were in a chain burger bar, you could even litter if you wanted to give it that authentic feel.

What's kind of sweet is that these places seek to emulate but not duplicate their inspirations. It's not like pirate goods at a dodgy car booter, presumably because it's harder to pack up a restaurant when trading standards come knocking than it it to bundle your fake trainers in a suitcase and leg it, and possibly because anyone considering doing this has learned their lesson from the sub plot of 'Coming to America'. What would be good to see is this approach applied to 'fake' goods. Who of us could resist a tee shirt branded 'Nikf'?

Of course, the snobbery could just arise from these places being patronised by the sort of people that cause the reflex unkind thought: 'chav' or the considered unkind thought: 'morlocks'.