Are you a food photographer?
As in one of the professional ones, the ones who perform the miracle of making a Big Mac look like something more than a tumour trapped in some soggy bread, or who manages to find a way to make lettuce curiously sexual?
No? I suspected not. That's fine, frankly the majority of people aren't, so it's not a big shock.
At least it wasn't, until world + dog took it upon themselves to hide the day to day tedium of their existence behind a ceaseless chain of images of their bloody lunch!
Now, and I do want to ruin this for you so please, read on.
Nobody, since humans invented fire and 5 minutes later the BBQ, has ever cared about what you're eating. And this counts double for what you're eating if they're not there at the time. Sure, if you've just ordered something a little different and your friend is sat next to you, that might be interesting, to them, for about 3 seconds, but otherwise, nothing. Ever. To be frank they don't even care that you are eating! Unless they did really badly at school I can promise you that your friends should be pretty damn certain that you're eating. After all, if you decided to kick that particular habit then it wouldn't be too long before you moved on to fertilising the cow's lunch, rather than chewing on it's rump.
So why, of all the things in the world, has the internet suddenly taken it upon itself to photograph and share it's every meal with a near limitless supply of total strangers? Is this the legacy we want to leave from the early years of the digital age? I can just see historians in years to come complaining about how much more advanced society would be if only the people of the early 21st century, who should have been absorbing more knowledge in a week than everyone in the rest of human history had access to in a life time, weren't using that power to show each other pictures of Cabbage!
And why that particular part of the process? Why not the cow in the field? Why no close ups of your mouths and stomachs, or a quick shot down the pan once the whole thing's really over and done with? Isn't that what you're really telling us is going on anyway? "Look everyone I'm alive! I eat food! I turn food into poo! ADMIRE ME FOR IT!"
And for crying out loud, there are a thousand ways to take and share beautiful, and incredible images on the internet, but I can promise you, you won't get notoriety from a sandwich!
