Regarding pictures of food, I never quite understood the hate.

Okay, I'll play.

When I sit down to eat a meal, I'm somatically enjoying the flavor, the smell, the appearance, the texture. I'm enjoying it in an unmediated environment that surrounds me, which I have no ability to curate, which changes in real time and which satisfies all my senses. I am enjoying it as a part of the people who surround me, some of which I know, some of which I don't, none of which I can control, none of which I can filter. I am partaking of an experience within the real, the environment as it exists, the place we are born, the place we die, the one mother experience we are all blessed and cursed to endure.

When I sit down to eat a meal on Instagram, I'm curating a mediated experience for the loose connections I barely know, whose personalities are also carefully curated avatars of their desired attributes, whose involvement is subject to the whim of Instagram and themselves, which is limited to your pithy comment on your carefully crafted food shot. You are enjoying it as performance, as the aspect of your mediated life whose perspective you wager to inflict upon others in your mutual game of one-upmanship. You offer your food shot as a gambit towards greater prestige within an arbitrary environment crafted by others to increase your participation in a game whose ultimate beneficiaries are large faceless corporations, through methods and means subject to the whims of fashion and technology. You are taking an ephemeral somatic experience and transforming it into a catalogued and searchable intellectual gamepiece.

More than that, you're dragging me down with you. Sherry Turkle lists chapter and verse studies in which your inattention at your laptop damages my attention to my laptop. Your inability to experience your life unmediated interferes with my life unmediated because guess what, mutherfucker, I'm eating a meal, not voluntarily providing a backdrop for you to attention-whore your breakfast for meaningless internet points. And while I'm not on Instagram, every time you whip out your phone to tilt-shift your toast you're refusing to participate in my environment, the one here, in the diner, where we're eating, not performing, where we're enjoying each others' company rather than screaming senselessly out into the void to seek approval and accolades for your fucking orange juice.

"Healthy eating." Bitch, you know you only share your extravagances. You only show me your triple bypass burger, your $17 mojito. You ain't socially signaling shit other than "I am at a fancy restaurant, like me!" You are carefully crafting a fake fantasy of fabulousness because you can't enjoy a stack of fucking pancakes without seeking the approval of 600 people you met once, 300 people you met twice, the eight people you actually speak to in person more than once a year and the several thousand friends of friends that you know don't give a shit about your breakfast but you hope will think positively about you because the act of sitting down at a restaurant without OtherSpace following you every step of the way makes you feel empty inside.

Right. The change in people's health is because of Instagram, not because we've been calling it "the obesity epidemic" for the past ten years. Gimme a break. Next you'll be telling me selfie sticks increase exercise.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

You asked. Personally? I give a fuck if you take a picture of your food. If that's what you need to round out your existence hey - it's your life. Just understand that every bit of available research laughs in your face and feels sorry for you at the same time. The rest of us are out here, eating sushi and talking to each other without the need of five corporations and three networks to do it.