Food is to be enjoyed, not Instagrammed

The Russian restaurant-owning oligarch hit London in 2014 and turned eating out into very conspicuous consumption. But being seen by other people in the restaurant was not enough. It became essential to Instagram pictures of your meal to all your friends, too. Food turned into a kind of deviant beauty contest, decoupled from most of the things that food used to be associated with – such as keeping you alive and healthy. Instead, it became another measure by which a judgment could be made. Taking pictures of what you are about to eat is like entering a very particular kind of competition. Please stop it.

For a start, good pictures of food are very hard to take. Usually the amateur version looks flaccid and congealed. This is because food needs careful lighting, rather than the blinding flash most phones come equipped with. Or no lighting at all, which probably means a tripod. The food itself needs to be a bit minimalist. Some photographers spray water over the plate for that just-out-of-the-oven glisten. And then it needs accessorising. OK, maybe not. But my point is that for food to look good in pictures it needs extreme care, time and imagination, not a mobile phone.

Anyway, a picture of the plate that’s just been put down in front of you cannot begin to convey the actual experience of being there and seeing it, let alone eating it. First, you’ve ordered it, chosen this dish over its rivals. You’ve got an idea about how it will look, and smell, and most of all how it will taste. You’re excited about it, and even if you’ve spent the 20 minutes between ordering and arrival listening to your companion’s problems with computer coding, or wondering if, sitting three tables away, that is the one person you would cross a continent to avoid rather than encounter in a restaurant, you will still have an element of anticipation when the food arrives.

And when the shimmying waiter delivers the perfect plate, getting hung up on its beauty is a kind of betrayal of what cooking’s about. Good food should appeal to all the senses, except maybe hearing, though there are probably exceptions even to that. A picture can only reproduce rather inadequately one facet of the experience.

Of course, looks do matter, because they influence the experience that comes next. They narrow expectations. It’s important that things taste, and smell, and feel on the tongue at least as good as they look. But no one would ever eat say, fish pie, let alone turkey and brussels sprouts, if it were only about looks. In fact if you only ate food that looked beautiful you’d be more or less stuck with fresh fruit, raw vegetables and very expensive restaurants. Taking pictures of food is really just one more way of bragging.

And you know what? That “you are what you eat” thing? It’s not meant to be taken literally. And since the rouble is in freefall, maybe the oligarchs will just have to clear the plates and go home.