food blogging

Shoot first, chew later
There's a fine line between 'foodie' and 'crazy'. Which type of food paparazzi are you?

by Kate Murphy food@mediacorp.com.sg 05:55 AM Apr 10, 2010 (with thanks to TODAY www.todayonline.com )

Twenty-eight-year-old neuroscientist Javier Garcia was in the pub recently having a grilled cheese sandwich. But before he took a bite, he snapped a digital picture of it, cheese artistically oozing between toasted white bread, just as he has photographed everything he has eaten in the last five years.

Every other week he posts the photos on his website (ejavi.com/javiDiet) providing a strangely intimate and unedited view of his life and attracting fans from as far away as Ecuador. The nearly 9,000 photos leave nothing out, not even snacks as small as a single square of shredded wheat.

When he lost his iPhone while visiting New York last month, he pleaded with exasperated friends to take pictures of his food and to email them to him, lest his record be incomplete.

"It was a nightmare," Garcia said, particularly because the unfocused pictures "were not the quality I'm used to".



You are what you eat. Snap!

In 1825, the French philosopher and gourmand Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin wrote: "Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are." Today, people are showing the world what they eat by photographing every meal, revealing themselves perhaps more vividly than they might by merely reciting the names of appetisers and entrees.

Keeping a photographic food diary is a growing phenomenon. Indeed, the number of pictures tagged "food" on the photo-sharing site Flickr has increased tenfold to more than 6 million in the last two years, according to Tara Kirchner, the company's marketing director.

One of the largest and most active Flickr groups, called "I Ate This", includes more than 300,000 photos that have been contributed by more than 19,000 members. There would be more, but members are limited to 50 photos a month.

The same phenomena can be found on other sites like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Foodspotting, Shutterfly, Chowhound and FoodCandy.

Nora Sherman, 28, the deputy director of the City University Of New York's Building Performance Lab, which promotes sustainable construction, finds that the pictures she takes of her food are her most popular posts on Facebook, Twitter and on her blog, Thought For Food (noraleah.com).

The immediate and enthusiastic commentary on, say, an arugula and feta salad or a plate of fried okra, have given her a sense of connection and community.

"People I have never met follow my blog and know me through the food I eat," Sherman said. She was even introduced to her boyfriend through someone she came to know through his comments on the food pictures on her blog, and who thought the two might be a match.

She said she takes pictures of at least half the meals she eats, omitting, for example, multicourse meals when it might "interrupt the flow". But she has noticed lately that it's becoming harder to suppress the urge to shoot.

"I get this 'must take picture' feeling before I eat. What's worse is that I hate bad pictures. So, I have to capture it in just the right light and at just the right angle," Sherman said.

And, she said, photographing the food has kept her honest when she has started diets. "When I decided to have salad for dinner during a juice fast, I snapped and posted that."

Photos are also a means of self-motivation for Garcia, who began photographing his food after he lost 36kg. "It's definitely part of my neuroticism about trying to keep thin," he said. "It keeps you accountable because you don't want to have to see that you ate an entire jar of peanut butter."

Ever the scientist, he hopes to one day use the photographs to calculate how much money he spends to consume a calorie versus how much he spends in gym memberships and sports gear to burn a calorie. "People I have dated haven't been that into it," he said of his food photo-journaling. "But it's never been a deal breaker."



Capture, collect, catalogue, brag

That some people are keeping photographic food diaries and posting them online does not surprise psychotherapists. "In the unconscious mind, food equals love because food is our deepest and earliest connection with our caretaker," said Kathryn Zerbe, a psychiatrist who specialises in eating disorders and food fixations at Oregon Health And Science University in Portland. "So, it makes sense that people would want to capture, collect, catalogue, brag about and show off their food."

Photographing meals becomes pathological, however, if it interferes with careers or relationships or there's anxiety associated with not doing it. "I'd have to ask if they would feel okay if they didn't do it," said Tracy Foose, a psychiatrist at the University Of California, who treats patients with obsessive-compulsive disorders. "Could they resist the urge to do it?"

Joe Catterson, the general manager of Alinea restaurant in Chicago, said that, increasingly, people can't. "One guy arrived with the wrong lens or something on his camera and left his wife sitting at the table for an hour while he went home to get it," he said.

Evidently aware of the trend, manufacturers like Nikon, Olympus, Sony and Fuji have within the last two years released cameras with special "food" or "cuisine" modes, costing around US$200 ($279) to US$600. "These functions enable close-up shots with enhanced sharpness and saturation so the food colours and textures really pop," said Terry Sullivan, associate editor of digital imaging technologies at Consumer Reports.

This bemuses Tucker Shaw, the food critic for The Denver Post, who made do with a basic point-and-shoot digital camera to take pictures of everything he ate in 2004. He published the photos in his book, Everything I Ate: A Year In The Life Of My Mouth.

"It used to turn heads if you took a picture of your food, and I even got in trouble at a few restaurants," he said. "Now it's ubiquitous and just shows that we are in a spastic food era - we couldn't get more obsessive."

Nonetheless, Shaw said the year he spent photographing his food (and a year was enough for him) resulted in an achingly honest account of his life that revealed far more than the fact that he ate too few leafy green vegetables.

"The pictures, I realise now, are incredibly personal," he said, "And by looking at them you can probably deduce the type of person I am."

Unlike a picture of a flower or friend, a picture of a meal recalls something smelled, touched, tasted and ultimately ingested. Carl Rosenberg, 52, a website developer who divides his time among San Francisco, Texas and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, photographs his food along the way with a Nikon D3.

He often places a small stuffed animal, a sheep, which he calls the Crazy Sheep, next to his food before taking a picture; reminiscent of the globe-trotting garden gnome in the French film Amélie.

"I think photographing food is a more accurate way to document life," said Rosenberg, who shares photos with family and friends but does not post them. "Food isn't going to put on a special face when you take a picture of it." The New York Times