You see it more and more these days.  In restaurants, cafés and fast food joints across the world.  The food arrives and out come the smartphones.  Lots of photos are taken from various angles.  Then it’s Tweeted, Facebooked, Instagrammed, Tumblred and then a pic is done for Snapchat.  “Excuse me, my food is cold”.

Well, it’s not surprising when you’ve been photographing and social networking for the past 10 minutes.  Would you behave this way if you were invited to someone’s house for dinner?  If you were throwing a dinner party and the minute you plonked the plates in front of your guests they all started a photographic session, would you be offended?

Be My Guest

Well some people are … and that’s just the restaurants.  More and more eateries are banning diners from photographing their meals.  Not only because they believe it’s rude but because having people photographing and uploading to social networking sites is taking so much time, they’re finding people are taking longer to eat their meals and the turnaround of customers is dropping.  They would like us all to behave as we would in our own homes.

Talking of the home, many families are banning smartphones from the table at mealtimes.  Parents in particular are finding they prefer to talk and eat rather than sit around staring at ‘phones.  Not surprisingly mum and dad get annoyed when the kids only take their eyes off their screens to occasionally nonchalantly stick a forkful of food into their mouths.  They also expect considerate behaviour from invited guests.

Everyone's a Critic

If you were throwing a dinner party and the results of your slaving in the kitchen were photographed, posted and left open to online criticism before being consumed, you’d be tempted to grab everyone by their Apples and Blackberries and throw them into the street.  Is there really any advantage to taking photos of nearly every meal?  Well, possibly.

One BBC journalist recently undertook a project where he photographed and posted every meal for a week.  He soon discovered that when it came to his own cooking and food preparation, the exercise forced him to up his game in the kitchen.  Boring meals were replaced by more exciting and adventurous cooking.  Repetition of the same meals went out and in its place was more variety.

Food For Thought

That’s all very well but you can imagine that followers and friends on social networking sites would have found that posting pics of three meals a day is still as dull ditch-water, regardless of how exciting the ingredients.  As with most things on social media; what you do isn’t necessarily what others want to see.  So next time you’re about to post a food pic, think about whether or not you need to share it to truly enjoy it.  Now that really is food for thought.

To see the BBC journalist’s experience of photographing his meals every day for a week, look here http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-31548938


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