Before you take a bite, let me take a (food) selfie
Food. Snapchat. Instagram. Facebook. Yelp. Eat. Repeat
I love food. Like, more than any regular person should. I love the way it looks, I love pictures of food, and I love eating a surplus amount of food, well, all the time. As a kid, I got to travel to a lot of places and was fortunate enough to eat out a lot. I remember every Saturday when I was younger, as the youngest member of my family, I would dictate where to eat out. I was obsessed with Home Town Buffet. I ate there every Saturday for about 6 years. I always looked forward to eating at Home Town Buffet before watching a movie with my family. It was a convenient location and I loved the variety. I thought it was the most delicious meal on earth. Spaghetti and French fries and chicken noodle soup. I was eating plate after plate of it. I was filled with food and happiness. I was always more than content with what I ate. I just loved the food at Home Town Buffet.
Eating back then was about how much food I could eat and consuming all the food I could eat. I didn’t care about anything else. I ate carbs on carbs and stuffed my plate as much as I could. There is something different when I walk into a restaurant now then when I did as a kid. I have an unhealthy obsession. No, it’s not the food. It’s the aesthetics of the food I eat. I’m sure most you have seen pictures of food that look like only the food gods have made for people with really nice cameras. Or you might’ve seen people in restaurants who take their phone out and take about 50 pictures of all different angles before actually eating the food. Glad to admit, I am that person. I am that person who takes a picture of what I eat and make it look aesthetically pleasing so I can possibly upload it to Instagram or Facebook. Social networks have me thinking nonstop about what to post online. Food is easy, it’s delicious and if it looks pretty, I want to post it. Ice cream, breakfast food, cupcakes, macaroons, tacos, sushi, you name it. I’ve probably posted it. New technology like the iPhone 6 (bless its great photo quality) and popular social media sites have made amateur photographers like me, adhere to the love of sharing on the Internet and adhere to the concept of “do-it-for-the-Insta.”
I remember one day I was at home and I was scrolling through pictures on Instagram and I saw a picture of a double scoop ice cream and the location was at “Frozen Bar” in Garden Grove. This was about 40 minutes from my house. I told my sister I really wanted to go get ice cream in Garden Grove, but secretly I just wanted to post a picture saying I was there. All I ever thought about was “What picture could I post for the day?” My sister and I decided to get dessert up in Garden Grove and as soon as we both got our ice cream, I told her not to take a bite until I took pictures of our ice cream together. I took about 7 pictures and realized I didn’t like the lighting or the picture at all. After around 30 pictures, I found the right one. Now all I had to do was think about which filter to use, what edits I could do, and, most importantly, what my caption should be. After 20 long minutes I finally posted. After that I started talking to my sister. For someone like me, it’s normal to post and ask opinions about filters and come up with a clever caption. For people like my sister, someone who is not into social media, she didn’t understand why I put so much time and effort into a post. Why did I feel it was necessary to drive far, take a bunch of pictures and spend 30 minutes editing it?
This is just one of the many instances I’ve had whenever I ate. Sometimes I wonder if I choose to eat because I want to post a picture or because I really want to enjoy the food. Ever since I moved to college, I grew to love the city I’m in and the places I’ve visited. I wanted to share my experience in college through social media. I wanted to let people know how much “fun” I was having in my life and that my short time in San Diego was being well spent and I wasn’t missing out on much as a transfer student. Even going back home to Orange County, I needed people to know my life was fun and exciting by posting new places I went to eat or places that were hyped and posting a picture of it on Instagram and “checking-in” on Facebook.
This idea of constantly exposing my foodie life on the Internet was derived from friendship-based practices that developed into an interest-based hobby. After meeting so many new friends and seeing their life on Instagram look so fun and exciting, I wanted to be like them too. I was exposed to a new world of what I like to call “hipster Instagram.” Picture placements, filters, captions, everything was different and I wanted my photos to look like that too.
Our generation today is very dependent and exposed to the Internet world, where our interests and our activities are revolved around social media. Everything we do is posted onto the Internet. The number of likes we receive, friends we have, comments we get, makes us feel important and popular. My friends would complain that their pictures didn’t get enough likes and I’ve seen them take down a picture on Instagram because they didn’t get a certain amount of likes within the first 20 minutes (okay, I’ll admit I did this a few times as well), but the idea is that our social world is much more important and valuable to us than personal interactions. This generation relies on the likes and views and tweets, and the number of social media friends is held sometimes at a higher value than the friends we see in real life.
