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Phone Eats First

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Sam

Sam

Phone Eats First Ireland Headrick • Nonfiction

A pancake breakfast-in-bed featuring a Daniel Wellington watch and miniature jars of berry compote. Boba milk tea with extra pearls, no ice. Cinnamon-flavored kombucha sipped from a biodegradable straw, crimson lips puckered into a plump little bow. Blood orange granola with oat flakes in the shape of the sun.

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The rise of Instagram has brought the art of food styling out from the shadows of the Food Network and into the hands of the masses. What was once cringe-inducing millennial behavior is now the bread and butter of influencers around the world: a perfectly styled shot, creative in concept and delicious in execution, featuring colors so vivid and stylized (re: filtered) that they make viewers’ mouths water with envy and delight.

It’s a new type of currency: Instagram gold. Users are enchanted by the idea of social media popularity outside of their immediate circle of friends, so they learn the ropes of the platform and use it to their advantage. The Instagram algorithm—a dumbed-down catch-all for how the app organizes content in user’s feeds—exists to serve us the posts we are most likely to engage with, first. But this, of course, is only theoretical.

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By making sure we see high-interaction posts as soon as we open the app, Instagram keeps us scrolling longer (thus making them, and their sponsored partners, more money). But we—the users who are not only bits of data, scavenged and sorted into a single homogenous entity, but real, live human beings with whims of our own—can easily disrupt the system by engaging with different content than what usually appears on our home feed.

Advertisers capitalize on the fantasy of the digital age: that our generation is the first to live two lives. One on a physical playing field, the other in a digital sphere. To gain followers (or friends), you must produce content that is beautiful, outrageous, or otherwise aesthetically pleasing. To gain likes (or approval), you must engage with viewers in a way that makes them feel part of something intimate and special—even if it is anything but.

Fortunately, most Instagram users are skeptical of the production value behind some of the most dazzling accounts—those that have budgets dedicated strictly to food flatlays. The ones with a perfect grid of acai and pitaya bowl photography, blueberries artfully drizzled from bowl to sparkling granite countertop and back again. It’s ridiculous but lovely, and we rarely stop to question those images.

Some will say that photographing a meal takes away from the innate ephemerality of food. I say, let them eat cake, and let them photograph it. Cooking is an art, and food is beautiful. The idea that we narcissistic millennials and Gen Zers can’t enjoy a single meal without stopping to take a picture? That’s stupid, because of course we can. We do it all the time.

Yesterday, I didn’t eat until four o’clock and had the most magnificent crème brulée of my life from the frozen goods section of Harris Teeter. I did not pass Go, I did not pause to take a picture, I did not stop to collect $200. I warmed that tiny glass pot up in the microwave, broke the crispy custard top with my fingers, and called it a day. But tomorrow, I might go to a themed

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café where they serve matcha lattes the color of those hybrid cars in Mike Meyers’ The Cat in the Hat, and I’ll want to share it with my friends. And I will, because I believe in the power of image creation and curation—not for the sake of self-promotion, but— dare I say it?—for fun.

Yes, Instagram exists to make money from advertising, and yes, they do so by capturing and selling our attention. Their purpose is to create value, not community. But just because Instagram doesn’t have our best interest at heart, doesn’t mean that it’s bad. Maybe we all just want to be seen, without making ourselves fully visible. To express our ideas in a medium so specific that we have full creative control of the outcome.

Personally, I don’t see how there’s anything wrong with that, the desire to explore and connect and self-edit and share. I think that as long as we aren’t simply exchanging real beauty for a manufactured variation, we can enjoy the benefits of social media without compromising our integrity. Our purpose in taking pictures of food should be rooted in appreciation for the time, effort, and love someone put in to prepare what’s in front of us, and for the ephemeral experience of the meal itself.

Cooking is an art. A great chef is a craftsman and a visionary, with the power to lead all five of our senses—touch, taste, hearing, sight, and smell—to a higher plane of consciousness. Great food is inextricably linked to occasions and memories, and because this is true across cultures, we can find common ground on the desire to create and share beautiful meals. So food stylists of the 21st century, rejoice! You will always have a place at my table.

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