We’re eating with our cameras instead of our mouths — and food is losing its soul in the process.

I’ve never had the patience for photography. When I’m travelling or out with friends, I forget to take photos. I’m too busy being present. The same happens with food — sometimes I’ll snap something to save the memory, but I don’t obsess over how it looks.

And that apparently makes me the minority.

Because food today isn’t just made to taste good — it’s made to perform.

Food now has to be photogenic

Walk into almost any café and you’ll see it: plates designed to be photographed. Towers of toppings, drizzles of sauce perfectly applied, micro herbs placed like confetti.

Food used to be cooked to be eaten. Now it’s plated to be posted.

Recipe bloggers spend hours styling and editing photos. Lighting rigs. Props. Perfect smear marks. Crumbs placed “artistically”.

And the message becomes:

If your food doesn’t look like this, it isn’t good.

Home cooks don’t stand a chance

At home, real cooking looks messy. Counters are full. Sauces splatter. You eat off the plate you actually own — not some matte stone slab sourced for aesthetics.

But the internet doesn’t show that. It shows:

• impossible stacks of avocado toast
• pasta twirls engineered like sculpture
• crumbs placed with tweezers

Serve that same dish at home, and suddenly you feel like you’ve failed.

Food styling is no longer about food

When plating becomes about height, angles, and lighting, the eating suffers. How many times have you received a dish so tall you couldn’t actually cut into it?

It looks incredible on camera — and impossible on a fork.

Plates are too small. Portions topple. It’s a balancing act, not a meal.

And now… AI food styling

Social feeds aren’t just full of styled food — they’re full of fake food.

AI-generated food images are everywhere. Perfect lighting, perfect steam, perfect textures. And underneath? No real dish. No real meal. Not even a kitchen.

We’ve shifted from styling meals to inventing them.

Recipe developers feel forced to compete. If the internet rewards perfect images, then anything average — anything real — gets buried.

And the side effect?

When people try to follow a recipe and their dish looks different, they feel like they did something wrong. Even if the food tastes great.

Food doesn’t need to be flawless to be meaningful.

A good recipe should help you cook — not make you feel inadequate.

Bring back imperfect food

The best meals in my camera roll aren’t the pretty ones. They’re:

• padrón peppers dumped straight onto a plate
• pasta sauce staining the rim of the bowl
• hawker noodles served on a tray with a chipped spoon

They weren’t styled. They were eaten. Shared. Enjoyed.

Great food doesn’t need:
— tweezers
— AI retouching
— “shareability”

It needs flavour.
It needs people.
It needs a table.

The joy of food is in the eating — not the aesthetic.