On people taking pictures of their food and posting them on the internet

I'd never committed much thought previously to a certain internet trend of sorts, but yesterday I finally did and now I can't seem to stop thinking about it. I'm talking about people who post pictures of their food on the internet via blogs, Twitter pics, Facebook, etc., something that's been going on for a while, and suddenly I find myself fascinated by it and mildly obsessed with figuring out why people do it.

I suppose for me this mini-obsession to figure out the "why" in all of this sprung from a thought I had yesterday on the train, a thought that kind of hit me out of the blue and without warning, and it was this...never in my life that I can recall, not even once, have I ever had a plate of food in front of me and felt overcome with the desire to take a picture of said food, much less post it on the internet afterwards to show my friends and/or any stranger who happened to come across it. My only thought, typically, is to eat my food. Or season it. Perhaps heat it up a bit or have it cooked a bit longer. But the "this looks so good I've got to take a picture of it" thought has honestly never crossed my mind.

Now, perhaps this is a little primitive on my part, a little caveman-esque maybe, something that is probably rooted in my having grown up in a relatively poor family dominated by hungry men, a background which conditioned me a bit to eat rapidly if I stood any chance at getting a second helping of something. If anyone at the dinner table in the house I grew up in stopped to take portraits of their meal, it would have probably been snatched away and eaten by someone else. Just saying.

Anyway, here are a few note on this trend that I've taken...

-The people who post photos of their food often go to great to great lengths to explain every element of what it is that's in the photograph, from where the food in the photo came from to the process in which it was cooked. This is an exercise that typically involves many hyphens ("farm-raised," "fossilized-redwood-smoked," etc) due the exotic nature of the dish in its totality.

-The food in photographs people post to the internet seems to be primarily of the "fancy" variety. Rarely have I seen people posting photos of what some might consider traditional middle-class American standards like meat loaf, fried chicken, ground beef tacos, or spaghetti with meatballs. The exception to this "rule" is the occasional pic posted of foods that exude extreme gluttony, like triple cheeseburgers for instance.

-It should be noted that despite having a photograph and a detailed written description of the food posted in the photo to work with, I often find it hard to get any sort of grip on what it actually tastes like because I have little or no idea what some of the ingredients in the dish are or tastes like. This is due to my peasant palate's ignorance of high cuisine I presume.

Regardless, where does this motivation come from? Is it a derivative of the oh so pervasive "look how fabulous my life is" internet narcissism? Is there an element of braggadociousness to it? I've noticed that the trend seems to be growing in these hard economic times. It's almost as if some of the food-photo-posters are saying, "fuck you assholes I'm still living large."

Let me clarify here that I'm not condemning the practice of taking pictures of food and posting them on the internet, it's just something I've found sort of vexing and have been trying to wrap my brain around for the last 24 hours or so. If anyone knows of anything illuminating that's been written on the subject, please send it my way.

And yeah, I do need to get a life.