Partout or almost, the good gives way. In the morning radio broadcasts or at the end of an email, it is no longer a good but a beautiful day that we wish for in a perky or borrowed tone.
In the culinary sphere too, the tyranny of the beautiful has hit hard. Since its creation in 2010, Instagram has made the zoom on the plate a necessary step before the first stroke of the fork. On the photo-sharing application, the success of the #food theme and its derivative hashtags (foodstagram, foodlover, foodporn, etc.) cannot be denied, according to figures published in 2021 by the social media analysis company Digimind: 27% of Instagrammers share “food” content, 38% view it and “food lovers” consult four times more content than average users.
Dishes published and intended to be ” likes ”are they really beautiful? It’s a matter of taste – alas, rarely in a tasty sense. They obey criteria well known to influencers to ensure their popularity: a clear light, natural if possible; bright and variegated colors; graphic patterns; multi-storey buildings (pancakes, burgers); modern and refined tableware; controlled accidents (dripping sauce, dripping cheese or coulis, bread crumbs, zaatar yogurt marbling); neat decorations (edible flowers, herb bush, constellation of seeds, powdered ornaments in icing sugar or matcha tea, etc.).
Salmon and avocado are the stars, beetroot and red cabbage have never had so many friends, young shoots provide a mattress green while filling out the meager portions, pomegranate seeds are sown in all winds and in all seasons.
In this little game stand out the bowls (buddha, poke, smoothie, etc.), “avocado toasts”, baos, bo buns and tacos, crustaceans with pink legs, fruity stained glass pies, enchanted waffles or even cups of latte art with contrasting heart emerging from the crema coffee… On a screen that emits neither smell nor flavor, the dice are thrown: a good old stew patiently simmered has no chance of competing with a dashing poke bowl quickly packed.
Pushback effect
In the realm of appearance and calibrated beauty, certain dishes from our culinary repertoire thus offer a vision with a repulsive effect. Everything that is soft, shapeless, liquid, without relief, swampy, viscous, illegible is blacklisted. Like anything dark, dull, brown, brown or taupe.
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