Photographing Food: A New Phenomenon

I saw this article about people who photograph food in The New York Times yesterday, and naturally it jumped out at me. It’s about people who photograph every meal and then post the pictures online. While I’m not that fastidious about my meal-photographing, I’ve been known to whip out my camera at the dinner table pretty often — much to the chagrin of my fellow diners, especially Keith. The article was a self-reflection of sorts, and it was interesting to read this:

“In the unconscious mind, food equals love because food is our deepest and earliest connection with our caretaker,” said Kathryn Zerbe, a psychiatrist who specializes in eating disorders and food fixations at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland. “So it makes sense that people would want to capture, collect, catalog, brag about and show off their food.”

I suppose that’s true personally, though I always assumed that I just like talking about good food. Thankfully, I haven’t reached an obsessive level. Yet.