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Making your food “Instagrammable” is not new. People have made careers out of slapping the Valencia filter on plated food in front of them for years now, and I really don’t have a problem with that. If you can figure out a way to make money doing Instagram food reviews, I have to begrudgingly respect you. That’s scamming on a level I can only dream of. What I do take issue with is how restaurants have responded to the rise of the food blogger.
The name of the game in Instagram foodie culture can be summed up with one word: excessiveness. The more over the top the menu item, the better your chance (as a restaurant) to get mentioned in an Instagram story by an influencer with a few hundred thousand followers.
The only way to stand out is to feature some limited time only entree that challenges everything we’ve come to know about food. It’s now just an arms race to see who can put the most bacon or cheese on something so that someone out there will take a photo of it with the caption “cheese goals” or “C.R.E.A.M. (Cheese Rules Everything Around Me). It’s cringey and completely ridiculous. I constantly see photos on Twitter and Instagram of stuff that looks impossible to eat with two hands.
At the crux of my argument is the so called “stacked cheeseburger.” I guess for some people it’s fun for a photo op, but there’s simply no way anyone is actually ordering something like this when they step out of their home with food on their mind. How do you bite into that? When I order a cheeseburger, it’s because I want something I can eat with my hands. No fork and knife allowed. This is patently absurd.
Give me a break. No one in their right mind is ordering something like this UNLESS they are a food blogger looking to get a shit load of interaction on their page.
Take a look at this mac and cheese burger. I’m not at all opposed to the idea of a mac and cheese burger, but how does one go about eating this?
That isn’t a meal, it’s a chore. I’m sorry but that just looks like shit. You’re going to look like you just rubbed mac and cheese all over your face after trying to eat that thing. There is no way to pick that up without having to go home and take a shower afterwards.
And then we have the bloody mary, a fantastic drink before noon that, in my opinion, should only be garnished with a piece of celery and maybe some cheese cubes or a slice of bacon. I don’t even know what I’m looking at here –
I guess what I’ve discovered in the past few minutes writing this is that I’ve come to the end of my rope with self-proclaimed foodies and the stuff that they choose to post on a daily basis.
I mean, really what does it take to become a food “blogger?” I’d argue that it’s nothing more than a working iPhone and an Instagram account in this day and age, and once you gain any sort of following restaurants will dole out their best shit free of charge as long you mention them in a post.
It’s not only the fact that these jackalopes are eating for free at the best restaurants all over the country, it’s that they are constantly claiming to this ridiculous shit pictured above.
Listen I love food, and I’ll willingly read a couple hundred word review of a restaurant by a food blogger, but no one is doing the leg work anymore. They’re just posting ten second Instagram stories of epic bacon cheeseburgers and claiming to be bloggers. That’s not how this works. Get back to normal sized cheeseburgers, bloody mary’s without an entire plate of food attached to the glass, and deli sandwiches that people are actually capable of biting into..
Image via Instagram
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jduda@grandex.co
Not serving food on plates is a trend that needs to die as well. Serving fries on a shovel or an ice cream sundae in a dog bowl doesn’t make your food interesting or creative.
Pub style fries in a newspaper wrap is acceptable but that’s damn near it.
I’d read a food blog about solely about restaurants that haven’t changed a thing in the last 40 years
See what happens when you make prostitution illegal? People find workarounds and ways to sell themselves out for a shittier market value whether that’s in the form of attention/fame, free food, and labor output to faceless organizations who then hire the OG escorts for their fancy masquerade dinner parties as they supply them with the cocaine from their black market business partners. The world is a Red Light District, guys lol
I think we can all agree that amateur food blogger is a far more immoral profession than prostitution anyway.
I might love you Nived, your analysis of the market makes the denim tight.
My favorite are the rail-thin food bloggers taking pictures with giant burgers, pizza, mac and cheese, and boozy over-the-top milkshakes with two additional desserts piled on top. It’s all lies! They did not eat that.
Agree on the take, but I’d definitely do some things to get my hands on those burgers…
Absolutely fantastic use of the word “jackalopes.”
I think the word you were actually looking for is “excess.”
Stock photo is delicious AF tho.
Bloody Mary’s are the most over rated cocktail to ever be created. And what makes them more acceptable than an old fashioned at 10:00am?
When it comes to Bloody Marys, the more food the better.