Sep 3

Sep 3 BETWEEN GOOD LOOKS AND GOOD FOOD

Part of the pleasure of eating derives not from taste, texture or smell, but from a visual experience. In fact, many languages feature expressions somehow capturing this ‘food for the eye’ concept — it’s a cliché as old as man. Of course, the visuals of food have not only been explored on beautiful plates in combination with those other aspects — taste, texture, smell, and so on — but also in media lacking those. Archeologists have theorised that the animals depicted in prehistoric cave paintings are really images of food to be, hence their importance to the artists. What’s certain is that the ancient Greeks loved to paint pictures of food on their walls and ceramics, as did the Romans. The latter seemed to be so keen on visualising their food culture that even today it’s hard to eat a grape off the bunch without feeling ‘a little Roman’.

For a food to become iconic, certain criteria need to be met. Most countries have a kind of national dish, a dish that embodies the ingredients of its geography, as well as the cultural approach to food, or food philosophy if you will. Goulash as a representative of Hungarian cuisine features the region’s love of peppers, meat, and slow cooked, hearty dishes. It has become almost synonymous with the country’s cuisine and is recognised as a staple of the region the world over. In that sense, it’s an iconic dish. The same can be said for the hamburger as an icon of US-American cooking, evoking images of barbecues in back yards on Summer evenings as well as the country’s fondness for fast, cheap foods bought and eaten in one of the many chain restaurants. However, in addition to being iconic of the country’s ingredients and food culture, the hamburger has a particular visual quality that enables it to become iconic in a different way. There is the uniform and recognisable round shape, the colour contrast between the layers of the bun and the burger patty, and between the bun and the speckles of sesame seed on top. A hamburger might be chosen as an icon in a ‘no eating and drinking’ sign.

The move from food on a plate to recognisable icon also happens to foods that transcend certain cultures and regions. As of 2020, the hashtag #eggs is used in thirteen million Instagram posts and is in the top ten of most hashtagged foods. Food writer Bee Wilson suggests that eggs have made their way back onto our plates, after years of being shunned by those fearful of health dangers associated with high cholesterol diets, not only as a part of the ever-growing brunch hype, but also because of the power of social media. The reason for eggs’ popularity on Instagram might be largely due to just one thing: the colour contrast between the whites and yolks. One of 2017’s biggest food trends on Instagram was a so-called ‘cloud egg’: baked whipped egg whites with the yolk put back into the middle that look like a cartoon fried egg. Talking about cartoon eggs: Japan has been enthralled by a cartoon egg yolk that’s lazy and depressed for a while now.

Visually, eggs work — as do things like bacon, cupcakes, sushi, donuts and dumplings. They have such consistent shapes and colours that they become equally recognisable as the ‘men’ and ‘women’ figures seen on public toilet doors: they easily become visual icons. A look at a smartphone’s emoji library shows this too: The growing list of icons includes more food from around the world every year, but still, it’s hard to imagine how it would include goulash anytime soon. Goulash meets a lot of the criteria set by Unicode, the computing standard for consistent writing systems that decides which emojis become part of the universal catalogue. In a non-visual understanding of icon status, it has no fewer reasons to be there than a taco. Still, it’s a shapeless, brown mass that seems to be hard to capture in an image the size of a letter. Emojis might seem harmless, but they have played a role in ongoing discussions about inclusivity. Since they have become an important part of modern-day communication, not only different skin and hair colours, as well as culturally significant clothing such as hijabs and turbans have been added over the years, but people have wanted to see their food — which is also a cultural signifier — represented too. Mexican communities fought against the inauthenticity of a hard-shell taco in most companies’ taco emojis, and an Apple Inc. emoji was changed after a Chinese blogger pointed out that chopsticks sticking out of a take-out box represent death in Chinese culture. Another aspect of this discussion is that in 2018, it was reported that Google removed the egg from their Android salad emoji to be more inclusive for vegans.

More generally speaking, it might not seem to be of the greatest importance for every great dish of the world to be represented as an emoji. However, it is a question worth asking what might happen to all those humble, delicious dishes of great tradition that don’t meet our modern visual food standards. They might not make the selection for an Instagram food blogger to cook — or for a television chef, cookbook author or brunch café owner. Are they at risk of slowly disappearing in an age in which visual media influence so much of what we eat? Whilst the power of tradition shouldn’t be underestimated and great cooks around the world work tirelessly to transport tradition into modern times, it can’t hurt to give these foods a little visual loving. Because is it really impossible to capture them that way? It might demand use of a different register of our brains to look mouthwateringly at a picture of a bowl of congee or refried beans than at that of a donut with colourful sprinkles, but it’s not impossible. And why wouldn’t it be achievable for mashed potatoes or couscous to be cute and lazy and a little depressed, in the same way that seems to be possible for an egg?