Food is on plates, on our feeds, and in the news. It’s the object of policies, a topic of conversations both profound and trivial, and the subject of iconic artworks. The answer to the obvious question as to why we are so obsessed with food is twofold. Of course, food is sustenance; we need to consume it regularly to obtain the calories and nutrients we need to maintain our health and carry out our daily activities. Yet, there is much more to eating than its primary function.
We eat for pleasure, but what we eat is also tied to our traditions, health status, and socioeconomic conditions. Eating, as with most other things, is political, and this deep connection with politics is also why representations of food across the arts morph in tune with societal changes.
The evolution of culinary representation in art
Around 10,000 to 5,000 years ago, a process with massive ramifications took place across the world: the Neolithic Revolution, the emergence and expansion of agriculture across the globe. Growing your own food instead of gathering and hunting it, as we humans had done before, meant settling down. In his famous essay “Stone Age Economics“, the American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins highlighted how the Neolithic revolution subjected people to increasingly demanding work and led to the first capitalization of goods, introduced the concept of property, and coincided with the first conflicts. That’s when food became political.
It didn’t take much longer for food to become the protagonist of artworks. The ancient Egyptians believed that, upon death, their spiritual body would continue to exist in an afterlife comparable to the physical world. If their soul managed to gain entrance into this afterlife, they would need the sustenance provided for their spirit. This meant ensuring a supply of food. This set of beliefs is the cultural background behind the Stela of the Steward Mentuwoser, a rectangular stone stela from the Middle Kingdom of Egypt, ca. 1944 B.C., that honors the official of the same name. He is portrayed holding a folded piece of linen as he attends his funeral banquet, ensuring that he will acquire food offerings forever.
In the Middle Ages, food was connected to social hierarchy, medical beliefs, and religious devotion. In a time when most of Europe’s population consisted of peasants, much of people’s daily labor and social life centered around cultivating, preparing, and eating food. Illuminated manuscripts depicted cooking methods, typical dishes, food preparation, and the meals enjoyed by different social classes like in the representation of the The Temperate and the Intemperate from the illuminated manuscript of “The Memorable Deeds and Sayings of the Romans” by the Master of the Dresden Prayer Book who depicted the way of eating of the two groups in a spacious dining hall.
During the Dutch Golden Age, the Netherlands became one of the wealthiest countries in the world. This newfound wealth meant that for the first time, the rising local middle class could invest in artworks, a pastime that for the longest time had been a prerogative of the aristocracy. The food art from this time, like the rest of the artistic production from the Dutch Golden Age, reflects this era’s moral conundrum.
The Dutch society of the time held Protestant Christian values and were raised to show and praise modesty, and yet, owning and displaying art was a way of showing off one’s status, taste and worldliness, an act of social posting as sociologist Pierre Bourdieu defined it in his essay “Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste’ (1979)”. An interesting incarnation of this phenomenon is the Dutch take on the Still Life genre. While some were Vanitas, a type of ‘Memento Mori’, visual artworks meant to remind the viewer of their mortality, the Still Life paintings featuring food were often a way to celebrate an opulent everyday life, like the painting Still Life with Cheeses, Almonds and Pretzels by the Flemish painter Clara Peeters.
How our food obsession has changed in the digital era
The deep connection between food, art, culture, and politics has not been served in the digital era. On the contrary, the internet has reflected and amplified this millennia-old phenomenon. In line with their origins as horizontal sites of aggregation, online spaces can still be places where users organically express their interests, find and connect with like-minded people.
Still, in the era of corporate-owned social media, algorithms also play a pivotal role in selecting the content we interact with online, exerting a strong homogenizing effect on people’s online habits. As a consequence, food content is everywhere on social media. Regular users post it, celebrities post it, influencers post it. It would be hard to find someone who doesn’t follow at least one food content creator or who doesn’t occasionally watch recipe videos. This online food craze is nothing new, as food content has been widely popular on almost every social media platform since the 2010s.
Those years were the years of the “Food Porn” Instagram pictures, the Yelp reviewing of new restaurants, and the BuzzFeed food videos. That was the food content of the online era now dubbed “Millennial Hopecore” (or “Millennial Cringe,” if you so prefer), the name for that specific brand of sincerity that permeated pop and digital culture until the mid-2010s.
Fast-forward a decade, and internet users are still as into food as they used to be, but the food content we see now has unsurprisingly changed along with the massive world events of the 2020s. A global pandemic, war, political instability, recession, and the ever-growing concentration of wealth of Late Stage Capitalism have made food, a human right that long been seen as a commodity, even more expensive. The more challenging it becomes to get a commodity, the more it is seen as a luxury. This socio-economic context explains the dual nature of the food content from this ‘eating in and making it yourself’ era.
On one hand, posting content centered on homemade food and cooking is an easy way for influencers and celebrities and everything in between to appear “apolitical”, enter a popular niche, and present themselves as down-to-earth people who engage in everyday activities that have become even more mandatory even for working professionals in metropolitan areas as restaurants and food delivery prices have become more and more inaccessible.
On the other hand, having the time, money, and ability to cook beautiful, “Insta-worthy” meals with nutritious ingredients at home is far from the norm at a time when many people are overworked, burned out, and facing financial constraints. In a way, food content at this time of socio-economic turmoil has become a form of semi-aspirational content as good food is increasingly seen as a little luxury, like drugstore cosmetics and perfumes.
One might not have the capacity to cook that delicious-looking dish they see on their TikTok feed in a nice, clean kitchen, wearing a put-together outfit just like that food influencer, right as they are doom-scrolling on their couch, but they think they might be able to on a “good day”. Once again, food and the way we see and represent it is a mirror of societal changes, brief and long-lasting, big and small.
