The Psychological Case for Instagramming Your Food

New York Magazine:

The most important thing about a good food picture, as any amateur food photographer can tell you, is natural light. It’s why you can find particularly determined patrons of the food-photography arts looking like lost waiters — carrying plates of food to nearby windows just to take a picture. If there is no natural light, there is always the option of flash. And don’t forget about angles and composition. Capturing a full Sunday-brunch spread is near impossible to do while sitting down, so you might as well stand up, maybe even on your chair to shoot from above. If you’re particularly concerned about it, you could bring a handful of GorillaPods — those miniature tripods with flexible legs — and assemble them on your table to act as your own personal photographer.

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The findings are in line with a collection of studies published in the journal Psychological Science in 2013 that also found delaying eating by performing a short ritual — regardless of how mundane the ritual may be — positively influences our perception of the food on our plates. One experiment found participants given a chocolate bar with strict instructions on how to handle and unwrap the bar before eating ended up savoring the chocolate more, rating it higher, and being willing to pay more for it than those told to relax and eat the chocolate bar at their leisure. The researchers observed that a longer delay between ritual and consumption bolstered these positive effects, but that delaying consumption through random movements did not yield the same results. Only repeated, episodic, and fixed behaviors were capable of changing the perception of food.

Read the whole story: New York Magazine