The New York Times had a story today on a distinctly unique obsession to our time: taking pictures of food, a recent phenomena that has led me and several others I know to become food bloggers, Yelpers, Facebook posters, Twitpic takers, and weirdos with what amounts to a habit that some regard as annoying (have dinner with me and you'll think the same thing).
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It points out that even camera companies are starting to notice, offering up special lenses and features that make food pictures pop with more vibrant colors.
The story starts off by citing an example and a profile of a 28-year-old neuroscientist at UCI named Javier Garcia. Javier, the Times writes, has been doing this more obsessively than others.
“JAVIER GARCIA, a 28-year-old neuroscientist at the University of California, Irvine, was in the campus pub recently having a grilled cheese sandwich. But before he took a bite, he snapped a digital picture of it, cheese artistically oozing between toasted white bread, just as he has photographed everything he has eaten in the last five years.
Every other week he posts the photos on his Web site, ejavi.com/javiDiet, providing a strangely intimate and unedited view of his life and attracting fans from as far away as Ecuador. The nearly 9,000 photos leave nothing out, not even snacks as small as a single square of shredded wheat.”
The article goes further to dissect this weird but consuming tick, not just on our local neuroscientist, but more people like him…and me. But I can quit anytime. Really, I can.
Before becoming an award-winning restaurant critic for OC Weekly in 2007, Edwin Goei went by the alias “elmomonster” on his blog Monster Munching, in which he once wrote a whole review in haiku.