Why Instagram feeds can leave a bad taste in your mouth

Recently I attended a foodie event as an ‘influencer’. It was an incredibly eye-opening experience because I got to meet the human beings behind some hugely successful Instagram accounts; those with 60k followers, 100k+ followers. I attended their cooking demonstrations and I soon realised that, quite frankly, they weren’t all they were cracked up to be. It got me thinking about how our brains process the contrived images we see on platforms like Instagram (which have been proven to leave us feeling inadequate). 

One ‘influencer’ at the event gave a demo on food prep. Her concept was to compile foods from different groups together to create a packed lunch. I agreed with her—food prep is useful—but how is this new in any way? Is this not what any foodie worth her/his salt is already doing? 

Forgive me for the sass here but who are you to tell me to put rice, broccoli and chickpeas in a box for my lunch? The rice you’re using isn’t even whole grain god damn it!

Another demo I attended saw an incredibly accomplished chef paired with a blogger to discuss vegan desserts. We got to taste them. Anything the chef made tasted phenomenal. Literally divine. Anything the blogger made was too dry and lacked flavour. Her food looked good, but tasted plain.

Who was she to stand alongside a professional chef with a wealth of knowledge and a profound understanding of ingredients at a molecular level? She’s a blogger who likes to take nice photos of vegan food. Her focus is on healthy vegan food, fair enough. Granted, it doesn’t say ‘tasty’ in her bio, but she asked the audience to taste her food and to guess whether it was vegan. Of course it’s vegan, this is a vegan conference, but if you want me to be surprised that it tastes both vegan and good, I’m afraid you’re mistaken. It tasted grand, but not good. I’m very capable of baking tasty vegan treats and tend to receive positive feedback from non-vegans and vegans alike. The non-vegans are often particularly surprised that what they’re eating is both vegan and delicious. Decadent. Rich. 

This is not to sing my own praises, but rather to make a point. Let’s not kid ourselves; vegan food can taste incredible and can simultaneously look incredible. You can have it all but can we please stop pretending that you do have it all when the food looks pretty but tastes like cardboard.

No am I not getting the ‘chocolate‘ in this brownie, or the ‘pumpkin’ that you apparently baked into this cake. Sorry but I’m not.

Why do we feel worse after scrolling through Instagram? Although the images we see are often far from reality, I don’t think our brains can make this distinction. We see a photograph of mind-blowingly perfect food and we assume it tastes delicious. We eat with our eyes, because that is the only option on Instagram. We can’t taste the physical food so we make assumptions, based on the food’s aesthetics.

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Think about it; if your photos are getting likes for looking beautiful and the Instagram community does not care how the food tastes, are you going to make more of an effort to make your food taste good? Or are you going to make more of an effort to make it look good? Are you making the food for people to eat, or for likes?

Even if an account gives the recipe of a featured dish, how many followers are actually going to take the time to recreate it and test whether it actually tastes good? The vast majority will simply double tap. Making tasty food does not necessarily generate more likes. You can easily use hyperbole to tell people how “life-changing” something you made tastes. So why bother going to the effort of making tasty food? Well, as someone who runs an Instagram account dedicated to food, I would argue that it is worth making the most delicious food possible. The reason being that I am going to eat it after I have taken a photo. As far as I’m concerned life is too short to eat sub-par food. Of course I could spend less time ensuring the food tastes good and more time ensuring it looks good, but why would I?

Is there a new style of baking emerging whereby colour matters more than taste? Where visual texture matters more than actual mouthfeel? Where the ‘looking’ matters a lot more than the eating? This is why shows like ‘The Great British Bake Off’ are so important these days 😉 Those contestants would never get off the hook with a bake that looked good but tasted mediocre!

Having met some of these mysterious ‘Instafamous’ influencers, and having tasted their food, I feel better about my own instagram account with my modest 1k followers. At least my food bloody well tastes good. For me, food is to be shared. When I share food I’ve made (physically, not in the social media sense), I connect with people. I’d rather have fewer followers and make genuinely tasty food for the real people in my life, than make mediocre food for followers who will never taste it and perhaps don’t care whether it tastes decent or not. I may never be an ‘influencer’ with tens of thousands of followers but if I am able to influence the odd person in my immediate circle by baking or cooking delicious healthy (often vegan) food, then I am happy.