Food bloggers of Instagram: Your faithful follower is frustrated.
August 23, 2017 |
I don’t usually discuss my first world problems on a public platform. They’re usually kept to the privacy of voice messages sent to friends over WhatsApp, so they can hear every intonation of devastation in my voice. However, this is something that has been bothering me recently, and I thought I would air my extremely important, of high priority grievances with the rest of society. I know, I know. A millennial complaining. You can leave your eye rolls via the comments if you wish.
Nonetheless, let me start off by saying, I love Instagram. And I love food. So a few years back, when I discovered Instagram accounts with pictures of just food and nothing else, I think I actually shed a tear.
Each post, from rich red swirls of a
raspberry coulis to a dark chocolate sauce overflowing from the inside of a
molten cake….err what are we talking about again? Basically,
with every post I came across, I became the heart eyes emoji personified.
So with the rise of Instagram, and the craze of capturing each meal before consuming it-so came the rise of the Instagram food-blogger. And just to be clear, by food-blogger, I am referring to the full-time foodies with Instagram accounts dedicated to hunting down the latest café or eatery. Not just food enthusiasts like myself who post a picture of their mid-week Eggs Benedict sandwiched between a selfie and a picture of their cat.
So with the rise of Instagram, and the craze of capturing each meal before consuming it-so came the rise of the Instagram food-blogger. And just to be clear, by food-blogger, I am referring to the full-time foodies with Instagram accounts dedicated to hunting down the latest café or eatery. Not just food enthusiasts like myself who post a picture of their mid-week Eggs Benedict sandwiched between a selfie and a picture of their cat.
For the most part I applaud these full-time foodies, and I feel blessed that you’re doing the hard work of locating the next best café for me. I love your perfectly edited pictures that you may have had to defy gravity to capture. And I appreciate you taking the risk with your cash and trying new food trends so that I don’t have to. (Ice-cream in a donut cone, anyone?) Unfortunately, that is where my praise stops and my disappointment kicks in. If you believe yourself to be a blogger, and your Instagram bio reads along the lines of ‘a guide to’ or ‘follow to discover places to eat’ then I need some hard hitting info. I need more than a mouth-watering image, a pun for a caption which is then followed by some food-related emoji’s.
Short and brief? Sure. An actual review? Nope.
In this
case, a picture does not speak a thousand words. I wouldn’t go to a travel
agent and be like “Im thinking Italy” and they just show me pictures of the
outside of different hotels. It just doesn’t work that way.
And I would have to say my biggest gripe with Instagram food-bloggers currently, is the issue of aesthetically pleasing vs. actually tasty. I just need some transparency guys. Are you posting the picture because the passionfruit sauce on your pancakes looked extra vibrant with the C1 filter on your VSCO app or because you truly believe it tasted like summer in a bowl?
Because the last time I visited a café based on an Instagram recommendation (read: a pretty photo of some french toast) the taste was pretty average.
So, with
all that being said/vented, I decided that in a perfect world where food-bloggers
based their content on satisfying my requirements, here is what I would love to
see on your account:
Is it worth
the trip?
Listen, Im from Penrith. And while I won’t go knocking my hometown, I will say the food around isn’t the most ‘instagrammable.’ (It is getting there though. Progress.) So usually, I have to travel at least 45 mins or an hour to find the red velvet latte I saw on your Instagram. I really don’t want to be disappointed.
What is the interior of the place like?
Oh, man. If only I could tell you the amount of times I have been fooled by an image of a café on Instagram. The cafe looks so airy and spacious in the photo, only to find out it’s some ‘rustic’ hole in the wall at the back of
some train station. Look, I’m not hating on these smaller cafes (or train
stations. Cityrail for life.) I just feel...deceived at times. And tell me what the lighting is like please (Is this getting slightly demanding?) But what is the point of me dressing up if the lighting is so dim you can’t even see me? I
still remember the time I went to a café and the lighting was so bad I had to
guess what was on my plate.
Level of Instagrammability
for a layman?
This is
important for those who want to take pictures for Instagram, but aren’t bold
enough to stand on chairs or set up tripods like a pro food-blogger. By Instagrammability I mean, What
is the distance between each table? Will the other diners judge me? Will I look
like I have come here for just the pictures? Will I be seen as an uncultured human with no fine dining capabilities? (Yes, these are all real concerns.)
And most importantly: The menu
This is often overlooked, but if you're clever, you can always find out the most popular dish at the cafe by going through the actual cafe's account's 'tagged photos' section. If the only item on the menu consistently being ordered is the waffles, and they just happen to be the most aesthetically pleasing item--Is the cafe truly worth making the trek for? This is where I expect my food-bloggers to come in. Tell me, do the rest of the items on the menu sound decently appealing? Even
if you haven’t tasted them, how do they sound? Did anything else tickle your
fancy before you chose the most photogenic item? Let a girl know.
Perhaps I am alone in this struggle, and maybe it is a first world problem. But honestly, Im just tired of driving to places, checking the menu and then being like, ''Well crap. I cant even leave now, they already served us some table water and just asked me for my drink order.'' So please, food-bloggers of Instagram, for the sake of my social anxiety, I believe you can do better than this.
I (still) have faith in you. I just need you to put the same effort you put into your pictures, into actually letting me know how it tasted.
Yours truly,
your instagram follower, @mahene27
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