are you going to eat that?

One of the odd things that have become commonplace with ubiquitous photography and sharing digital photos is the picture of a recent meal. Doug does it. Chad does it. Even David Byrne does it (mmm... huaraches...).

It used to be that there were basically two places one saw photos of prepared dishes: restaurants where orders were placed at counters (and of those, I seem to remember most of them being Asian or Middle Eastern), and food or travel magazines. If you rifle through your old boxes or albums, how many bird's-eye-views of meals will you find?

This makes sense. Photos are cheap now, and eminently shareable. Eating is the most enjoyable communal thing we still do, and, for most people, conveying how good a meal was is pretty hard; not as hard as trying to convey the feeling of a musical performance, but close. But at least you can say it was great, take a picture, and hold it up to support your assertion. What's interesting is the after-the-fact nature of this new development - these pictures aren't made to entice, or even to translate. They exist, I believe for the better, only to share something passed past, in our ever-thickening gumbo of experience sharing and self-projection.