Consider the freakshake. Gaze upon this monstrosity – this jam jar piled with chocolate and ice cream and candyfloss and barf, this osmium-dense calorific nightmare, this weaponised children’s birthday party – and ask yourself if it would even exist without Instagram. Of course it wouldn’t.
Nobody in the history of the universe has ever enjoyed a freakshake. They’re too vast and messy and filling and moronic to claw legitimate pleasure from. However, they are quite good for taking pictures of. So are rainbow bagels, for that matter, and unicorn frappuccinos and any number of other lurid food microfads that appear to have been dreamed up from the depths of a malevolent branch of Claire’s Accessories. These things were all invented to be photographed, not consumed. Instagram has made our food stupid, and it has made us stupid, and we’d probably be better off if it had never been invented.
Michel Roux agrees. He’s so sick of people Instagramming the dishes served at his three Michelin-starred restaurant, the Waterside Inn in Bray that he’s put up a sign forbidding the practice altogether. “I’m really getting so upset about people taking pictures,” he told the Daily Mail. “I mean, what are they doing? Maybe once during the meal you want to take a little photo of something because it’s unusual. But what about the flavours? A picture on a phone cannot possibly capture the flavours.”
Quite right too. The Roux brothers are famed for their dedication to flavour and their avowed distrust of all presentation. That’s why the Waterside Inn’s pan roasted fillet of Angus beef with blue cheese, caramelised onion raviolis, red port and Sarawak pepper sauce (£68) famously comes mashed up in a big bucket, while the fillet of turbot cooked meunière with croutons, green vegetables and grape emulsion (£61) is served looking like someone has sicked it up into a Tupperware box.
This isn’t the case, obviously. Although I’ve never eaten there, the food served at the Waterside Inn uniformly seems to be the result of painstaking attention to detail; everything looks neat and perfect and agonisingly fussed-over, right down to the very precise garnish placement. How do I know this? I checked Instagram.
Because people love Instagramming the Waterside’s food. It’s overflowing with pictures of Roux’s dishes. They can’t get enough of it. It turns out that people who spend hundreds of pounds a head on a meal – very possibly the fanciest meal of their lives, one they might have saved up for months to buy as a gift for somebody they love – would quite like to have a lasting memory of the time they blew the equivalent of three big shops on a risotto skidmark and a billionth of an onion. I probably would, too. And, all things considered, I’d prefer to do it without a gouty bloke off the telly storming in to harangue me about it.
There is a chance that Roux’s displeasure is rooted in the quality of the food itself; after all, if you take a photograph of the food before you eat it, then it’s bound to be cold by the time you’re done. Except I just took a picture of my lunch – a microwaved pouch of soup, fact fans – and the whole process took less than two seconds. So either the food at the Waterside is made of a berserk new material that instantly loses its heat, or Roux still thinks photography involves huge exposure times and magnesium wire. Either way, as much as it pains me, I’m siding with the Instagrammers.
In fact, to save everyone any more strife about this delicate matter, I’ve decided to create a new unified theory of food photography. It goes as follows: the size of the occasion is directly proportionate to the acceptability of an Instagram snap. Going to a three Michelin-starred restaurant to celebrate your 50th wedding anniversary? Snap away. Just bit into a funny-looking Greggs pasty on the way home from work? Keep it holstered, soldier. And under no circumstances should you ever, ever Instagram a freakshake – not least if you have ordered it at a Harvester while your two-year-old is having a meltdown in the chair next to you. Trust me: this is personal experience talking.
