Brown Food Isn’t Photogenic, but It’s Delicious
In our Instagrammable age, are we neglecting flavorful browned dishes?
On July 16, 2010, Kevin Systrom posted a few images taken at a taco stand in Baja California on a new photo-sharing app he had co-founded. The first was a picture of a scrawny-looking yellow puppy. The second showed part of a plate of food on a woven raffia mat. The mat was brown. The food, in what looks like a shallow brown terracotta bowl, was reddish-brown with pieces of something yellow and a smear of something white. It could well have been a plate of chilaquiles — tortilla pieces in a red chile sauce with either crema or an egg on top.
Systrom’s app evolved into something called Instagram, and that unidentified — and mostly brown — image is considered to have been Instagram’s first-ever food photo. It was not the last.
There are more than 210 million Instagram posts with the hashtag #foodporn. According to one survey, 69 percent of Americans between 18 to 34 have taken a photo or video of their food before eating it. Much has…
