Fetish for beautiful food.

The human breed has successful spread the habit of romanticizing food. We love to beautify them, take them on cozy gatherings, and pose them for photos which have made up a big part of the Internet.  

Aesthetic food receives a lot of clout in the attention economy. Restaurants beautify our meals to make them more sharable on social media, which drives traffic. Hollywood movies, TV shows, and Youtube videos construct food and eating as a utopia of wholesomeness and self-care. At night, we happily spend a stupendous amount of time watching beautiful people making beautiful food in beautiful, upper-middle class settings, often hanging out at a romanticized, white, cottage farm. (ehem, cottagecore)

The traditional narrative around food, Pilgeram and Meeuf wrote, remains linked with "white, upper-middle class foodie culture." The more we fantasize about food, the more elitist it becomes. Even the sustainable food movement which promotes organic, local, and permaculture has become a way to demonstrate class distinction and good taste.

How we dream and talk about food prevents us to acknowledge the "ugliness" around it: the class struggles, the poverty, the unequal access and horrific assembly of food production that questions our moral and ecological sanity...

A simple daily action as seeking out for beautiful food, when done collectively and unconsciously, perpetuates a systematic injustice. But this does not just apply to food, it is everything that we romanticize.