Having just read this feature on the Guardian’s Word of Mouth Food Blog, it has set me thinking about why I take photos of my food.  I have been photographing my food since pretty much the first day I had my very first digital camera, and through the joys of technology, I can show you one of the pictures from that very era which I have found from the deep, dark archive of my old LiveJournal!  The date is July 14th 2005 and the location is the now defunct Marmalade on Beech Road in Chorlton and the dish was a surprise starter of radish & green bean salad with seared scallops (the surprise being that there weren’t actually any scallops!).

I can reliably report that within three days of this modest brasserie meal, Peter and I were dining in some style at El Bulli (and yes, I photographed every single of the 40 courses and not one person batted an eyelid), and not long after that, we were eating at The Fat Duck (17 courses) and again, I photographed everything.  The Guardian article mentioned above says that Heston has banned cameras at The Fat Duck which I think is a great shame.  Would I have remembered these once in a lifetime meals if I hadn’t taken any pictures?  We have the menus as souvenirs but that’s not quite the same thing really.

So why do I photograph my food?  I love to eat and I love to cook but I don’t like to forget.  Peter is always amused that I can chart my way around a city or country by the restaurants I’ve been to and what I’ve eaten in them.  Even with the best will (and memory) in the world, that’s not so easy to do so over a long period of time without either taking notes, recording a commentary or taking a quick photo and I know which I would find the least obtrusive, especially in the current days of excellent camera phones which are most inconspicuous and even (sometimes) cope with the terrible (or ‘atmospheric’, as they like to call it) lighting in most eateries.  I love to photograph food that I’ve made, I do this as I am interested in food photography, because I am building up a substantial archive of food photos (which have come in very handy for a recent design job where I was able to use all my own pictures and not resort to library snaps), I do it because I like my food, I think it’s delicious and I like to have an aide-mémoire of what I’ve made, call it vanity if you wish – I’m guilty but very happy to keep photographing my food.  The only place where I have been aware that photography was forbidden was in a tiny little sashimi restaurant at Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo where our friend Dave took us for a sashimi breakfast at 7am when we had finished exploring the greatest seafood market in the world.   We queued for ages outside the little shoebox sized restaurant for the best sashimi I have ever eaten, I do remember it though, despite the lack of photographic evidence, but the experience would have been enhanced for me if I could look back on it and remember in full colour.  If our visit to Japan had been in the days of the iPhone 4s with it’s excellent camera I would no doubt have been cheeky and risked a quick snap, but all I had was my ‘proper’ camera which would have been somewhat obvious!

I’ve never taken to the food photo sharing apps though, not sure why as they are aimed right at me.  I share my pictures on Instagram, Flickr, Facebook and here in my blog, sometimes I write detailed reviews about the experience, sometimes it’s just the pictues with a description, but it all helps me to remember what I’ve had which in turn jogs my memory as to why I was there, who I was with, why we were there – was it a special occasion or just a ‘normal’ nosh? and that can’t be a bad thing surely?