“Happy snappy!”

Fine Food with

Charles Campion

Food writer and critic

• It’s time to go left field rather than safety-first
• “Fashion or for keeps?”
• “New year and new possibilities”
• “What is in a name?”
• “The art of shopping”

Once, the invitation to “come round and see our holiday snaps” was a surefire way to send a shiver down the spine

The slides would come back from Kodak in a little yellow box and then be projected onto a screen so that everyone could ooh and aah at snaps of that darling Majorcan donkey wearing a hat. In those bygone days, cameras exerted a nerdish fascination and there were more than enough dials to twiddle, settings to set and lenses to focus. Then came the mobile phone, which kicked the photography industry sharply below the belt. Now everyone has a camera with them at all times, and technological advances not only mean impressive picture quality but also the ability to circulate your photos widely at the touch of a button. Your phone will happily save you from out of focus shots, add a flash when it is needed, and banish those demonic red eyes from your group smile.

On the downside, the genie is well and truly out of the bottle. Everyone takes pictures of everything, millions and millions of images linger on memory sticks and in cameras. In the old days, when shooting on film, you had to pay for the shots you printed and that made snappers more cautious. It’s routine to hear chefs grumbling about their customers’ desire to photograph each course and then put those images on the internet. As anyone who has worked on a foodie television shows will tell you, while they are faffing around with the presentation and the lighting, the food goes cold – which is no bad thing for a sorbet but isn’t much fun when you’re tucking into a congealed stew. Some chefs are getting so irritated by customers snapping away as their food gets chilly that they put a ‘no photography’ note on the menu, where it is ignored by all and sundry because now we are in a world where the new media rules the airwaves.

At a recent trade show there was a forum centred on social media accounts and how businesses could use the new media to best advantage. One of the points made was how useful it was to have somewhere that disgruntled customers could air their grievances – always providing that there was a speedy and apologetic response from the company concerned. Digital media expert Karen Fewell (managing director of the company Digitally Blonde) has just completed a piece of research looking into the motivation of people who take snaps of every plateful they encounter. 40 stalwart eaters who were also snappers were invited to sit down to a seven course tasting menu. Each course sought to evoke a different emotion and the object of the research was to quantify that reaction by measuring the social media traffic generated. Lessons were learnt. People turn to social media more when they feel positive about something, and those interest levels are higher when both text and pictures are featured. So it looks like taking pictures of platefuls is here to stay. Surprisingly, the study also showed that the ‘end of the scale’ emotion – disgust – scored the second highest level of interest, particularly when this was turned into surprise, indicating that it may yet be possible to manipulate responses to the social media. 

Pictures are here to stay, but shockingly (if you are an ageing Luddite like me) there are signs that camera snaps are being displaced by the latest big thing – short videos. Jolly useful if you can pack everything you want to say into six seconds.