First camera,then fork

In 1825,the French philosopher and gourmand Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin wrote,Tell me what you eat,and I will tell you what you are. Today,people are showing the world what they eat by photographing every meal.

Keeping a photographic food diary is a growing phenomenon,with everything from truffle-stuffed suckling pig to humble bowls of Cheerios being captured and offered for public consumption. Indeed,the number of pictures tagged food on the photo-sharing website Flickr has increased tenfold to more than six million in the last two years,according to Tara Kirchner,the companys marketing director. One of the largest and most active Flickr groups,called I Ate This,includes more than 300,000 photos that have been contributed by more than 19,000 members.

Nora Sherman,28,the deputy director of the City University of New Yorks Building Performance Lab,finds that the pictures she takes of her food are her most popular posts on Facebook,Twitter and on her blog,Thought for Food,noraleah.com. People I have never met follow my blog and know me through the food I eat, Sherman said. She was even introduced to her boyfriend through someone she came to know through his comments on the food pictures on her blog,and who thought the two might be a match.

She said she takes pictures of at least half the meals she eats,but she has noticed lately that its becoming harder to suppress the urge to shoot. I get this must take picture feeling before I eat,and whats worse is that I hate bad pictures so I have to capture it in just the right light and at just the right angle. Her impulse to photograph her food and do so artistically has made her a more adventurous eater. Its driven me to seek out interesting,photogenic foods, she said. She is now more likely to eat foods she would have once avoided,like beef tendon,heart and tripe.

Photos are also a means of self-motivation for Garcia,who began photographing his food after he lost 80 pounds. Its definitely part of my neuroticism about trying to keep thin, he said. It keeps you accountable because you dont want to have to see that you ate an entire jar of peanut butter. He hopes to one day use the photographs to calculate how much money he spends to consume a calorie versus how much he spends in gym memberships and sports gear to burn a calorie.

Pamela Hollinger,36,an independent radio programmer and announcer in Stephenville,Texas,said her husband of eight years is resigned to her taking pictures of her food. When we were dating,it was like,What are you doing? she said. Now its a quirk hes come to accept. Her habit began in 1997 as a way to show her mother what she ate on vacations,but she now photographs almost everything she eats.

In the unconscious mind,food equals love because food is our deepest and earliest connection with our caretaker, said Kathryn Zerbe,a psychiatrist who specialises in eating disorders and food fixations at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland. So it makes sense that people would want to capture,collect,catalogue,brag about and show off their food.

Evidently aware of the trend,manufacturers like Nikon,Olympus,Sony and Fuji have within the last two years released cameras with special food or cuisine modes,costing around 200 to 600. These functions enable close-up shots with enhanced sharpness and saturation so the food colours and textures really pop, said Terry Sullivan,associate editor of digital imaging technologies at Consumer Reports.

Unlike a picture of a flower or friend,a picture of a meal recalls something smelled,touched,tasted and ultimately ingested. Carl Rosenberg,52,a website developer who divides his time among San Francisco,Austin in Texas,and Addis Ababa in Ethiopia,photographs his food along the way. You have more of a direct connection with your food,so it forms a more essential memory of an occasion, he said. I think photographing food is a more accurate way to document life.