taking food pictures less seriously

Exhibit A: last night's dinner.

There is only so much to a picture of bouchons au thon, you know what I mean, or like, chocolate cupcakes. A premium photograph of a chocolate cupcake makes the cupcake look appealing, resulting in a desire or a small unfettered anxiety about finding said dessert and inhaling it. But what does this cupcake taste like? Yes, I mean the one in your photograph, oh pristine food-photographing blogger. I have seen beautiful chocolate cupcakes before, and I've made them from your recipe, and they tasted like foam, or one time oatmeal. This should never happen and it proves the flaw.

I would rather interpret the quality and taste of food by how it's been written about, versus the aesthetic appeal of the photograph per se. There is something to be said for people who can do this, who can write engagingly about making/eating food, hence making that food seem irresistible. I believe this recipe really worked for them because they are able to recount the feelings they had as they were eating it and making it. Julia Child has done this. Molly Wizenberg has done this. I have respect.

My calculated declination in food photography over the next few weeks will be in effort to improve my own food writing, starting......now, featuring (above) shoddy photograph of what I ate for dinner last night (post haste), including blurry background glimpses of the disheveled laptop-centered life I lead, not failing to include the occasional cameo of a used Q-tip.

The 9G Burrito Cart

It's inexplicable to live at Bard College for a summer and never eat at the Route 9G/199 Burrito camper, which I just learned is officially called Bubby's. I have never tasted a burrito so soft and fat and perfectly crisped and variegated by a charcoal grill as the ones I've tasted here. And I've had a lot of burritos. Like, probably not more than people who have worked at burrito joints but close enough to know those burritos are sub par. They have nothing like the home-made, hand-mashed guacamole the burrito cart ladies mash up a few hours before the lunch hour begins, or the fluffy, basmati rice brought in straight from India, or the salsa verde they make at home and put out in little jars for you to spoon on your tortilla in the little nooks where it folds in above some melty local organic cheese. After being exposed to that kind of salt-of-the-earth enterprise those Other burritos you get from Some Mopey Employee at the chain joint just bring shame to the tortilla-wrapped genre of cuisine, in my opinion, and to the world as a whole.

Today I spent my penultimate $5 bill on what may be my last rice-and-beans-in-foil until I return to the Hudson Valley next summer to graduate with my first master's degree. If I had not waited until the last hours of the afternoon to eat lunch today, a digital memory of the Bubby's cart and all its representative attributes might be pictured here. As it is, you'll just have to take my blog for it.