Does documenting what we eat reduce our capacity to enjoy it?

• John Vench
• We may eat with our eyes first, but all too many of us are seeing things first through the lens.

I’ve accepted the fact that I’m not always a fun dining companion because, on occasion, I’ll stop whomever I’m dining alongside and ask if I could take a picture of their food. Even worse, I’ll ask them to wait to take a bite while I snap a few pictures.

And while I’m polite, I recognize that it’s irritating. Great dishes are like well-made movies – you want to immerse yourself in them for a brief few moments and forget everything else. Someone directly intruding in that moment is the closest that any of us will likely come to knowing what it’s like to be with paparazzi. The Guardian wonders about our obsession with documenting what we eat in pictures in order to blast it out to the world via our social-media serving of choice. Is our desire to photograph our plates ruining the simple joy of eating out at a restaurant?