How to Eat in the 21st Century
Eating in the 20th century was pretty simple. You got food, put it in your mouth, chewed and swallowed. However, as time has passed, eating has gotten far more complicated and it’s no longer a 4-step process. It’s now an average of 25 steps.
1. Use Instagram and websites like Urban Spoon and Zomato to find out where everyone else from your area is eating.
2. Drool over pictures.
3. Study the menu in detail to make sure you like the descriptions and price as much as the pictures.
4. Share the menu with your friends.
5. Argue about which reviewers to trust.
6. Repeat steps 2-5 as many times as necessary until you can agree on a place with your friends.
7. Find a time that somehow does not clash with anyone’s hair appointments and sister’s dog’s best friend’s birthday.
8. Arrive at the restaurant and study the menu again.
9. Check Instagram to create a list of all the foods that someone at the table has to order.
10. Settle arguments between 2 people who want to order the same thing.
11. Stare at all the food other people are getting and wish you had gotten that.
12. Engage in a discussion about how 7 minutes is far too long to wait for food.
13. Pray that it’s your food every time the server comes close to you with a plate, even though you know it’s not what you ordered.
14. Get angry at the person who tries to take a bite of their food before you have taken a picture.
15. Take pictures of everyone’s food from every angle possible.
16. Give hungry, exasperated people the go ahead to eat.
17. Upload pictures to Instagram and/or Facebook with every hashtag you can think of.
18. Offer your food to everyone else at the table and try theirs.
19. Check your phone to see how many likes your picture got.
20. Be disappointed that you didn’t get more likes.
21. Talk about how good/bad the food is and what you would get next time.
22. Do boring stuff like chew and swallow.
23. Get back on Instagram and tell one of your dining companions how good the picture they uploaded looks.
24. Talk about other things while sneaking as many peeks as you can to see if you got more likes.
25. Discuss where to eat next because you saw the absolute best pictures of this cute little restaurant on social media.
Help! my food has more likes than me
#FirstWorldProblems
Haha! no. 22.
So true and so tragic! A recent visitor insisted that “If something isn’t on Instagram, it didn’t happen” – it’s a miracle we survived the weekend 😉
That means I’ve been starving for decades and I should eat more cake. Logic I can live with!
Ha, I wish I’d thought of looking at it like that!
Too true! Who could imagine that social media would make eating so complicated???!!!
Love it. So true, so true. I went to a new cafe in the country yesterday. I did not take photos; no-one else actually cares or wants to see other people’s photos of food. After the meal, we went outside and petted the donkey. Way more fun than parading what we ate on Instagram.
This reminds me of the restaurant, I think it was in New York, they put cameras in the restaurant to see what was going on because people were complaining. And the cameras proved that the service was slowed and food was cold because people would take forever to decide what to order because they were on their phones more than looking at the menu, then the food would get cold while pictures were being taken, and various other things. It was sad that the restaurant was being accused of bad service when it was the customers with other things to do besides eat. My pictures of food are never good because I rush to eat my food while it is hot. My hubby has great photos, but he does not mind cold food.
Seems a bit strange that there was only one restaurant in nyc where this problem existed, eh?