The countdown to summer is in full swing here in the Angleton household with one son already finished with classes and moved back home, mini-fridge and all, and the other heading into final exams and ticking off the the hours until the end of the semester.
The brothers have already been busy making plans to earn money, spend time with mutual friends, get fit, and learn to cook more. I’m not sure what exactly inspired this last goal, but they each mentioned it to me separately and I couldn’t be more delighted, not only because I am happy to turn over the task to them, but also because I would like them to be able to feed themselves when they get out into the real world.
Both of my boys do have some cooking skills. They just might lack a little confidence in the kitchen. My youngest took a culinary class at school and has a good base of knowledge. His older brother spent the school year living in a frat house as the low freshman on the totem pole who got stuck with cooking for the house when an ice storm cancelled classes and prevented their cook from reaching them. And then there are a few favorite recipes they each have learned over the years.
So they aren’t starting entirely from scratch, but they also don’t necessarily want to learn to prepare the typical meals that have graced our dinner table since they were small. My sons are, after all, part of the Instagram Era, and if it’s not worthy of a picture, it probably isn’t worth making in the first place. #foodstagram
Sharing a picture of one’s food isn’t unique to the age of social media of course. For centuries food has been depicted in works of art, and about eight years ago, it even inspired a study from Cornell University that looked at whether food depictions in art can tell us anything about what people ate during the corresponding eras.
The short answer to this question is no. We know this for four reasons:
- Historians do have a pretty good idea, from many other sources, of the kinds of foods people frequently ate in the time periods and regions studied, and it doesn’t really match up.
- By far the most common meat gracing tables in paintings is fish and shellfish, and the percentage increases in nations with relatively little coastline. #crablife #GettinMyLobsterOn
- Artist’s runaway favorite fruit over the five hundred year period looked at is lemons, which for much of the times studied, was a pretty uppity, expensive fruit that wouldn’t have been widely available to just anyone. #making lemonade
- No one painted pictures of plain ol’ meatloaf. #JustLikeMamaUsedToMake
It turns out that the artists of the previous five centuries weren’t all that different than the social media #foodies of today. Paintings depicting family meals from the Era of European Exploration through the Industrial and Post-Industrial years don’t typically showcase the everyday fare of most families.
Instead, paintings feature celebration meals, status dishes, symbolic foods, and fancy choices that might best highlight the skill of the artist, like textured lemon skins and bug-eyed lobsters. They were the kinds of food that could be labeled with #foodie #yummy #foodporn #eatwell #dinnerinspiration or #foodgasm, and that might inspire numerous likes and shares.
Such paintings are definitely not representations of the meatloaf recipe your mama’s been making since since you were old enough to stuff crumbled bits of it into your mouth with a slobbery toddler fist.
Whether they will be taking photos or not, my sons are not looking to make mama’s meatloaf. They’d prefer less familiar ingredients and Instagram-worthy results. This doesn’t really bother me. I’m just glad they’re excited about cooking and I get to spend a summer learning new recipes along with them. But sometimes we’ll probably still eat plain ol’ meatloaf.