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All those food photos you take? They may be hampering your enjoyment of eating

Take photos of your food at your own risk. A study has found that diners who take photos and scroll through food photos are likely to take less enjoyment in eating.
(Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)
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Photographing your food before you eat it, i.e., posting it to Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and everywhere else, may prevent you from fully enjoying your meal, a study published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology suggests.

Ha! I knew it!

Two studies are mentioned in the abstract, demonstrating that after repeatedly viewing or rating pictures of foods, people become satiated in regard to that food. And the more they do it, it’s as if they’ve actually consumed the food -- and, get this, they have a decreased enjoyment of the food.

The Atlantic’s Julie Beck concludes in her story on the studies that “you’ll probably enjoy your food more if you don’t take a picture of it, or scroll through images of burritos at work and then eat one when you get home.”

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While that makes sense, taking a quick snap of a dish isn’t the same as endlessly scrolling through food porn images of one kind of food, whether it’s pork belly or angel food cake. There isn’t the deep involvement.

In the act of taking a picture, fiddling with the camera controls and composition, by the time you actually pick up your fork, the dish itself has lost some of its impact.

I’m quite sure chefs would be thrilled if guests stopped photographing every dish before they eat it and just picked up their forks and -- here’s a radical idea -- just ate it.

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