It surprises me sometimes how I can still sit down to a perfectly good meal and never think about taking a photograph. Then, on another evening, a plate arrives and my phone is already in my hand before I have properly looked at it.
I used to think it was simply about presentation. A beautifully arranged cup of acai superfoods, a bowl of ramen with steam rising from it, something colourful enough to catch the eye. But after noticing my own habits, I realised it is not always the prettiest food that gets photographed.
Sometimes, we photograph the meal because of what the moment feels like.
I remember sitting with friends at a restaurant after a particularly long week. The food was good, but nothing about it seemed especially remarkable. We were talking, laughing, passing dishes around, and someone suddenly took a photo of the table. It was not really a picture of the food. It was a picture of us being there.
Other times, I have eaten alone and photographed something simply because I knew I would want to remember it later.
There are also meals I never photograph at all. A familiar plate of rice from a neighbourhood stall. A quick lunch between errands. The same breakfast I have ordered many times. Perhaps some foods feel too ordinary to document because we assume we will see them again.
That assumption interests me.
A photograph turns an experience into something we can return to. It freezes the colours, the setting, even the people sitting across from us. Yet some of our strongest food memories have no photograph attached to them.
I can still remember certain meals by the smell of the room, the sound of conversation, or the person who was sitting beside me.
Maybe that is why I no longer think of photographing food as simply showing what we ate. Sometimes we are really trying to hold on to where we were, who we were with, and how that particular evening felt.
And when I look back at the places I have eaten, I find that the stories are often more interesting than the photographs themselves. There are always more such moments waiting to be noticed across Town Eats SG for you to enjoy.
