3. Reading. Task 2.1. Click... Bite!

The first part of the Reading Task 2

 

 

When the French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce photographed a table setting with a bowl, bottle, and bread in 1832, he probably never imagined that he had laid the foundation for what turned into a global phenomenon known as "Camera Eats First". According to Wikipedia, "Camera Eats First" is the behaviour and global phenomenon of people taking photos of their meals with digital or smartphone cameras before they eat, mostly followed by uploading the photos to social media. The term refers to how people "feed" their cameras first by taking photos of their food before feeding themselves.
Until that moment, when the inventor of heliography took the oldest known photograph of a meal, food had only been painted. The meal still life has represented a separate still life genre since the early 1600s. Nowadays, food has become the most photographed subject on social media, and this passion has been transformed into a trend known as "foodstagramming". In the past, shellfish, artichokes, and lemons were particularly frequently selected as subjects for still lifes. Today, the most photographed food worldwide is pizza, closely followed by sushi. A visit to a restaurant without observing at least one "foodstagrammer" has become increasingly rare, New York being the world capital of snapshot-loving foodies.
However, in the last 10 years, taking pictures of meals has become so rampant that some New York restaurants have decided to simply ban the practice on their premises. In the eyes of some restaurant operators and chefs, people constantly fiddling with cell phone cameras disrupt the ambience and often do injustice to the quality of the painstakingly prepared food, which is often lukewarm by the time the first bite is finally consumed. Another worrying thing is that a single poorly plated dish could go viral and unfairly harm the reputation of a restaurant.