The Appetite for the Internet

CEBU, Philippines —There’s no question how the human race has since been adapting to the new, more connected world. The internet has changed the way people shop, how people fall in and out of love, the way people communicate and even how citizens engage with their government. This amazing new technology is indeed redefining people’s day-to-day lives.

The internet is even affecting the way people eat. There are now more recipe websites and plenty of #foodpicsbruh to influence where and when people eat. It can look like a good thing to some, and bad to the others.

Homemakers, in particular, swear to the necessary help that cooking posts on YouTube and social media bring them. But people’s relationship with the internet technology – with social media, specifically – has also changed the way they think about and consume food. It seems the people today “demand more stimulation” with their meals, as James Campbell, at www.switch.us, has observed.

Campbell cites that people’s mealtime has generally been in a constant state of interruption ever since the first television set made its way into the home. Whole families have since followed that TV set — bringing their plates out of the dining room and into the living room. The coffee table has become the dinner table, and talking with one’s mouth full is no longer bad manners.

The advent of social media and mobile internet access has all the more pushed the behavior change further, knocking the average family mealtime down to measly 20 minutes, from what used to be 30 minutes to an hour of meaningful time together. There are now multiple screens competing for everyone’s attention. It’s no different at restaurants, where they’re adding more TV screens, games and even live entertainment to keep peoples’ eyes up and engaged.

Social media has reduced the world into a global village. Foreign isn’t foreign anymore and exotic is, if not familiar, easily accessible. People can look into far-flung worlds and the food that people there eat – and they want to try it, acquire the taste for it, and so restaurants serving new international cuisines pop up everywhere.

The result: People’s palates tend to crave more innovation, newness and experimentation. They are no longer content with just hot dog; they want all types of hot dogs. They want a new twist to foods that have become familiar.

Next, adventurism creeps in. People who hated chili are now craving for the spice after seeing posts on social media of people going into a trance while chewing a mouthful of the hot-tasting pod. The new demand for once taboo ingredients causes the market prices of these to shoot up.

It takes a lot of willpower not to be swayed into the fray. Social media posts of must-try – although incomprehensible – dishes soon find their way into one’s mindset. The next thing, one is already getting busy in the kitchen or, most probably, trying to locate the nearest restaurant for an exotic dish. In fact, the latter scenario is already getting institutionalized; it has given rise to food tourism.

But the taste buds soon grow bored as foods become more and more familiar. And so people tend to continually search for the superlative, Campbell points out. The freshest seafood, the biggest lamb chops, the juiciest hamburger, the spiciest fried chicken! The craving is mostly influenced by online posts of opinions, ratings, lists and reviews.

All of this, according to Campbell, has transformed simple meal decisions into empirical tests. People ask themselves, “Did I make the right decision? Is this restaurant the restaurant for right now?” They fret and toil over simple decisions, and make seemingly trivial details absolutely monumental.

Another peculiar thing is that people love to take photos of food. And they like to look at photos of food, which social media has a lot of. Ironically, Campbell cites a recent study that showed that internet-addicted and highly active social media users actually eat smaller meals because they are unwilling to spare chunks of time to anything that isn’t in surfing the web, including eating.

It deserves some thought what Campbell says: “The share of mind the food has during the experience of actually eating it is in jeopardy because of the likes, stars, shares, re-tweets and page-views we use to measure how true-to-life we have been in our choices. A meal is [no longer] simply that, it is part of who we are to the rest of the world.”