Good-Bye Food Photography, Hello Food

With Hank on the road this year, I’m not doing any food photography (outside of one freelance assignment), and I really miss it.

I’m realizing just how much I looked forward to the regular puzzle of combining Hank’s cooking with my props collection, experience, and creativity to produce images that are both mouthwatering and inherently beautiful. And occasionally quirky.

A fraction of my props collection

Some friends have suggested filling the void by photographing what I cook, but that’s a hard no. I am a purpose-driven woman. Spending two to four hours on a photo shoot for an image that will do nothing more than appeal to people on Instagram for a microsecond is a non-starter. I actually do have other things to do. And I like to eat my food hot, not reheated when I’m done with a shoot.

But as I’ve written before, my creative joy will not be thwarted: Cooking has slipped right into the space that photography used to fill.

When I wrote a few weeks ago about my resumption of cooking, I was just starting to figure out that forgotten habits (and forgotten self-reliance) really aren’t that hard to reclaim.

I’m sure it helps that I’ve remained deeply immersed in the food world: watching Hank, occasionally traveling with him in high-flying food circles, and being a devoted fan of food media (Top Chef, Taco Chronicles, Andrew Zimmern). I’ve been learning plenty for the past 15 years. It’s not a huge leap from there to put that knowledge into practice.

As my kitchen journey has continued, though, I have increasingly been struck by the incredible joy it brings me, even when dishes don’t come out exactly as I’d hoped. The process itself is brilliant alchemy: planning, tools, ingredients, timing, execution. Failure is a chance to examine which of those five areas failed and try again. The entire cycle is joy, even when it may feel stressful in the moment.

A little like food photography.

It is also like food photography in more mundane ways. Prep and post take way more time than the shoot itself, and the time it takes to consume what I produce is really short.

I’ve thought a lot about how misleading that can be. Humans have a tendency to view the product of other people’s work and assume that the time it takes to consume their work is the same as the time it took them to produce it. “How hard could that have been?” Grrr.

This applies especially to restaurant food. It’s very easy to forget what you’re paying for when you go to a restaurant if you never do the same work at home. You’re not just paying for the obvious labor of someone else doing the cooking, serving and cleanup. You’re paying for their fully-stocked pantry, their grocery shopping, their testing and practice, their skill, their creativity, and then, finally, yes, the labor of cooking, bringing the dish to your table and doing all the dishes and kitchen cleanup.

I knew all of this before, but now I’m feeling it on a more granular level.

I’m proud to say that I haven’t relied on restaurants in Hank’s absence, as I once might have. But when I do go to restaurants now - to spend time with friends, not because I have nothing to eat - I don’t just savor the food. I savor the joy as well.

And then I think about my next adventure.