Why do people take photos of food?

It’s probably not polite of me to ask, but I’ve been genuinely wondering why so many people tweet pictures of their food. I found some links that discuss this too:

• Guardian article
• Psychology today article

Recently, with some reluctance, I stopped following two tweeters because of their daily food tweets. It bothers me a bit that I did, because I feel a bit intolerant – but I hope that I’m not – it was mostly because I didn’t want to see or hear about the food – some of it was a bit out there.

I’d been hopeful to learn about what they had to teach – I’d heard one of them give a great talk at a conference, and the other is the leader of a popular software business. But I couldn’t take any more news about their meals. Even if I don’t look at the pictures, they’re described in words. It’s not why I followed them.

Why are they showing their food to 10s or 100s of thousands of people?

A big part of my reason to stop following is probably because I don’t eat meat. I’ve only been vegetarian a few years, and didn’t think I’d ever mind what other people eat. But it turns out that it sometimes bothers me – depending on what’s going on in the photo, and I suppose where my mind is at. I’m far from normal with my attitude towards food.

On the other hand I follow Jamie Oliver. I expect him to post about recipes and dishes – I’ll choose to look if I’m interested. That’s why I followed him. That’s his thing, and it helps that his photos are amazing.

And I follow a bunch of vegetarian tweeters. I’m happy to see them post recipes for the new ideas.

I’ve been reading some books about social media and how it is used. First question they ask is ‘why are you on Twitter?’

It has made me consider why I’m on Twitter.

I think mostly to learn – it’s a brilliant place to follow people and learn from them – that’s what I get most out of it.

To relate – to friends, and colleagues – my family doesn’t tweet much

To share – but what do I share? My blogs, my opinions – which I write to organize my own thoughts a lot of the time, and for my family. Notes about things that I’m working on – my Orion blogs get the most hits, so that tells me I should talk about Orion subjects when I can. I share other tweets that have made me think, or learn.

And on twitter, and in life I tweet about things that I’m most interested in: links about how technology helps societies – especially in accidental or unexpected ways, links about web design or development, my runs ( which is for my benefit – because it’s easy to look back on the runs ), or human stories that I find interesting.

Food tweeters, are you on twitter to share information about your food? If so why? To inspire? To show gratitude? To impress? What are you hoping the tweets achieve? Maybe it doesn’t matter - maybe it’s where we’re at with social media – just sharing our lives – and I should let it go.

Maybe the things I cook in our home are not photo worthy, but I never feel like taking a photo – although I am happy with how things look when they’re served, and I try hard to make things look and taste good, especially when cooking for other people.

I don’t want to discourage anyone from sharing photos of their food – just wondering why they do, and noting that it’s not personal if I stop following because of it – just that it it maybe isn’t what I was hoping for in following you to begin with.

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Thoughts on remote working

Just like Yahoo did this week, our lab asked us a couple of years ago to make a choice – to either come into work every day, or choose to continue working from a home office if we already had one. It was a bit of a different message – they wanted remote workers to remain remote workers, but they wanted lab workers to come to work. Many lab workers were actually working from home. [ Note I'm not speaking for my employer here - just my views ]

They told us that it was unlikely that new home workers would be hired. They wanted to foster a better level of collaboration. I think they quoted some research that they’d carried out about collaboration in the lab.

Quite a lot of people had chosen to work from their homes rather than come into the lab. I remember one day, there were just a few of us on the floor in my old group. That could be for a variety of reasons. It felt weird being in work that day, and I questioned whether I wanted to work for that group any more. I just felt that it wasn’t a happy day, and something felt wrong. Although there was some initial unhappiness at the rule for lab workers coming into work, it did improve the atmosphere for the floor to be filled again.

A year later, I changed group, to a group where the expectation was that you come to work each day – and we all do. We work pretty closely. For what we’re working on it helps, it is sometimes harder to solve problems when you can’t just talk in person. Sometimes when I do work at home, I save some problems to work on next day at the lab.

A few years ago, when I worked for Nortel, they sent me to the Santa Clara lab a few times. That Nortel lab was really near to the Yahoo! building in Santa Clara. I discovered that commuting in that area is very time consuming. Gridlock. It is expensive to live in Santa Clara, so there is a lot of traffic to and from the more affordable outskirts. I can only imagine that Yahoo! employees some days choose to save time by working from home.

I stayed at a local hotel and could walk to the lab. That lab I would say had at least 50% of people working from home. The impression I had while visiting, was that it was hard to know who would be there from day to day – there was no communication. Many cubes were pretty untidy – stacked with old papers and equipment. Nortel was struggling, moral seemed low in this lab, and it wasn’t a good impression for a visitor, or a good feeling as an employee. In fact it was a year before Nortel folded.

I’ve worked and lived in three countries. Every job I’ve had since graduation has involved working with a remote team. In some cases a few remote teams.

My experience has been that you have to plan for that. You have to want to make that work.

I think it is much, much harder when one person is remote from the rest of their team. I’m not convinced that remote working can be as effective for the one remote person.

It would have to be really well managed.

If all, or most people in a team work remotely ( like Automattic, or 37 Signals teams seem to be ) then I think there might be a different culture – probably a brilliantly effective culture of working together remotely, and a happier experience.

But I think there are problems when the team is neither one thing or another.

So Yahoo’s message does seem old fashioned in one sense. But when I think back to the Nortel lab in Santa Clara, I could see it differently. I’m sure that remote working can work, but I wonder if you have to get your basic ducks in order first – somehow make the rest of your company healthy, if it isn’t completely there.

For effective remote employees at Yahoo! this rule is harsh.

Our IBM lab is only about 10 minutes drive away for me. In the summer I can cycle to work in less than half an hour, and I hope to run there and back once or twice in the spring. It was part of the appeal of accepting a job there. The floor I work on has been recently renovated, we have a nice gym, and yoga room. Once a week I play indoor soccer at lunchtime with players from local businesses at a neighboring indoor field.

Yet some days I like to work from home too. If the weather is bad, or I need to go to an appointment, or on days I don’t feel 100%. I have a really nice home office and big display.

I will say that I like the face to face meetings and drawing on the white walls that we have for collaboration. Our lab has at least given us a nice  environment to come into.

My dream though is to one day work in a home near the sea, and maybe as a remote worker, or independent worker.

From the outside, it has been fascinating for me to watch Yahoo! change under Marissa Mayer. She comes with incredible experience and success at making successful simple, usable web applications. Yahoo’s applications have already noticeably improved under her.

I don’t work for Yahoo … I’m only writing my observations on remote working, Santa Clara, Nortel … and as an outsider. It seems up to now that Marissa Mayer has been very positive. I hope she is a success, and can only hope that this plan for remote working is with good intention. We’ll see!

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What’s in our food?

New daily stories of horse DNA being found in processed food in the UK have got me thinking back. When I was at university in England, the country reacted almost in a panic to the ‘mad cow disease‘ they claimed came from contaminated beef. I still can’t donate blood here in Canada because of BSE ( and I have one of the rarer types to share – blood that is, not bse ). Last year in Canada we experienced outbreaks of e-coli at food processing plants and a scandal in one plant where meat was handled more cleanly for markets other than the Canadian one.

So – with the troubles of the past you might be forgiven for thinking that more care would be taken with food these days. I’m absolutely no expert on how food arrives on our plates, and for the last few years I’ve been a vegetarian, so this crisis doesn’t feel as personal to me as it might for others. That said, maybe once a month I might eat processed ground soy, trusting entirely that it says what it is on the package, and who’s to say they haven’t put something else in that?

Somehow, maybe because of my age, and maybe because I’m far from home, I think back to my childhood in Ireland. We had no huge supermarket like the ones we have now. There wasn’t a national brand – we basically had an independently owned store that was bigger than the other stores. The meat my family ate came from a butchers literally two minutes walk away. Next door to the butcher’s was a greengrocer, and next to that was a bakery. Across the road was a newspaper shop. Even when I walk into those stores when I visit home, some of the owners remember me. Miraculously all of those stores are still in operation, all of them with loyal customers, all of them competing against an enormous Tesco supermarket that they later transformed our town to accomodate.

Many of the little stores in our town have closed in recent years, because Tesco sell everything – with wider ranges, and better prices. Whilst I love some of the range Tesco offers, I feel conflicted because the idealist in me likes the idea of trustworthy independently run butchers, bakers … etc.

So maybe the contents of these burgers and pies that they’re selling tell another story. A story where we’re too busy and too uncaring to give a damn about what’s in our food. I know that things are never that simple. Maybe it costs more at the butcher, maybe it is much less convenient. And we shouldn’t have to whip out a dna kit just to check that what we’ve paid for is what we expected it to be.

I’m no expert – it seems to me though, that this intensely profit driven world that Tesco helped create, has resulted in many corners being cut. Some people probably don’t care. Some people are probably appalled. But – I think if the ‘mad cow crisis’ of 20 years ago had no influence on the ‘horse DNA’ crisis of 2013, then why won’t there be another crisis in 20 years time? [ Is this how a Zombie apocalypse happens!!? ]

My mom used to take me to the open air market on Saturday mornings. She rarely ever cooked processed food back then – maybe because there just wasn’t that much of it – but I think mostly because she genuinely didn’t trust it. We only drank Coke at Christmas when my uncle brought us a case ( he worked for Coca-Cola ). I remember wondering if we were the most backwards family around. Now I realize that my mom had her standards. She was a stay at home mom, and perhaps had more time to work on her meals – but we had a big family too, and our cuts of meat were by no means the prime ones, or the biggest ones. Our meals were well sized and well balanced though.

I think a lot of that upbringing has stuck with me – I even make my own pizza from scratch most of the time ( including dough ) unless I’m in a hurry. Yet I wonder how far away from the simple approach my mom had, the next generations will end up. We are what we eat … I’m sure a lot of issues can be helped the more we remember that.

I gave up eating meat because of some other things that I was dealing with. It was the end of spring and my small urban garden was growing chard, herbs, and small early radishes. I didn’t want it all to go to waste, and I felt better for using it up. It helped me handle other things, and vegetarianism became established in me. I make meat for others, but whatever happened stayed with me, and the thought of eating meat is not one I can dwell on. It isn’t ethical, or environmental. It’s entirely personal.

These stories of ‘horse dna’ ( they don’t even say what part of the horses ) do nothing to help my feelings. It just feels so cynical, sad and greedy. While my feelings about vegetarianism are personal, this story does feel to me uncaring of people and the environment, and gives me something more to like about only eating vegetables for now.

One of the most liberating things I feel about being vegetarian is that I’m a whole lot more willing to try different things now. I would say that variety, and compelling tastes matter more when you don’t eat meat. Some of the best meals I’ve had have been when I end up at a restaurant that has no vegetarian food on the menu, and they ask what I’d like. I always tell them to ‘surprise me’.

So far only good surprises with what I’ve been served

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