Notes on cooking and looking

Life lessons from taking pictures of my food

My Instagram is as much an archive of cooking as it is an archive of light: over a thousand instances when I looked up in the kitchen and thought, This is beautiful.

I’ve come to know my kitchen so intimately since I started taking pictures of my food. It used to be an assemblage of walls in which I spent only the bare minimum of time. Now, my whole life revolves around it; I know its moods.

If I get up before 8 in the late summer or mid-winter, there’s a brief sliver in which the light is so harsh and crisp that the shadows on the table almost distract from any food. I can see the wisps of steam above my coffee cup so clearly then. When there’s wildfire smoke in the sky, the sun shimmers orange and the light is hazy. When outside is dull and dim, the kitchen looks dull too and my eye is drawn to nothing in particular.

I’ve learned that buildings are also an ecosystem, not only the walls inside them. My window used to face a worn brown wall. Now it’s white and this has changed the light just enough that I notice it. Where there used to be shadow is now only bright expanse, like a big bounce board that I didn’t have to buy.

This way of seeing my kitchen has transformed how I see food. I see sunlight stretch across roasted eggplants that are cooling on the workbench, the crumpled foil around them creating an effect like a shattered mirror. I see the spherical rows of sungolds sitting on the table and the way that, if I stand at the right angle, they form a scalloped pattern.

When I cut the tomatoes open, salt them, and let them sit, I see the way light catches in the water that comes to their surface, lending them a sheen like summer skin. I find so much more beauty in food now; I have to capture it all.

Time passes. I look at the photos on my phone and I remember how it felt to be in that kitchen taking that picture. I say that kitchen and not the kitchen because it, like me, lives and changes.

So often we talk about the act of taking pictures as pulling us out of moments — living our lives on the phone instead of in real life — but the act of taking pictures of my food does the opposite for me. It helps me live in the moment by making me pause and acknowledge what’s there instead of quickly moving along. Sometimes the moment is that I enjoyed a bite of food so much that I needed to stop and commit to some sort of permanence the beauty of its cross-section.

Three photos taken at different times on the same day

The light teaches me how fleeting these moments are. The kitchen looks so different over the course of one day. One morning looks so different from the next.

If I have any regrets from my 20s, it’s that I didn’t document enough. I especially didn’t document enough of the mundane: the sunsets outside the kitchen window that turned Somerville triple-deckers into silhouettes; the rare occasions I treated myself to farmers market arugula or fancy Whole Foods fake meat; the first time I tried to sear scallops — a birthday treat.

I can recall the contours of these years but I struggle to remember how the day-to-day felt. I never realized that one day I might feel wistful about even the dank little Allston kitchen, its dishwasher overtaken by mice. I wish I had seen the scenes that were there, even if they didn’t look pretty to me at the time. Now, my recollections of those days are filtered through the corrective lens of the time since. It’s all smoothed-out overarching narrative, no real-life texture.

Living in this kitchen has taught me that if I am always noticing, I might be able to forever preserve the way the sun pokes through the leaves of the rubber tree, splashing light onto the bowl of fruit on the table, then hopefully also the memory of the feeling — the little shimmer of wonder in the everyday. I won’t feel it the exact same way, but hopefully it’ll be close.