Anyone who has ever been on Instagram knows that it’s mainly full of three things: cats, selfies and photographs of impossibly perfect looking meals. Said meals tend to not only look totally delicious, but also make you feel very badly about your own culinary skills and generally pretty worthless as a human being.
Fortunately, Tom Kennedy has the answer to your social media food blues. His food blog ‘Dimly Lit Meals For One’ has been dubbed ‘the anti-Instagram,’ and is full of edible realness. Instead of images of impeccable prepared cuisine, Kennedy shares photographs of more believable kitchen creations, ranging from the mildly icky looking to very disturbing.
“It all began when my friend showed me some pictures an old school mate of his had posted on Facebook. The pictures were so odd, so poorly framed and badly lit, that they began to haunt me.”
Kennedy said the photographs were so appauling that he became obsessed with them and felt compelled to share them with the rest of the web. He now seeks out equally dreadful food photography, and each is captioned with a bleak and harrowing tale: “It’s now as much to do with trying to find humour in the isolation and mundanity of everyday life as it is to do with bad food photographs.”
The world seems to love these rubbish meal photos, and Kennedy’s blog has been discussed on Brazilian television (of all places) and tweeted by Stephen Fry. He also has a book based on the blog coming out in October: “My book is a completely made up journey into a hellishly hyperreal world of microwave meals for one and lingering disappointment.”
In the mean time, enjoy these not-so-tasty looking samples.
This image is captioned: “Half a loaf of Mighty White and a whole bag of frozen peas. At their core they’re as frozen solid as your hopes and dreams, your cold cold heart.”
This one says: “Happy Birthday (we don’t love you as much as your brother)”.
“In this cruel and uncaring corporate cesspool of a world a friendly face can be hard to find…”
The tin said: “‘Average contents 8-12 meatballs’. Keith counted fifteen. He was overjoyed… and for a moment he forgot the bailiffs were in the other room.”
“Tragedy strikes when Gargamel finally gets his hands on The Smurfs.”
Oh dear…
