Everyone Wants to Look Like a Snack. Nobody Wants to Eat One.

Sofia Caracci

1 hour ago

4 min read

Vanilla has escaped the kitchen. It lingers in perfume aisles, where bottles promise notes of crème brûlée, pistachio gelato, and toasted marshmallow. It drifts through candles scented like brown butter and Italian espresso. Lip gloss tastes faintly of birthday cake. Hand cream smells like oat milk lattes. Beauty brands borrow dessert language to market serums, body washes, and hair products. Somewhere along the way, food stopped belonging exclusively to the table.

We are surrounded by food even when we are not eating it.

Perhaps nowhere is that more apparent than online. A scroll through your social media feed rarely lasts long before you encounter glossy tomatoes arranged on burrata, butter melting into sourdough, strawberries stacked in glass jars, or the quiet choreography of someone preparing an aesthetically perfect lunch. These images are rarely about hunger. They communicate a lifestyle: discipline or indulgence, sophistication or simplicity, abundance or restraint. Food has become one of the internet's most fluent ways to describe life.

That shift extends well beyond the screen. We photograph dinner before tasting it. We judge restaurants as much by their interiors as their menus. A croissant is no longer just breakfast; it is evidence of a weekend well spent. Farmers markets are destinations as much for photographs as produce, while matcha, butter boards, and towering sandwiches cycle through our feeds not simply because they are delicious, but because they signal participation in an ever-evolving visual culture. Increasingly, we curate food as much as we consume.

There is a particular intimacy to this kind of performance. We are not only showing other people what we eat; we are showing them what we want our lives to look like. A bowl of berries suggests health, but also leisure. A table crowded with friends suggests abundance, but also belonging. Even the imperfect loaf of sourdough suggests a life with enough time to make bread from scratch. The food matters, but so does the person we imagine ourselves becoming by surrounding ourselves with it.

Food has always carried meaning beyond nourishment. Religious rituals, family traditions, and regional cuisines have long expressed identity through what appears on the table. What feels different today is the scale and speed with which food has become aesthetic currency. A meal is no longer experienced solely by those sharing it; people anticipate it, document it, edit it, and circulate it far beyond the dining room.

At the very moment eating has become increasingly detached from necessity; measured in macros, optimized through wellness culture, and quieted by appetite suppressors, food has become more culturally visible than ever. We spend more time looking at food, smelling like food, and talking about food than at any other point in history.

It raises an interesting question: if food is becoming less central to appetite, why is it becoming more central to identity?

That relationship feels increasingly inverted.

Today, we encounter food constantly without intending to consume it. We watch strangers prepare elaborate dinners we'll never cook. We save recipes we'll never make. We seek out cafés as much for their interiors as their menus. We perfume ourselves with notes of vanilla, espresso, fig, and pistachio. Food has become ambient; a sensory backdrop coloring our homes, algorithms, and identities whether we're hungry or not.

This transformation arrives at a curious moment. Across medicine, wellness, and popular culture, appetite is increasingly treated as something to manage rather than simply experience. Calorie-tracking apps promise optimization. Protein has become a personality. Entire industries are built around suppressing cravings, extending fullness, or making eating more efficient. GLP-1 medications have accelerated a conversation already underway: what if we no longer accept hunger, but engineer it?

The irony is that a quieter appetite doesn't necessarily mean a quieter relationship with food. We may want less of it while thinking about it more: the perfume that smells like warm sugar, the photograph of peaches glowing in late-summer light, the restaurant whose tables seem to promise a certain kind of evening. Hunger can be diminished without diminishing our desire for what food represents: comfort, abundance, nostalgia, pleasure. We can want the feeling of a feast even when we don't want the feast itself.

Yet the less central appetite becomes, the more omnipresent food appears. Perhaps that's because food was never only about hunger.

Long before it became content, food was one of our oldest emotional languages. It marked celebration and grief, hospitality and love. We bake birthday cakes, bring casseroles to funerals, and pass family recipes from one generation to the next because meals have always carried meaning alongside nourishment. A loaf of bread cooling on the counter or the smell of onions softening in butter does more than promise a meal; it signals that someone is home, that there is time, that care is being taken.

As our relationship with eating shifts, those meanings don't disappear; they migrate. If appetite can be quieted, the longing for comfort, ritual, beauty, nostalgia, and pleasure remains. Increasingly, we satisfy that longing not by eating more food, but by surrounding ourselves with its imagery, scent, symbolism, and performance.

Maybe that's why food has escaped the kitchen in the first place. When we photograph it, perfume ourselves with it, turn it into décor, or watch strangers prepare it on our screens, we aren't necessarily trying to satisfy hunger. We are reaching for the things food has always promised: pleasure, comfort, abundance, memory, a sense of home. Our appetites may be changing. What we’re hungry for isn't.