One of my favorite restaurants in the area is Ittoku. Although I’ve written much about it, one thing I do not believe I’ve discussed in detail is the menu. It has one relatively unusual feature – photos of the food. Now, some other places I’ve been to have photo or two on the menu but Ittoku outdoes them all. The photo coverage is so comprehensive that a diner could confidently order most items by simply looking and pointing at the pictures. (1)
This raises the question of why more menus don’t bother with photos. Food is one of those certain areas where a photo can help us understand far more effectively than text. This is likely because we’ve looked at food far more than we’ve read about it (I’m looking at food right now). It explains why visual representations are more effective than the nutrition labels even if both share the same information. It explains why Instagram is littered with photos of lunch and dinner rather than narrative descriptions of the same (well, kind of explains why, I guess, as nothing really explains Instagram). It’s just how our interaction with food works – first we see it, then we eat it, and there’s no break in that sequence for reading.
What I Eat, a wonderful work from Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio, helped me fully understand this conclusion. The book is very much a half-and-half in the context of food photos and description with almost equal space given to the photo and its description. Each chapter describes one person’s life alongside a photo of all the food that person eats on a given day (it also lists the nutrition details about that food). The text is compelling and details much regarding what the meals suggest about the subject. But the power of this collection is undoubtedly the photography, each person alongside his or her passport to tomorrow, and the emotions invoked by these images tell so much more about the person than could be explained by even a hundred thousand words.
Footnotes / endnote
0. Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal by Joel Salatin
While reading What I Eat, I wrote myself a note to see if this book from Salatin had received solid enough reviews to justify reading. It did, so I recently checked it out. So far, I’ve enjoyed Salatin’s work about the challenge of running a family farm within the confines of the USA’s industrialized farming system.
1. Pictures on the menu???
I bet some might consider this a negative. I’ve been to a few, er, finer establishments and I suspect the appearance of photos on their menus would be met with the same enthusiasm that moviegoers reserve for being told the popcorn machine is out of order.
