I was sitting at Lucali BYGB in Telok Ayer, watching a couple at the next table photograph their burrata pizza from four different angles before either of them took a bite. The pizza was still steaming when they started. By the time the phones were down, the cheese had stopped pulling the way it does when it is hot. They ate it anyway, smiling, and I think they enjoyed it. But I kept thinking about that small window they had missed.

I get asked all the time which trends are worth chasing. People want to know if the next viral dish lives up to the queue. And lately I find myself avoiding one particular kind of question. I do not want to review the food that exists mainly to be seen.

There is more to eating than taste. The way we treat a meal says something about what we actually want from it. Sometimes the dish is not really the point. The point is the proof. We want evidence that we were there, that we kept up, that we belong to whatever everyone else is talking about this month. The food becomes a prop in a story we are telling about ourselves.

I notice it in myself too. I have ordered things I did not want because they looked good on a table. I have let a coffee go lukewarm at Apartment Coffee in Selegie because the light was hitting the cup just right and I wanted the photo first. The drink was fine. The moment was gone. And I sat there afterward feeling like I had borrowed the experience instead of living it.

That is the part I keep coming back to. When we eat for the image, we put a small distance between ourselves and the meal. We are watching instead of tasting. We are curating instead of being present. The food arrives, and our first instinct is to document it rather than meet it. I understand why. I do it. But I have started to feel the cost of it.

So I refuse to review the trend itself. Not because there is anything wrong with a beautiful plate, but because I do not want to measure food by how well it performs for a screen. I would rather ask whether it was good to eat. Whether it was hot when it should have been hot. Whether I remember how it tasted, or only how it looked.

Most of my favorite meals were not photogenic. They were eaten quickly, alone, with no audience and no second thought. I cannot show you those. I can only tell you they were the ones that stayed with me.

These days I try to take one bite before I reach for my phone. Just one. It is a small thing, and it does not always work. But that first bite belongs to me, and not to anyone scrolling later. It reminds me why I started caring about food in the first place. It was never about being seen eating it. It was about the eating.