Emma’s Food Pet Peeves: Supersize on Insta

I eat often, a lot and with great pleasure, and then I regularly notice things that stand out to me. Often these are positive things, but it also frequently happens that something annoys me immensely. Whether that’s justified or not, sometimes I just need to vent. Hence this feature: Emma’s Food Pet Peeves, this time: supersize on Instagram.

You’ve definitely seen them pass by on your Instagram or Facebook feed: videos of people eating a slice of pizza or a dumpling as big as their head. Could all these people please just act normal for a moment?

The fact that more than half of this food is probably thrown away as soon as a few bites have been taken for the camera is awful enough. On top of that, it can’t possibly taste good. Pizza is delicious because of its thin, crispy crust. That has by definition disappeared in the Instagram supersize version, in which the crust has to be able to carry the enormous amount of sauce and toppings. A dumpling is delicious because of its wafer-thin, soft wrapper. A supersize dumpling needs a thick layer of dough to hold all the minced meat together. Once you reach the inside, you’re simply eating a meatball. Yuck.

Everything in one

Take this girl, for example: she found a burrito as big as her arm. Lucky her. She takes a bite with a laugh, but if you pay close attention, you can see that the bite consists mainly of tortilla, a little dry rice and a corn kernel. Isn’t the whole point of a burrito that you take a bite and get all the flavors in it? Who wants to first gnaw their way through two layers of tortilla just to reach the inside? And once you get to that inside, there’s no tortilla left. I simply don’t understand it at all.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BkfvxtfB2ti/

A typical case of choosing looks over flavor, which in my view should be strictly forbidden. Are you very hungry? Then just eat two regular-sized pizzas or as many small dumplings as you can manage. But stop with this disgusting nonsense. Nobody wants to slurp soup from such a huge bucket, do they?

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bbz4O4agINo/