The Unique Horrors of A.I. Food Slop

Why does it feel so unsettling when restaurants use generative A.I. to create their menus and promotional materials? What do we hope to communicate when we film and photograph food? In his 1957 collection, " Mythologies," Roland Barthes argued that food photography was often an exercise in whitewashing: the highly stylized pictures featured in glossy magazines, which he called "ornamental cookery," precluded a person "from touching on the real problems concerning food," such as the "primary nature of foodstuffs, the brutality of meat or the abruptness of sea-food." These photos were "meant for the eye alone, since sight is a genteel sense," Barthes wrote. Modern food television, meanwhile, engaged in a different kind of beautification.