Food has always been political, but lately it’s also becoming been suspiciously photogenic. Bread and poultry are carefully posed next to celebrities and major influencers. Fruits and vegetables are sculpturally arranged in artistic centrepieces. Groceries are meticulously filed into well-lit, clinically organised pantries and fridges. Sandwiched between clips of people starving in overseas wars, articles detailing a cost-of-living crisis, and breaking-news reporting on climate-exacerbated food shortages, today’s cultural imagination is primed to forget that food is a basic necessity and an essential human right — rather than the next big thing in fashion and lifestyle campaigns, a status symbol and wealth signifier.

The post-pandemic cultural consciousness is highly wellness-focused. During intense lockdowns, people made aesthetic content of fastidious fridge-scaping, ASMR pantry restocks, and grocery store hauls. Compounded by a growing health paranoia, this kind of content has just expanded to include trends in clean-eating and organics-only food content. Influencers like Nara Smith or Ballerina Farm have risen in popularity for their farm-to-table extremism, either growing and harvesting or locally sourcing organic ingredients and recreating typical suburban pantry cheap eats, like Cheeze-Its or gum. These influencers are willing to pay almost any amount to eat this clean, and heavily suggest you do, too. Following a viral video from fashion and beauty influencer Alix Earle, Erewhon taste-testing videos have been trending — among them, a series on people trying a $19USD strawberry from the upscale “food retailer”. The clips show the fruit securely encased inside a thick, clear plastic container, protected from the grimy hands of people who can’t afford to spend this obscene amount on one berry.

At the same time, major fashion brands and celebrities are using food as props in ad campaigns and promotional photoshoots. Press pictures of Rachel Antonoff’s self-titled clothing brand launch party feature towering sculptures of fresh cabbages and tomatoes as the decorative centrepieces to the collection. Rhode Beauty is another major brand, headed by Hailey Bieber, who advertised their new flavours of peptide lip tints by using food and beverages as props. Espresso, toast, raspberry jelly, and PB&J are not only the names of lip products but also the foods that were prepared especially to pose next to the colourful plastic tubes. The cherry on top of the curated fruit tower is Kristen Stewart’s photoshoot with Elle magazine, in which she is poised between rows of lush green lettuce and jars of organic peanut butter.

This you-are-what-you-eat moralisation of food and its instrumentalisation as a visual prop or fashion accessory feels archaically out of touch in the wake of national produce shortages. Staple groceries like eggs, lettuce, and potatoes are becoming increasingly inaccessible due to unseasonable farming conditions caused by climate-induced weather events; meanwhile, celebrities are spotted sporting bread-shaped handbags. The cost of these groceries is also rapidly growing, with staple cart prices rising by 15.2% nationally between 2021-2023 alone.

Historically, food has been a measure of access, with wealthier households importing exotic spices and fruits as organic decoration or gastronomic luxuries. Ancient Romans paid top coin for pepper from India, European medieval nobles flaunted granulated sweet treats, and early colonisers imported pineapples from the Caribbean — each a display of wealth and abundance, a symbol of luxury. However, disproportionate lack of access to these necessary resources has also historically erupted in violent uprisings — notably the 1775 Flour War in France that gave birth to Marie Antoinette’s apocryphal “let them eat cake”.

We can see these historic inequalities equally paralleled in our current consumptive zeitgeist, in the growing dichotomy between access and inaccessibility to food. Another phenomenon emerging is the retail gentrification of food stores and restaurant chains. Domestic grocery store chain Harris Farm Markets proudly flogs gourmet and artisanal food products. The chain has been abandoning its stores in lower-income areas (Penrith, Baulkham Hills, Parramatta) to open new shopfronts in more affluent neighbourhoods (Drummoyne, Redfern, Lane Cove, Marrickville).

Amid mounting pressures from a growing cost-of-living crisis, staple food shortages and resource scarcity, the upper echelons are flaunting their access to fresh produce in a medieval display of voracious excess. Food is being treated less as a basic necessity and more as a symbolic luxury and social currency. While people are keeping their pockets pinched at Aldi, they are scrolling through TikTok and seeing celebrities and influencers transform grocery shopping and mealtimes into a status signifier and wealth-signalling activity. History threatens to repeat itself as we eat up these artfully edible images while scraping the mould off our reduced-to-clear tasty cheese. The aestheticisation of food is not merely a reflection of individual excess or poor taste, but reveals a system that transforms a necessity for survival into social currency.

We stand at a precipice where hunger and spectacle are colliding in full view — where the performance of plenty becomes more valued than the provision of sustenance; where food functions more as an image than as nourishment. The return of Versailles-era excess in our digital age is not merely a coincidence: it is a harbinger.