It’s also social media. You can “like” and “comment” on friends’ “ratings.” You maintain a “streak” by eating out, and ranking a new restaurant, at least once a week. You can also bookmark restaurants your friends visit and see how many, and which, friends have bookmarked a particular restaurant. As of writing this, Beli has a relatively small user base, so you won’t see more than, say, 100 followers on most accounts. But new members join every day.

I heard about the app first in my sophomore year of college, around two to three years ago. Friends had been raving about a new food app, but from the little I had heard of it, I resisted it. Something felt vaguely wrong about documenting the process of eating out on an app—of placing every restaurant I had ever visited onto a list, from the best-ever, 10-point experiences, down to the very worst, sub-1 ones.

I can imagine the reasons why someone might “take food seriously” by “grading” restaurants on their food quality, ambience, service, and so forth—from gastronomic considerations, to those apropos the food economy, even those grander questions around culture and society. There are indisputably enlightening and financially productive effects behind this work.

But I didn’t think I was the one to do it. To get this app.

I wasn’t bothered. I didn’t think I had the palette to do this kind of work; I couldn’t name every vegetable I ate, nor could I differentiate between different roasts of coffee, despite the amounts I consumed. Above all, it seemed counter to the fun I experienced when eating. The pure joy of wolfing down a bowl of rice felt at odds with the sophisticated, refined process of thinking about food—to associate experience with concepts like texture or acidity. Why would I go out of my way to slow down, and detract from, my experience of eating?

It’s not that I don’t “like” eating. Like anyone else, I live on it. Beyond that, I consider myself generally adventurous and generally make an effort to eat foods beyond those I’m used to. I associate some of my happiest memories as a child with eating, from a piping-hot bowl of instant noodles in the Lei Tung neighborhood to freshly steamed seafood at the Ap Lei Chau cooked food market. I have joined communities and cultures that value eating practices—such as the dinner my family has together every Sunday, without fail. But going so far as to call myself a “foodie”? That felt inane.

Until Beli. I’m a sheep in most things social media, and when more and more friends started using it, then talking about it, I downloaded the app. At first, I was a ghost user, adding only the restaurants I had been to in New York City—the joints around my school in Morningside Heights, and a few other nicer restaurants I had tried on special occasions.

Then, over last winter break, while I was in Hong Kong, someone mentioned in passing that I hadn’t placed any Hong Kong restaurants—of which I knew many more—on Beli. She was coming to Hong Kong and wanted my recommendations. For a few more days, I resisted adding the Hong Kong restaurants I knew as a child onto the app. Then, one afternoon, I got bored, some part of me caved, and my fingers flew furiously across my screen in pursuit of ranking all of the restaurants I remembered having ever gone to.

I was addicted. The satisfying ease with which the act of documenting these restaurants must have triggered some reward mechanism in my brain, obediently releasing bursts of dopamine satisfaction every time I posted a new rating. By mid-January, a month after I had begun using the app seriously, I found myself itching to rate more restaurants, either by scouring my past for places I had tried but hadn’t yet ranked or by visiting new ones.

This was my senior spring—my final semester in college and my last in New York City. This new drive to explore food had aligned, by coincidence, with a rare period of having the time to do so.

I disliked most of my time in New York, suffering and complaining through the emotional turbulence that marked those times. I thought I would leave the city with just my dislike of the place. Food was the antidote I didn’t expect. The hobby not only erased the vague malaise that colored my college experience, but also compelled me to make my long-overdue acquaintance with the city.

I invited someone from Hong Kong to visit me in New York City last Thanksgiving. At the end of the week he stayed with me, I asked him what his impressions of the city were. He said that the city, despite its numerous flaws, felt very, very alive. He was right. He had identified in a week what I had failed to do in three years: New York City, though overwhelming, is also indisputably full of life. In the few months I had left, I made it my goal to see as much of it as I could.

Every second I wasn’t busy with the little work I had left, I spent on my Beli-ventures across New York City. Part of it is because I’m an obsessive person: I don’t commit to many things, but when I do, I go all in. Even more so, though, I felt a long-dormant curiosity awaken in me—that, and a new hunger for adventure. In semi-spontaneous bursts, Beli’s recommendation feature led me across the city, oriented me in unfamiliar neighborhoods. The Beli gods brought me to the best coffee, the cheapest lunch, the perfect pastry. Stores and dishes drove my routine; food became a map, a way of orientation. I was searching for food, which really meant: I was searching for experience. It felt irresponsible of me to have confined myself to my depressive box in the Upper West Side for so long, to have wasted this cherished opportunity to explore the city. In my time left, I would see it all.

I graduated in May. Of course, I didn’t “see it all.” But I did go much farther than I would have without the app. Almost every neighborhood in Manhattan. More prominent neighborhoods across Brooklyn and Queens. Fewer places in The Bronx and Staten Island, though several, still. Dozens, hundreds of restaurants, coffee shops, and bars.

And I rose the Beli “rankings.” The app runs several leaderboards, including national and college leaderboards, which rank users based on the number of places visited. I began the semester somewhere in the 40,000s and ended ranked somewhere in the top 500.

It’s been on my mind. Clearly. I enjoy it: It’s a fun hobby, and one that has excited me for quite some time. But I have also been thinking about it from different angles—of what the app reveals about food, of how it changes the culture around eating. Of what it means to be a user on a platform like this, of the less palatable implications of this technology. Food and restaurant culture is, if more intentionally considered, connected to all domains of life, from politics, society, and identity—and bears, for these reasons and more, some deeper reckoning. This impulse to say something—this itch within me that some things about using Beli had not yet been said, didn’t feel quite right—simmered in me, until finally, I started writing about it.

So, here is an initial attempt at compiling my thoughts.

I do want to issue a disclaimer: This is not intended to criticize Beli or any person on it. Conversely, these thoughts were compiled as a labor of thought and love—for the app and for the perspectives it’s instilled in me.

Furthermore, this is an incomplete and potentially growing body of thought, and is subject to change. Nothing here is to be construed as permanent, absolute, or even wholly correct. I’m open to the real possibility that my opinions are wrong.

If this compels a response in you, of whatever sort, I welcome you to reach out, over email.

The labor of documentation

There’s many ways to approach a space like Beli. What struck me most about it, as I mentioned earlier, was the ability of the app to generate an archive of experience.

As someone who enjoys writing, I’m necessarily invested in the field of archival work. I can speak to the joys and pains of archiving. I’ve kept numerous notebooks, diaries, and records of various events in my life, as I have studied theories of the archive—their value, their historical resonance, their incompleteness. How they are, by virtue of all the holes that underpin their creation, necessarily fragmentary.

And that’s how I begin to think of Beli: An archive-cum-social media platform of food experiences, documenting in detail every food experience one has had, sorted by restaurant name.

Many theorists would agree that the archive—like anything that purports to wholeness—is an incomplete, even unfaithful repository. Is it possible for anything to capture the entirety of anything? What do we mean by entirety? I think much about my identity, substance, and wholeness, and perhaps it’s because of this troubled inclination toward clarity that these kinds of questions occur to me when I face the pretense of anything complete. As I, like anyone, could write millions of words and still not record even a fraction of the entirety of my life, so do I believe that any record of a person is necessarily incomplete. There’s always more that can always be said—and just as much that exists that cannot be put into words.

For this reason, Beli, like any other social media, distracts me in its incompleteness. Apps like Instagram, Twitter, and now Beli, emerge with the function of letting a user document as much of their life on them—while leaving its users with the decision as to how much of themselves they put on them. Which is a tough decision, in my opinion, for many reasons. The question of spectatorship, how one presents oneself to a public. The question of planar existence—does the time and energy spent devoting oneself to a non-physical, digital platform take away from one's physical existence?

And the question of eventhood.

Social media highlights certain experiences. But having a platform to elevate certain experiences effectually elevates certain experiences over others—drawing emphasis to special experiences, while removing it from the ordinary things that everyone does, like cook at home or go to bed. (At least to at least some degree.) The notion of a platform alters what we consider an event. The medium could make certain experiences events when they wouldn’t have been, as it could just as well reduce a conventional event to mere experience—by virtue of not having recorded it. People say, “pics or it didn’t happen.” Which raises the existential conundrum: If an experience isn’t recognized as an event, as marked by its public documentation, then does it retain its original value?

The very act places an imagined other above ourselves—an idea I’ll return to later—reorienting our actions away from our “natural” position. This impulse to satisfy otherness is why we have originated, say, restorative practices against this loss, like mindfulness practices and adherence to the idea of “self-worth,” to return us to ourselves.

Another site of loss can be said to be the transformation the documentary act enacts on our biochemical and psychological relationship to food. For instance, how does documentation distort our relationship to food by delaying, disordering, and neurologically reprogramming our eating patterns?

Part of it is about future regard. The act of documentation itself evidences a concern with some impression to-come—someone’s reputation or image in a time to follow. But another has to do with the very moment of consumption—how the present, ongoing act of eating the food has been eclipsed by this futuristic drive. Commercial food photography is one thing, but when everyday consumers, like you and me, begin to take photos of their meals, they take on a dual identity of eater and photographer. We all have a friend that’s lamented the act, seen people roll their eyes when phone-eat-first culture stalls the rest of the table from beginning the meal. What this annoyance might indicate is an instinctive aversion to changes in nature of engagement with food—from the “original” sensory, communal, and even intimate experience of eating to the consumerist impulse of production, reproduction, and redistribution.

A friend suggested that food photography, in this regard, digitalizes a traditional, communal ritual, commemorating the ordinary moment through technological meals. There’s a certain sequential nature that arises with the addition of phone-eats-first. In his words: “Perhaps, digitalizing the beginning of the ritual (i.e. we only ever take photos of food that is left untouched) also signals to commence the rest of the ritual.” Indeed, it’s a fairly standard and inflexible ritual.

An interesting question to then ask is: Why do we not take pictures of food after it’s been eaten? It sounds like a rather silly question, but if we conceive of photography not as a display of food, but experience, then it becomes another story. A photo of a full and empty plate, in this context, arguably convey the same meaning.

Privilege

It goes without saying, of course, that engaging in these complex eating practices are deeply privileged acts, in a variety of ways. Having the luxury of eating not to survive, but for more superficial, time-insensitive purposes—and to have the freedom to grade them how one pleases—is limited to those who have the resources to do so.

Privilege exists in many different forms. In my view, Beli occupies a relatively extreme position on this spectrum. With Beli in particular, it’s not mere delay and capture of phone-eats-first, but the designation of worth through quantification—to hold the position, financially and mentally, of dictating the worth of a restaurant—that is a deeply privileged position to hold. It’s one I think every Beli user should consider.

There isn’t a price tag on getting the app. But, of course, there is a price tag to using it. By virtue of ranking an establishment, you must have first gone there. And you must have the bandwidth—bandwidth, I’ll call it—necessary to rank the restaurant: financial bandwidth, yes, but myriad other forms too. What kinds of people have the time to sit around ranking restaurants? What kinds of societies and communities must they come from? What kind of an attitude and self-worth must they have?

Interestingly, part of the craze comes from younger generations. In an interview with the newspaper at NYU, co-founder Judy Thelen stated: “We built Beli because we’re obsessed with food…What we quickly realized is that [in] Gen Z, there was a massive appetite for something like this, which was super cool.” To capitalize on this, it’s no surprise that Beli has a college leaderboard, which ranks college students by number of places they’ve visited.

Columbia and NYU host the most active Beli members who are also students, which isn’t surprising to me, given the several factors that (I assume) concentrate, to some degree, in the average Beli user: having enough money to eat out at a reasonable clip; having enough time and energy to try new places; and being based in a place like New York City, which, I’ve seen firsthand, has an incredibly vigorous eating culture. It’s a narrow and homogeneous segment of consumers and diners—not nearly representative of, say, every diner across the city’s five boroughs, let alone other cities and towns in the state, country, or world.

On their website, Judy and the other co-founder, Eliot Frost, write: “We have spent the last year working tirelessly to build an app that will substantially improve the lives of people like us.” The impulse to close-read “people like us” aside, it’s further worth pointing out that they proclaim themselves “two individuals who love food.” They “built [their] relationship around restaurants in the city … constantly looking for the very best places.” One wonders: What kinds of places? And by what means does one develop an interest, let alone a passion, in food?

Needless to say, people with higher spending power are more likely to use Beli. People with more money to spend are more likely to use Beli. Which not only exists in and of itself as a point to make, but also generates ripples across the rest of the technological and social ecosystem Beli creates. For one, we might consider how the kinds of places that get amplified on Beli—“the very best places”—cater to this group.

As of writing this (July 2024), here are the top 10 restaurants from the Beli Top 50.

4 Charles Prime Rib. (Average spend per person, $150.)
ATOMIX. (The cheapest dining option, July’s Bar Tasting Menu, is $295 per person + add-ons.)
The Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare. (Tasting menu costs $345 plus tax, service, and wine.)
Sushi Ishikawa. (Omakase costs $175. Also, reservations for a new UES location are available beginning October.)
Jua. (Tasting menu costs $140.)
Atera. (Tasting menu costs $298.)
Tatiana by Kwame Onwuachi. (Average spend per person, $150-$200.)
Sushi Noz. (Omakase costs $550.)
Torrisi. (Probably the most affordable restaurant on this list. You can read the menu here.)
Jungsik. (Main Dining Room experience costs $295.)

And while the list does taper off from $$$$ territory into $$$ as the rankings descend, the list’s agenda becomes only more clear. One of the characteristics of good food, apparently, is being expensive: fine dining, tasting menus, omakase. We come to question whether good food really is “good” in everyday terms, or if its excellence on a leaderboard has arisen through other less-than-objective device. Maybe it’s “good” food because the people who have the time, resources, and platform have deemed it such on a communal platform like Beli’s.

But there’s more to be said on affordability’s influence on restaurant culture. Once in a while, you’ll see a restaurant in the $$ or $ domain that climbs the Beli rankings, or otherwise goes viral, which serves as an interesting counterpoint to the wealth culture enacted by this platform—Beli’s “Top 50 NYC Restaurants 2023” listed Colonia Verde ($$) at #49, L’industrie Pizzeria ($) at #30—and there are several reasons for this I’d venture. Though by no means comprehensive, here are three possible reasons.

It’s not actually that cheap

At a broad level, the cost to eat out is much higher in the US than other countries. If we compare rates of eating out to another large economy, like China, for instance, it becomes clear that it is far less common to eat out in the US than elsewhere.

A January 2022 survey analyzed how frequently U.S. consumers eat out at a restaurant. Overall, 29 percent of respondents claimed to eat out once a week or more. In contrast, 11 percent said they never eat out at restaurants.

According to a survey by Rakuten Insight conducted in December 2022, almost half of all respondents in China stated that they dined out several times a week. Meanwhile, only one percent of respondents stated that they never bought food outside of their homes.

It’s likely due to high costs to eating out and broad social or cultural differences in spending habits.

In the context of most expensive places within the US, it shouldn’t surprise that New York City, in particular, is notoriously expensive.

In an article that aggregates data from Numbeo surveys, it was revealed that New York State had the highest cost of eating out, per meal, at $25, as well as the highest highest cost difference between eating out and eating in, at $19.4.

And that’s just NY state. The high state numbers are likely skewed by metropolitan centers like New York City, where prices are notoriously high. According to Eater NY, several post-pandemic reasons for these expensive, inflating prices include higher minimum wage rates and labor shortages; increases in credit card fees, as restaurants increasingly go tech-forward; and congestion pricing into most parts of Manhattan.

Social media

Once in a while, a restaurant might experience a surge in popularity due to a streak in online attention—often driven by influencers and social media trends. It’s possible that one viral video can catapult an obscure eatery into the limelight almost overnight.

Baodega in New York City, which gives a prime example of this trend. The restaurant gained widespread fame after TikToker @olive.yie created a video to promote her dad's business, which struggled to maintain its business following the pandemic. The video garnered 2.3 million likes and 133.1k saves, resulting in a marked increase in foot traffic and interest from food enthusiasts, locally and beyond. I myself recently visited with a friend to try their pan-fried buns (生煎包)—and can attest to how online influence has shaped my personal relationship to dining out.

Popular street food

Sometimes (though not always), street food that goes viral—or caters its image to go viral—leverages a type of invisible capital linked to cultural aesthetics. Even if a genuine, bona fide business starts off as street food, unpredicted fame can direct a business to reposition itself through “rebranding” itself—what some would call an “exoticizing” move. Having spent some time on Canva lately, I've noticed that the manufactured aesthetics of restaurants often resemble the clean, glitzy poster templates that Canva generates. These designs, studded with cool fonts and retro charm, and which somehow also feel artificially lived-in, match the perceived “vibe” or “look” that a foreigner would expect from a restaurant. Rebranding, or Canva-fication.

Of course, it’s not limited to street food. Street food just feels like the most immediate example because it originates in the “street”—a geographic symbol of democratization and equal access. Street food is made by, and for, a wide public. Street food—when effort is taken to name it such—is catered to a very specific consumer.

“Street food”

In a Guardian article, one writer lamented the ironic “street foodification of everything” that’s emerged of late. He spoke specifically about the growing number of gentrified, cosmopolitan food markets in London, referencing the UK chain Market Halls, which delivers these markets with a chain-store business model. Though his critique hits the New York nail on the head just as squarely, I think:

“What we eat and the way we eat it has always told us a great deal about politics and society. The explosion of trendy food courts and walled-off markets is no exception. They are exemplars of the financialisation and privatisation of urban space, of a middle-class ennui and yearning for authenticity, and a profits-first, pick-and-mix version of diversity. And such small portions!”

In my limited experience, I’ve seen outposts of this type of “street food”—or, more broadly, outposts of “cultural cuisine”—pop up everywhere across diverse, metropolitan NYC. Glitzy examples abound in Manhattan, restaurants adorned with flashy neon and X culture’s most recognizable artifacts. Take Potluck Club or Café China, for instance, adorned with so much fai-chun and 20th century memorabilia it’s almost like they’re worried you’ll forget they’re Chinese.

The thing is, these restaurants were likely started with intentions toward authenticity. It’s counterintuitive that anyone would somehow strive to create something inauthentic. (If you’re interested in a primer of the philosophy of authenticity, I’d recommend listening to this Overthink episode.) The question here is, instead, whether authenticity is necessarily a product of intention. Is an effort toward culture authentic if the end result, by virtue of both location and productive quality—culturally, literally—necessarily caters to and performs for an audience that is not their own? (Or at least, for an audience it wasn’t originally designed within or for?)

Take the example of a classic Hong Kong eatery. (Here, I focus on Hong Kong/Hong Kong-themed eateries because I'm most familiar with this culture, and have tried it in both Hong Kong and places across the US.) It's not that Hong Kong-style restaurants don’t decorate with HK-style artifacts. On the contrary, I've seen classic, traditional memorabilia used all over Hong Kong. But I’ll go out on a limb and venture that, in Hong Kong, their usage feels confined to one of two roles: either genuine, time-worn usage, or in kitsch, in order to deliberately evoke nostalgia.

Take the traditional Hong Kong-style calendars, for example—the green-texted ones you rip a page off every day. They’re seen in Hong Kong eateries (and other establishments) from time to time. They are not convenient and, with 365 pages of paper, relatively unsustainable. Mostly, they’re used either by the older generations that grew up with them—or as a pretty wall decoration by younger business owners who check the date on their phones.

Their usage is generally well understood by anyone who’s spent an extended period in Hong Kong. As it goes with any culture, if you are familiar enough with it, the distinction of particular artifacts doesn’t need elevation or explanation.

But confusion arises when these artifacts are taken out of their original surroundings and placed in front of a new audience—especially if, and when, the aesthetic purpose precedes the intention. For someone unfamiliar with Hong Kong’s culture, for example, it can be difficult to tell if a calendar’s placement in an eatery outside of Hong Kong is contemporary or nostalgic—a product of genuine utility or sentimental value. The calendar then loses its cultural meaning within the perception of new audiences unfamiliar with its history (operating under the false assumption, of course, that a “history” is absolutely, wholly perceptible). This differs from items that transcend culture, what we might term “acultural” items, or don’t belong to a specific culture. Like, I don’t know, an orange-colored chair.

This cultural transformation isn’t a “bad” phenomenon. This is not a judgment of value. Rather, it’s complex. On one hand, this adherence to cultural aestheticism and appearance is deeply, historically resonant within the sustenance and protection of diasporic communities worldwide. Recall how American Chinatowns have relied on their aesthetics to survive in large American cities, like San Francisco—the repositioning of familiar cultural aesthetics is, in fact, the very tool that has guarded Chinese-Americans against antagonistic populations that insist on an otherwise exclusive American agenda.

On the other hand, using cultural aesthetics for political or inventive reasons inevitably changes the original meaning of the artifacts. In some cases, this approach might erase the original cultural context of a particular object, or otherwise imbue them with a sense of foreignness within an American context—a transition that, to me, feels somewhat superficial. Under this new, globalized food culture, the calendar is no longer just a calendar. The calendar takes on the position of a decorative symbol in other environments to recall the quintessence of “Hong Kong,” It may have bona-fide intentions, but is possibly misleading, and certainly incomplete.

Culture, continued

This is on Western food culture, not Beli. The issue I see revolves around what appears to be a general, pervasive pretense to gastronomic omniscience among many “foodies” I've met. While I can't speak for other American cities where I haven't lived, I've certainly seen my share of these personalities in New York City. More than one or two people, in my experience, have claimed a seat for themselves at the epicenter of global culture, claiming cultural expertise and omniscience by virtue of their location.

Let me define my boundaries carefully and be very clear: First, this isn't solely a New York City issue, nor is it evenly distributed across the city. (In fact, it’s likely true that this problem doesn’t concern the majority of people who live in the city). Second, this particular point has often been used by public critics of New York elites I would not align myself with. And—most importantly—this point represents a broad, broad generalization that doesn’t aspire to capture every nuance of the situation, but rather, paint a general picture for the kinds of observations that have led me to these thoughts.

I’m talking about the archetype of the elite, privilege-laden “New Yorker”—a “woke,” postmodern subject, versed in modern theory and “aware” of the privilege they hold. Likely young, probably associated with an elite institution of some sort, and, above all, self-aware of their “cultured” status—part of the invisible group that plays arbiter for what is politically correct and incorrect in contemporary discourse. The archetype is further defined in these articles:

“New Yorkers, Self-Assured and Opinionated, Defend Their Values,” a dated but somewhat revelatory piece from the Obama/Trump era.
“Élite Politesse,” a diss on the New Yorker’s “self-mythologizing” that reads like a gulp of iced water in a postmodern desert
“Why a lot of Americans resent the cultured ‘New York City elite’” offers a primer on the theory of “cultural inequality” and how conservative voices leverage resultant bitterness as socio-political capital

It’s likely true that New York literally houses—and allows exposure to—many, many cultures. But, two things.

First, cultural awareness—especially when granted merely as a product of proximity to cultural diversity—is not cultural competence.

“Culture" itself is complex and politically charged. We can endlessly debate which verbs best describe engagement with culture—being cultured, having culture, living culture, embracing culture, appreciating culture—as well as the practical questions of laying claim to culture. (Is culture innate, chosen, earned?) And while, as someone who has lived with a muddled sense of cultural belonging for so much of life, I still consider what it means to aspire towards culture, I am certain: It is naive, and incorrect, to assume that one automatically becomes "cultured," or that "Culture" (with a capital C) is endowed within every person as a natural inheritance, though we all certainly grow up with our own understandings of culture and cultures. What the myth of a place like New York City erroneously posits is that because there is so much access to culture, one necessarily engages with culture, with “their culture,” with Culture—and becomes cultured as a result. The above Guardian article captures the thought well in writing of “the suspicion a chunk of Americans have—correct or not—that only a small, elite slice of the country defines what tastes and values are acceptable.”

Second: The conflation of cultural awareness with cultural competence engenders not only blindness to the limitations of one’s own cultural understanding, but also a dangerously flawed, absolutist definition of culture. It’s not just that “New Yorkers” aren’t more or less cultured. The dangerous part is believing that there even is a right or wrong approach to cultural matters.

For some time, I’ve struggled to elucidate why cultural milieu doesn’t resonate with me. Here’s my inadequate stab: That the hollow, somewhat easily adopted pretense that being a New Yorker automatically implies cultural competence. No one is categorically cultured or not—as no one is categorically anything—and to believe that one can be “more cultured” or “less cultured” than another is not only simplistic, but dangerous.

It’s this type of ignorance—not mere unawareness of other cultures, belief that other cultures can somehow be fully comprehended and categorized under a rational, enlightened, and Western scheme—that poses danger. This mindset alters—detracts from, perhaps—the very essence of cultural artifacts, such as the calendar. As it removes us from real attempts at arriving at our identities.

I’m not saying that the meaning of the calendar cannot change. Cultures, their artifacts, and the people that activate them—these always change. But the myth that one can be fully, absolutely culturally enlightened—that someone can be a “perfect” cultural subject—shifts the notion of culture from relative to absolute terms. And it does so invisibly and balefully.

The calendar might occupy a new cultural position. But we must realize that the very act of (Western, American) interaction with these artifacts—their nature, conditions, and environment—changes their meaning. And to what extent?

Back to Beli

Beli is a minor indicator of this large cultural phenomenon.

It factors in tangentially, by virtue of being an electronic implement through which the “New Yorker” hegemony of understanding exacts control over the gastronomies of different cultures. Beli purports to represent all of food—if not on paper, then by the functional model of the app itself. (The typical Beli video narrates: “We rank everywhere we eat on Beli, and we gave this restaurant a score of…” Who is “we”? Who is “everywhere”?)

To its core, it’s an American app—and, as such, subject to the same issues that the country’s culture faces more broadly. One is the tendency to process global cultures through a hyperlocal lens.

(A friend from Hong Kong visited me in New York City last Thanksgiving. I told him to download Beli. He said he couldn’t access or download it from his App Store. I wonder how many American users know that only those signed into the American App Store can download it.)

But why is it important to maintain a multicultural perspective on food?

Here’s one example.

When you rank or bookmark a place on Beli (as of when I’m writing this), you select one of five categories to place your establishment in: Restaurants, Bars, Bakeries, Coffee and Tea, Ice Cream and Dessert. In New York City, these categories made sense, as most of the establishments I visited fit neatly into one of them.

But, over winter break, I returned to Hong Kong and began adding Hong Kong establishments to my rankings. I quickly realized that the categories, now within a different culture, began to fail. Hong Kong is home to myriad stores that defy the buckets: cooked-food and seafood markets with dining areas (街市/熟食中心); street food stalls (大牌檔); night markets (夜市) that host a variety of vendors and are often temporary. I couldn’t squeeze every location I had been to, and eaten at, into one of these five categories.

The very nature of these categories is, in itself, culturally defined. Put another way, the categories Beli offers are themselves a cultural product. They offer one structure that we may use in understanding food. But it’s just that: One structure. Which cultures feature dessert in their cuisine? Which feature ice cream?

(And if they do, do they feature ice cream so much that it’s on par with much larger categories, like Restaurants? Even the positioning of equivalent categories is, in itself, a statement of cultural significance.)

The very notion of ice cream carries a specific vision of eating culture within. In Italy, gelato shops are ubiquitous and integral to local food culture, fitting perfectly into the Ice Cream category. In contrast, we might look at, say, Japan, whose culture emphasizes traditional desserts like mochi or wagashi, and find the category less satisfying. (These are generalizations, of course, and are meant to be taken only in service of this point.)

By designating Ice Cream as a category, and by placing it alongside the arguably more universal Restaurant—though even this is up for debate—Beli centers those societies that center Ice Cream within their diet and culture while marginalizing those that don’t, however inadvertently. Certain foods originate from, and are limited to, certain cultures.

Of course, this is all theoretical. Beli is bound by the practical limitations of app development, nor should it be subject to the moral question of achieving and representing cultural neutrality. This isn’t a discussion of whether Beli is valid. After all, I use it!

Rather, I want to qualify Beli usage with the flaws in objectivity that necessarily underlie a Beli ranking. Acting within these cultural categories entails subjectivity, which has the potential to misrepresent other cultures if not recognized. Dropping eateries into one of five buckets oversimplifies the rich diversity of global culinary traditions, relegating nuanced dining experiences to broad, and often Western-centric, labels. This approach risks distorting the authenticity and depth of certain cultural practices: What comes to my mind are the communality of hot pot, the tradition of dim sum carts, even the cultural staple of this this rice—which may not neatly fit into Beli’s predefined categories. And I’m sure many other examples will occur to different people. Without fully recognizing the oversimplification upon which Beli functions, one runs the risk of perpetuating a narrow view of what constitutes a valid or noteworthy food experience.

(Tangentially, the Beli of Hong Kong—OpenRice—lists only restaurants based in Hong Kong. When ranking an eatery, one is never asked to define a category, instead filtering by location.)

The issue of comparison

So far I’ve given thoughts about Beli and cultural concerns. I also want to explore the app’s conceptual premise.

I’ve heard some people say that Beli is a difficult app to use because comparing food is inherently challenging. When you compare restaurants, what are you really evaluating? Flavor, in a vacuum? If not, then what? As I’ve been doing my own Beli-ing, I’ve been thinking about the other factors that influence restaurant rankings, which Beli doesn’t explicitly prescribe or define beyond claiming to help identify the “best” (according to its App Store description). The bio states its function as to “Keep organized ranked lists and maps of everywhere you've been and want to try,” but lacks guidance on how exactly to construct these lists. (Which contrasts, for example, with the apparently more stringent criteria of the Michelin rating scheme, which I’ll get to shortly.)

Naturally, without clear guidelines, rankings take the subjectivity of preference. Each person becomes their own little critic, grading according to the instinctively-crafted criteria of whichever factor matters most to them—or, more precisely, whatever combination of factors matters to them, in what proportions. As of now, when faced with two options, I ask myself the arbitrary question: “Where would I prefer to be more?”

But chalking up a Beli ranking to pure subjectivity feels incomplete. It feels like it hides, rather than clarifies, why people make these choices. We might heed the suggestion of the thinker Jean-François Lyotard, who suggested that, in our postmodern world, grand narratives or universal truths have given way to smaller, personal stories—and readily accept Beli’s fragmented, opinion-driven approach. But it feels wrong to say Beli is all subjective and leave it at that. The very fact that people use it shows that it’s more than just random choices. Even in the postmodern view of a thinker like Lyotard, which emphasizes the importance of multiple perspectives, there are still larger patterns, shared values, that give these rankings meaning.

So it may be worthwhile to outline the factors that contribute to a culinary experience and organize them, if only to more clearly understand how these experiences translate into perception and preference.

What determines a Beli ranking?

Flavor is the obvious one. Food is, of course, graded on flavor—how something tastes.

But taste itself encompasses a multitude of factors.

There are the straightforward ones, rooted in chemistry. Our palette is divided across the five divisions of sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami, what the Cordon Bleu refers to as “the five flavor elements.” These align closely with the criteria of the Michelin guide, which assesses food based on factors like “Quality of the ingredients used”—that is, freshness, seasonality, whether something’s organic, and so forth—”mastery of flavor and cooking techniques, the personality of the chef in the cuisine, harmony of flavors, and consistency between visits.”

(“Personality” of the chef? Interesting: as though good food requires the manufacturing of a persona, or narrative, within, in order to authenticate quality.)

Then there are the ways these “objective” factors are processed. This includes considerations like age, obesity, illness, smoking habits, awareness of nutritional value, food temperature, and so on. (Rabbit hole: Chapter 8, page 131. “Factors affecting taste perception and food choice.”) These factors aren't really about the food but more about the person eating it—all of which significantly influence a dining experience. They differ naturally from person to person, and they may even fluctuate within the same person at different times. They’re highly subjective—but, still, affect how we experience the five flavors, at least to some degree.

These are two categories of factors that form the collective, vague label of “taste.” They reason away the subjectivity that inheres in assessing food and contribute to the idea that food can be graded objectively. It’s why you might go to a restaurant with three Michelin stars and think the food is average—it’s attributed to your different, perhaps inferior sense of taste.

This raises an interesting tension. Currently, we chalk these differences up to taste, to food preference. But should we consider the way that flavor is perceived as an element of flavor itself? David Hume, the 18th-century Scottish philosopher, raised some interesting thoughts in “Of The Standard of Taste”—which, though not about food, directly tackle the idea of opinion and perspective. He suggests that while everyone has their own tastes, there are still some common standards that those with refined judgment can agree on. “Refined judgment” refers to the learned ability to appreciate subtle qualities and complexities—a form of training that comes from experience and deliberate practice. So—maybe there are universal standards in food that go beyond just personal preference.

Then there is the environment—what the fancy people call “ambience.” Is a bowl of laksa served piping-hot on a sweltering street corner the same when it’s presented on a tablecloth in a corporate kitchen? Are petit fours better in a glitzy, air-conditioned room after a pricey meal than when plucked from a store-bought box during a workday lunch break? Instinctively, I would say: Yes, there is a difference.

You might be interested to learn that the Michelin Guide’s “restaurant inspectors do not look at the interior decor, table setting, or service quality when awarding stars.” The five factors listed above are the only criteria by which stars are judged.

Is that really possible, though? To ignore the environment in which food is consumed, when assessing a dish?

Environment is a broad term. It immediately brings space to mind, but it’s also temporal. That is, the same physical space can feel different across time. I still think fondly of the McDonald's that opened in Stanley Plaza when I was young: freshly renovated from its older location; bleached, wooden benches bathed in morning sunlight; adorned with comfy, orange couches, There was a corner by the McCafe where my mom, aunt, brother, and I would enjoy breakfast after Sunday School. It hasn’t changed much since then, but these days, I only occasionally go inside. It no longer holds the same significance. What progressed was time, and me through it.

It depends on how you define the scope of your critique. Those who disagree with this view might argue against relativism, asserting that there are comparable aspects between environments, whether across space or time. They argue that you can compare fancy restaurants to less-fancy ones by adjusting for different factors to arrive at something “objective”—like the cost-utility ratio (how effectively a well-funded restaurant uses its decor budget) or the historical context (how a fancy restaurant today compares to one from twenty years ago, given the resources available then).

They might believe in prestige—that a fancy restaurant is inherently superior. They could argue that one culture can be more refined, sophisticated, or classy than another. They might even suggest grading establishments within their category (e.g., comparing McDonald's branches or three-star French restaurants), acknowledging some degree of relativism for the sake of categorization. (And I see some reason in this).

But, with every additional layer, meaning further erodes. You can take logical precautions while following this rabbit hole to the end, and, still, run into the mess of relativism, where no one can agree on what “environment” means anymore. If pushed to do so, we all caveat our understanding of what the “environment” of a restaurant so much that, eventually, the debate takes on the logical masquerade of semantics. We begin a theoretical, unending debate as to what a word like “environment” might mean, digressing only further from an answer of substance.

A better question to ask might be: What is the real discussion at hand?

There’s also value.

At my local Trader Joe’s, there’s a mural that breaks down value to its arithmetic factors, price and quality. It’s a pretty resonant reminder, and relevant for this discussion, even if oversimplifies things. Value is a big deal when judging food: You would throw in 3 HKD for a bowl of beef noodles, while 300 HKD for the same meal feels absurdly overpriced. Just the same, how much would you be willing to pay for a hot dog? See: “$2 Hot Dog Vs. $169 Hot Dog.” (The $169 hot dog, the “Juuni Ban,” won the Guiness World Record for the world’s most expensive.)

Beli never clarifies how it actually grades food—is it based on quality, price, value, or some combination of these factors in varying proportions? If it’s true that the majority of Beli users come from more affluent backgrounds—those with greater spending power—it stands to reason that price would matter less to them as compared to groups with tighter budgets. Beli is a capitalist device, even if it appears democratic or accessible—and, as such, is entangled in the inherent inequalities apropos consumption and distribution under capitalism. The app may even perpetuate them.

One of the least palatable truths about Beli follows in further discussion of a product’s value under a market society. Here’s a cursory look from the Marxist perspective from Investopedia:

The labor theory of value (LTV) was an early attempt by economists to explain why goods were exchanged for certain relative prices on the market. It suggested that the value of a commodity was determined by and could be measured objectively by the average number of labor hours necessary to produce it. In the labor theory of value, the amount of labor that goes into producing an economic good is the source of that good's value.

In context, this theory suggests that the worth of a product or service—like the food and experience of eating a restaurant—equals how much work was put into making it happen, measured in time.

How exactly does food come to be? Meals and food products involve labor at every stage of the production chain, from the farm to the table. If you've dined at a restaurant, you might consider the intricate steps involved in this process. (The below graphic depicts “The business process of a chain restaurant”—but it’s just one example of many.)

In my view, assigning a ranking implicitly extends to every stage of the production chain. It’s not solely about the final dish, decor, or atmosphere of the restaurant. The ranking also encompasses the labor involved in harvesting the vegetables, selecting the lamp for this and that corner, and the effort of the staff who waited on your table. Each element of the production process contributes to its overall evaluation.

The most unsettling aspect of Beli is that it not only amplifies the privilege of enjoying these benefits but also grants the power to grade these contributions. It makes us consider how much invisible, often overlooked labor goes into food production—from raw ingredients to the plated dish and the surrounding environment. I think of restaurants owned by large groups, yes, and I think of small, family-run businesses even more. I think of all the time, effort, and love invested by individuals to create every single eatery that inhabits the planet.

However inconsequentially one Beli account sits in the grand scheme of the food universe, something about the app’s premise of assessment bothers me, deeply.

It’s not exactly new, of course. The Michelin Guide has been entrenched in this practice for decades. But how Beli or Openrice differ to me is its democratization of this authority, granting everyone the right to voice their opinion, regardless of professional expertise. Michelin reviewers, I assume, are subject to screening and training before committing careers to judge flavor. They are trained to negate personal taste in service of judgment against a universal standard of culinary excellence—elusive and subjective, sure, but present nonetheless. This differs on a platform like Beli, where any user can assert judgment without formal qualification or standardized assessment criteria. It underscores a postmodern shift toward discourse where subjective opinions dominate over objectivity or credibility. It’s not like you take an exam before you are qualified to use Beli.

I try to remind myself that when the app spits out a rating, it measures my personal experience and doesn’t represent any objective measure of labor, effort, or quality. But this reassurance, of course, is self-centered and self-serving. Like trying to side-step the fact that my personal experience on app like Beli is a privileged one. Even so, it’s not like Beli tracks your intentions. With a clean, sophisticated layout, it just simplifies and masks the realities of its usage.

It’s worth briefly touching on, too, the factors that typically aren’t associated with food rankings.

For one: Nutritional value. I think it’s a product of modern society—and its emphasis on production, optimization, and immediacy—that we don’t automatically consider a food’s nutrition as the priority in assessing whether it’s “good” or not. We tend to notice immediate experiences and factors, like flavor and temperature, more then we do less obvious effects on bodily processes, like digestion and excretion. (Still, it’s worth clarifying that nutritional value typically correlates with price—and I would find it an interesting inquiry to explore why the latter factor is generally more prominent, and more widely associated with prestige, than the former.)

Another one is food safety. We live, thankfully, in societies where established, intelligent bodies like the FDA exist to regulate this factor so we don’t have to. Generally, the average person doesn’t suspect their food to be poisonous or toxic, especially if it comes from a credible source and is prepared properly. Once in a while, though, something slips through the cracks—an undetected chemical, a bad chemical composition that leads to food poisoning—in which case the factor of food’s safety suddenly becomes very crucial. It’s worth pondering why we don’t automatically consider it, even if there are both physical—and evolutionary—reasons that this should be a baseline factor for the quantitative value of food. It’s a privilege to participate in societies that allow us to forget these factors, to not think about them as much.

These are generalizations, of course. I’m sure there are some out there who would surely assess food according to one of these factors more than some of the others I’ve mentioned. But I’d be interested in the distribution of people across factor preference. I’d guess that these particular consumers would be in a minority, compared to the average flavor-minded consumer.

The problem of relativity

It’s not just food, though.

Our experiences—of food, of life—are themselves variable, too. It’s not a problem with Beli so much as the—the way I see it, necessary—philosophical inquiry into the validity of any rating system. For we, people with opinions, vary, too.

Not only does our opinion of a place depend on our particular, discrete experience of it. (It’s why we see the option for people to “rerank” a place they’ve been to before on second visit.) But even as actors on Beli, we must realize that we each interpret grading systems differently. We all arguably experience the same spectrum of emotions—we all love intensely as we hate—but does that mean we would rank experiences in the same way? We might bear the same dislike to something, but this same impulse could well entail a 2 to me and a 5 to you, depending on how we have learned to associate numbers with non-numerical qualities. Just the same, everyone loves something endlessly—but is everyone as willing to dole out a 10?

Not all points on the Beli scale carry equal weight. Everyone likely has a favorite restaurant, and everyone is generally inclined to place many restaurants into the high-green category of “I liked it,” in being nice. But the effect is that people become less likely to assign lower ratings—those in the low-yellow “It was fine” range, down to the red “I didn’t like it” category—resulting in varying assessments. Most people’s average ratings skew well above 5 points; every list I’ve seen consists mostly of green numbers, with fewer yellow and even fewer red. This tendency probably stems from differing levels of comfort with negativity or criticism, or simply different tendencies in how willing people are to treat another negatively. Regardless, the effect is that Beli ratings, especially the lower ones, become increasingly ambiguous. The linear scale of 0-10 on Beli presents a false impression of linearity, where higher numbers dominate and lower numbers are less common. It begs the question: Do we mostly like things in life? Are we, as a social collective, driven toward positivity?

Which is, in itself, something else about culture I want to think about. Bookmarked for another day.

(Side note: I asked my dad after a recent dinner what proportion of restaurants he’d place in the green, if he were to be on Beli. He doesn’t use social media much. He said no more than 30%.)

Beli’s model tries to mitigate some of this bias, with its unique grading system that ranks restaurants against each other rather than simply assigning grades. It creates a sense of perspective, avoiding pitfalls found in other apps, like Google Reviews. Asking people whether or not they liked a restaurant is more qualitative, and therefore more representative, than a selection of numbers: It’s more close to how we experience life. And there’s some some merit in this.

But this qualitative question opens up myriad vaguenesses about the actual rating of restaurants. Google Reviews has functions that Beli doesn’t, like stratifying ratings by taste, ambience, and experience, whereas Beli gives just one blanket figure for the entire dining experience. It makes one consider whether a perfect system of grading could exists—or at least, which system most closely achieves perfection. Can a perfect system of grading exist? If not, which system most closely approaches it?

I sometimes like to imagine the situation that I had, say, every single egg tart in the world laid out before me. I wonder: Would I be able to rank every single one, from best to worst? I struggle to accept most categorical judgments, and in this case, I’d say no. Straightforwardly, it seems like an impossible task.

Secondarily, it’s very valid to point out that these categories are fluid. That some food falls well into “I liked it!” and “It was fine!” And that the “best” food isn’t necessarily the “most enjoyable”—that mediocre food, enjoyed in acknowledgement and appreciation of its mediocrity, can present better experiences than “better” food.

But if the answer here is no, then what becomes of Beli? Its goal to grade every restaurant—even according to an amorphous, independent variable, like preference or memory—is fundamentally unreachable.

Spectatorship

Beli is social media. But what does social media entail?

A rating depends on numerical values. It reflects an increase or decrease in perceived value or quality; it connotes relative status. Do we automatically rate things, though, as we eat them? We might make judgments, sure, but does the moment food touches the tongue translate into a number? I don’t think so. I’d hope not, at least. I’d hope our opinions, and our lives, are made up of more than just quantitative determinations.

But why, then—as exemplified by a platform like Beli—are these ratings are taken by us as the most reliable indicators of a place’s objective quality? What is the purpose of a number?

These are ratings required by us. Us. Not individuals, but a social collective. We don’t need numbers to explain our own preferences to ourselves. Our feelings about food are exactly that—feelings. They come as naturally to us as any other emotion, like love or hatred. Numbers, like any language, function in order to categorize and simplify the magnitude of our experiences for others. No one can truly know what another thinks, but a number allows one to compare his experience to their own and—through what I’ll call empirical empathy—understand another’s feelings toward, say, a certain dish. Numbers, like words, are conduits of relative meaning: They refer not to absolute concepts, but instead symbolize relativity, allowing for mediation between distinct experiences that otherwise resist straightforward characterization.

I currently hold the view that words are best understood as but their associations with other experiences (and words), ad infinitum. When someone describes a bite of cake as “creamy,” I compare their description to my own idea of “creamy”—my own schema and history with “creamy” foods—and access their experience through comparison from my own personal distance. I wouldn’t understand what “creamy” means otherwise.

In sum, we convey ideas through symbols to evoke similar ideas in others. Numbers and words are conduits of social experience.

One might raise the scenario that a person eats alone and assigns a dish a number, without any external input. For example, I’m a lonely food critic, and my gut tells me the pasta I just ate was, I don’t know, like, a 6.2/10. Since I am physically away from anyone else, it really does seem that the opinions of others aren’t relevant to my assessment.

Not really. Let’s unpack what happens when you describe something with a number. (Or word. Or any symbol of communication.)

You experience an event.
This is the initial sensory input stage. Our sensory organs receive stimuli from the environment, which is then sent to the brain for processing. This stage is well-documented in cognitive psychology and neuroscience.
Your brain processes this unique experience.
The brain wants to process sensory information by giving it meaning. It does that by reaching for symbols to categorize the experience.
By a string of neural associations, you are drawn to a particular number or word.
By a string of neural associations—the extensive and immediate step of searching through your mind’s memory and knowledge—you are drawn to a particular signifier. (Re: Hebbian theory—“cells that fire together, wire together.”).
The thing about this word is that everyone, including you, has access to it—and the neural connections it promises.
Words aren’t a product of individual experience, but an arbiter between diverse experiences. A grasp of semiotics can address how signs, like words or numbers, collectively generate a shared, social system of meaning. (See: on de Saussure.)
This process might have taken place alone, and quietly. But what actually happened was the transition from something private to something social.
It’s a social act to simplify our ideas into commonplace symbols so that anyone, including but not limited to ourselves, could access similar ideas—provided that the recipient is conversant in that language or code.

Beli-ing might seem like an entirely private task, especially if you have no followers on the app. But it's not. Fundamentally, when you rank experiences—even if only for yourself—you move your thoughts from the nebulous, gooey realm of the brain, where nothing needs explanation, into an external reality that can exist only through explanation. Ranking is about placing things (that are not only incomparable, but don't inherently require or demand comparison) into a system of comparison. To shove things neatly into boxes so that they may be shipped to another brain, in the future.

Rankings take on meaning only because of the existence of the spectator, irrespective of the actual existence of a real, other spectator. Spectatorship is not about one’s relationship with other people. It's about one’s relationship with an imagined Other. There’s a distinct separation between the embryo of thought before it comes into being and after it becomes worded as a thought. That difference relies on an imagined spectatorship—of the Other. (See: Mirror stage.)

The production of experience

It’s not novel to examine social media through the lens of spectatorship, really. It’s a common conclusion that social media harbors panopticon qualities—that it functions as a kind of commercial production for the surveillance of those beyond ourselves. Here, it’s worth spelling out the implications of the kinds of production that Beli, like other social media platforms, compels us toward.

On Beli, you not only rank restaurants, but can choose to upload photos of your food to accompany your rating and written review of the restaurant, upon which your ranking is presented on your friends’ feeds. It’s similar to Instagram—if you use Instagram like I do, for personal use—in that you post periodically for an extended group of connections, uploading content taken from your own life to share with an audience. The same, of course, for apps of varying nature: TikTok, X, and even other, more niche media, like Substack or Medium blogs.

This content ends up in front of others’ eyes as they scroll through their feed, occupying another’s attention and time even without physically presenting oneself there. Labels, like “Personal Blog” or “Just For Fun” on an Instagram bio, don’t escape the fact that, to the core, maintaining an Instagram is inherently in service of others. (Otherwise, wouldn’t the photo albums on our personal devices be enough?)

Posting about something makes it an event. It marks it, like a pause at a storefront window. By sharing snapshots of life, we transform accidental occurrences into significant moments, pulling them from the ambiguous mass of life and casting them in spotlight. A photo, for instance, elevates a single moment above those that came before and after it. This captured moment becomes a representative slice of all that surrounds it. While we all live at the same pace, we mark life at different intervals and intensities.

It’s worth asking why we have this urge to make events of our lives. Surely, part of it is the desire to showcase our privilege to others. But there’s something more: A deep yearning for experience itself.

I’m sure we’ve all heard the phrase, “Buy experiences, not things,” and it’s easy to see why. Things have a material, corporeal existence. They can be shiny and valuable, but they remain fixed in their moment of time and space. Experiences, on the other hand, are ongoing phenomena—encoded in memory and retrievable at will. They are more diverse, in type and sensory value, and, because of this diversity, often more valuable than things.

Yet, if we place experiences on the same plane as things, it follows that experiences, too, can be objectified, quantified, and subsumed within a capitalist framework. In what’s known as the experience economy, “memory itself becomes the product”—where the psychological process a customer undergoes becomes quantified in economic terms. This concept, I suspect, is especially valuable in fields like hospitality or the food and beverage industries, which thrive on the production of happy experiences in a customer. For the same reason, I can see the appeal of unique experiences such as fine dining or exclusive establishments—which capitalizes on the value of a rare or difficult-to-replicate psychological experience.

(Tangentially: I don’t see a clear indication that eating more widely successfully realizes the value promised by sheer quantity. Does eating more increase your appreciation of food, or could it be the other way around? Could we reach experience fatigue and feel overwhelmed in our collection of new opportunities?)

If experience is a psychological phenomenon, “feelings about a product will become a large part of what people buy when they buy the product” (added emphasis). Emotions themselves—whether it’s the emotions tied into the experience, or the emotion of securing the experience itself—become commercialized. Emotions beholden to an experience are crucial in dictating that experience’s value.

What this indicates to me, though, is something more fundamental: We crave experiences because we want to feel something. We are capitalists, and we want to maximize our benefit. So we collect experiences—even those like fine dining—because we want to feel as deeply as we can. As André Aciman put it: “but to make yourself feel nothing so as not to feel anything — what a waste.” It’s a very human drive—especially those of younger, computer-fluent generations that wish to expend their money on experiences—to want to feel something.

Romance has created this proliferation and excess of technology, exclusivity, and hyperconsumption. It saddens me.

The production of experience: Phones eat first

On Beli, you can elect to upload photos of your food to accompany your rating and written review of the restaurant. The functionality is no surprise in the phone-eats-first era, of course, where photography is marked by convenience and accessibility. Still, the automatic documentation of life’s images, as reinforced by social media usage, demands consideration.

In 1977, Susan Sontag theorized the role of photography in social life through the notion of “photographic acquisition” in “The Image-World,” from her essay collection On Photography. Sontag didn’t believe making photographs was an isolated act in itself. Rather, she saw photography as acquiring reality by capturing, owning, or controlling a moment or scene—thereby influencing how we relate to our own reality and memories. This explains the power of platforms like Instagram and Beli, from Sontag’s viewpoint: By allowing users to curate their lives through images, these platforms act as intermediaries that turn personal experiences into content, reshaping and transforming those experiences.

For Sontag, photos aren’t just a snapshot of reality. They redefine it “as an item for exhibition, as a record for scrutiny, as a target for surveillance” (82). The purpose of photography is to be viewed—by the self, by another—which necessarily introduces artificial standards of curation and consumption into reality. We might call this approach “exhibitionist”—a self-consciousness of how one’s actions are perceived and judged by others. Sontag views photography “as a kind of writing… even as photographed images were themselves first compared to writing” (83), which creates a fascinating parallel with the realms of, say, creative writing or literary production. Might photography embellish, enrich, or aestheticize our lives the way our words do?

And yet, isn’t it ironic that those societies embracing photographic usage in this documentary way—the prevalence of which, Sontag claims, correlates with the degree to which a country has industrialized and modernized—ultimately find ways to control and limit experience? Photography isn’t the saving of a moment—it’s the detainment of one. That’s why we call it “capture.” They’re “a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still. Or they enlarge a reality that is felt to be shrunk, hollowed out, perishable, remote. One can’t possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images…” (85). Ephemeral, real-life experiences are free; the permanence of digital images is not. (Stunning: Sontag wrote this in the ’70s, long before social media, as we know it, came to exist.)

In this way, we might argue that social media, including Beli, embodies a politics of domination. Whether it’s “aesthetic”—a sun-drenched café or an exquisite plate of food—or not, the act of capturing moments itself determines which are deemed worthy of display and which are not. Value and narrative become a matter of selective representation. This, in turn, shapes both individual and communal perceptions of what is noteworthy, beautiful, or desirable, steering social behavior towards an increasingly artificial and constrained version of reality. Moments are no longer fleeting. Instead, they are given value through filters, numbers, and technological replication.

Pragmatically, it speaks to feelings of disorientation and alienation. I don’t think I’m the only one who’s gotten “lost” at mealtimes—in my relationship to social media, really—caught up in the eventhood Beli imposes on my food consumption. Every time I eat, I ask myself: Should I post? Even if I don’t end up taking the photo, the very fact that the thought arose within me is, I recognize, itself the crucial distinction. The confusion about whether I am within an occurrence or a noteworthy event is, in itself, the removal from reality. If the mind drifts to questions of assessment—acidity, complexity, ambience—then it no longer has the freedom to wander. It’s bound by the invisible pressure of eventhood, weighing into the present as it does the future.

Social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels amplify the curation process. Videos often depict food as perfect, hiding the less glamorous side of production. And yet, by presenting meals in an exaggeratedly appetizing way and faking reactions to gain views, these platforms speed up society’s shift toward an increasingly artificial and constrained perception of reality. They showcase an idealized version of life to capture attention and build a niche, distorting our sense of what’s desirable. If we’re not careful, the pursuit of beauty could end up overtaking life itself.

If ignorance is bliss, then knowledge takes away the simplicity of enjoyment. I can't remember the last time I ate something without first taking—or wanting to take—a photograph. These days, the camera eats first. This precedence is, in my opinion, a radical and unwanted change in behavior.

So, again, back to the thorniness of archival work.

Food for thought

Distancing

Graduation station