“It looks like shit.” The words are said just loud enough to turn heads, including mine, but as soon as I register what’s happened, the perpetrator has melted back into the crowd. There’s nothing to do except refocus my gaze on what looks like, at a glance, a slop of offensively bubbling brown goo on my plate, which I then polish off completely.
The “offending” sight: homemade Japanese curry on rice, brought to the workplace for both budget reasons (a decent pot of curry can last me three days’ worth of meals) and for delicious reasons. Chock-full of tender meat, carrots, potatoes, and onion, Japanese curry is filling, easy to make, and most importantly, very, very tasty. It’s the perfect “I have $15 to spend on food for the week” dish; or its more social counterpart, the “I have to feed how many people?!” dish.
The author’s delicious Japanese curry
It is also, by all accounts, very ugly. Sure, an Instagram search through #japanesecurry reveals some well-lit portraits of morsels of meat and vegetables seemingly glazed over by a light curry sauce. This is as “deceptive” as, say, selfies enhanced by contouring or lip-lining, in that the reality of the image is much goopier and objectively grosser once the benefits of flattering angles, lighting, and stillness are stripped away.
Japanese curry is far from my only culinary indulgence; all of my favorite foods are messy and/or smelly eats. Ribs? I once found sauce on my elbows, the morning after eating them. Crab? Discovery Channel predator special flashbacks. Korean BBQ? I would wear the smoky residue as perfume, if someone ever figured the formula out. If it’s rich and pungent and would leave intense stains, I’ll generally want to eat it, consequences be damned.
I grew up in a household that was comfortable with farts, burps, intense smells, and food that facilitated all of the above. My dad would eat raw garlic and chase my sister and me around the kitchen, and then the whole family would sit down for dinner rich in not just garlic, but also ginger, hoisin sauce, black vinegar, sesame oil, and a thousand other strong scents and flavors. By virtue of my grandmother’s cooking style, and later my mother’s cooking style, the food I grew up with was spiced, sauced, and sublime. Most of it was also, in hindsight, very ugly.
Eating aesthetics have always been important — there’s a reason that Iron Chef awards points for plating, and why everybody places more stock on Yelp’s photos than its written reviews. It’s tempting to blame the rise of “foodie” culture on social networks like Instagram, but the truth is, people have been judging each other’s eating choices since food evolved from survival necessity to global mega-industry, if not the global mega-industry. What social media has done is move the conversation beyond magazines like Bon Appétit and Real Simple to any person with a smartphone. There’s nothing barring you from documenting, nay, curating every meal you make and eat, and that’s just what’s happening, and while most restaurants implicitly embrace this reality by serving beautiful food, some are explicitly adding smartphones into the dining room setting.
This isn’t a condemnation of amateur food photography or the restaurant business, but the visibility of what “good” (desirable and photogenic, not necessarily nutritious) food looks like has created food sub-cultures, linking food not by its actual contents and taste, but instead by projected experiences and ideas. Pizza, fries, and burritos get the “Yaaass” treatment from snackwave enthusiasts; smoothies, pastel desserts, and fresh fruit dazzle the Instagram model-wannabe set. Dim sum, ramen, tacos, pho: All have risen to the forefront of covetable, camera-ready foods that carry with them new associations devoid of their cultural origins. Yet the discourse around food is seemingly more democratic and deep than ever, with the language of food criticism available at our fingertips rather than relegated to rarefied dining rooms.
But it’s not a mistake that pretty food is often more expensive or inaccessible, with the lone exceptions being those “authentic” cheap eats. Side-stepping the issue of authenticity, which is often argued over by people who have no business touching it, the main weirdness of modern food culture is that, like fashion, it’s totally disconnected from the reality of food production, preparation, and consumption. Food isn’t devoid of historical and cultural context, and it’s built on a foundation of blood, sweat, and well, shit. There’s nothing inherently wrong about thinking of food solely at the visual level, yet the ascent of such thinking isn’t without consequences. And of course, beautiful doesn’t always mean delicious, and may even detract from taste totally: who actually enjoys eating intricate fondant, or feels totally satisfied drinking a rainbow of raw juices?
It’s also fundamentally impossible to separate food aesthetic from its economic implications. The people who care the most about it are those who can afford to, or those who aspire to it. The percentage of people who share images of fruit-infused water and the portion of the population that actually stuffs lemon slices into Voss bottles are disparate, not least because the object is Voss and not Arrowhead or Poland Springs. And while pizza is generally affordable, the people most likely to vaunt its appeal are those who can afford to not eat it every day. The “broke 20-something lifestyle” still manages to include brunch, cold-pressed juice, late-night taco truck binges, and eating Thai takeout while watching Netflix in your sweatpants.
My first job out of college was as a publicity assistant in Los Angeles’s Grand Central Market, a covered, nearly-century-old space that hosts a wide variety of produce, dry goods, and nowadays, restaurants. Despite being neither new nor a restaurant, it made the coveted Bon Appétit Best New Restaurants list while I worked there, and I led food photographer after food photographer, whether armed with a DSLR or just their iPhone, through the narrow aisles packed with people of all ethnic and class backgrounds. That was part of the appeal of the place: it offered something to all economic levels of a rapidly changing downtown LA, but the comments I heard in passing betrayed a snobbish class distinction between the older stalls, run primarily by Asian and Latino workers, and the newer stalls, projects started primarily by white owners. While the admission wouldn’t come from the floor employees or owners themselves, management understood the visual disconnect between having a place that sold a $12 burger right across from a place that, at the end of the day, gave away their heat lamp-lit leftover food for free to anyone who lined up for it. Guess which one inspires gushy Instagram posts under the #grandcentralmarket tag, and guess which one is no longer in the market?
I suppose I too am to blame; one of my tasks there was to update the market’s Instagram. And when it came to choosing foods and thus businesses to highlight, I had to answer this question every day: What will look beautiful? Lighting apps and filters could “correct” raw images, but what did it matter anyway? The people who bought $3 jumbo tacos would continue to buy them regardless of how exposed or colorful their snapped counterparts looked, just as not posting pictures for the most popular stalls wouldn’t hurt their business; but sometimes, you couldn’t stop shit at any price point from looking like shit. Not that that ever stopped people from eating it.
Tags: eats, food, food politics, lilian min
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This reminds me of something my dad always used to say on the topic of class:
When it comes to food, poor people ask, is there enough?
Middle-class people ask, how does it taste?
You know you are rich when you are asking, how was the presentation?
There is a good point in there, but the phrasing kind of suggests that folks without money aren’t also asking whether their food is delicious and appetizing. Everyone has food aesthetics, tastes, and preferences. The key difference here is that when you enjoy certain financial privilege you are free to pursue those tastes without also worrying about having enough to eat.
I am sure that neither you or your dad mean to imply that poor people don’t have tastes or appetites like other folks, but since that’s a fallacy that comes up a lot in the food scholarship I spend my time buried in, I felt it was worth spelling out here.
so I’ve moved from being poor as balls as a kid to being middle class now as an adult and part of that process has been to splurge on food. it causes tension with my partner who thinks I buy overly expensive food items (really? that much on yogurt) but it’s like…this is the shit I always wanted and could never had. And I worked so hard to get here that it physically hurts to go back to that place of bottom shelf food items unless I really truly have to.
Of course, the idea is that they build on one another. And that that’s the type of anxiety that you have about your food, depending on where you’re at.
Oh, I was hoping for a recipe. But food economics is very interesting! You begin thinking about the ways government regulation also shapes food choices and availability and BAM! you’ve got yourself a dissertation. Or something. Thank you for the article. If you wanted to give us the recipe to your curry here in the comments that would be ok too.
Hey there, my curry recipe is the one found at the back of every box of Kokumaro/similar store brand of Japanese curry (check your local Asian market), except that I half the water portion because otherwise it doesn’t solidify well/timely. You can help it along by putting it in the fridge, but chances are you’ll want to consume it right after making it!
I usually make mine with lots of onions, sweet potato and/or squash, and chicken thighs, but you can basically toss anything into it and if it has enough mass, it’ll cook alright. I do find that chicken breasts don’t absorb as much of the flavor through the process, so go with thighs or other meat. Hope this helps, and good eating!
Yes, a recipe for the curry would be most appreciated! (Or a link to a similar one… whatever). I saw that pic and all I can think about now is delicious, warm curry.
Here’s one from Serious Eats: http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2010/06/how-to…
Thank you!
S&B golden curry, medium.
Two or three boneless chicken breasts, cubed and browned.
1 bell pepper or like 4 or 5 mini sweet peppers
half a yellow onion
Any other leftover veggies you have sitting around. We discovered that half a cup of corn is an awesome addition (the burst of sweetness is just To Die For against the spicy curry)
Easy and cheap, can be extended exponentially with naan and rice. Reheats fine in the microwave. Mmmmmmmm
This is great. I wanted this article to go on and on. I could read all damn day about the politics of food and why beautiful food is prized when I would much rather eat a pile of “looks like slop” curry or stew or casserole than a gorgeous artful selection of glistening berries and trembling cheeses. I like both! But my favourite ugly foods get no love from any quarter.
And what’s more, sometimes I get tired of the constant fixation on food in social media. Food is a big and important part of life, yes, but sometimes it’s a chore and not a glorious instagram moment. Let’s all relax a bit or ten.
Thank you! My original draft segued into the gender politics of professional vs. “amateur” cooking, but… that was rightly cut, as it warrants its own, loooong analysis.
I actually love looking at food pics, but there’s still the idea that ugly food is the thing you eat when no one’s looking, while the pretty, labor-intensive food is basically the stylized selfie but for your gut and body presentation. But when you finally drop the pretense and accept that yeah, this might blow out my bowels later, and gosh, the sounds I’m making are pretty gross, and I do look pretty ridiculous with sauce all over my face, it’s liberating, except that when did public/shared eating become that trap in the first place? One could say there’s plenty of… food for thought. (I’ll show myself out.)
Oh, man, one of my biggest pet peeves is people commenting negatively on the appearance of my food, like I start to see red when it happens. (I also have an extreme hatred for fondant.)
fondant tastes like styrofoam
Marshmallow fondant is the answer. It tastes much better than the standard variety. It’s also not as classy, but who cares?
It is hella rude. Even more so if you made the food yourself. It’s like someone walking up to you and telling you your hair looks like dog poo, only it’s worse because they can’t believe you are going to eat it. Omg, are you going to put dog poo in your mouth?!?
I have never gotten this feedback from a foodie, only from people whose meals tended to come out of a box in the freezer and go straight into the microwave. I’m not against frozen meals at all, but people who can’t cook rice and beans from scratch need to think twice about commenting on mine.
Any conversation about food and class is a good enough excuse for me to post one of my favorite poems:
The Good Life
BY TRACY K. SMITH
When some people talk about money
They speak as if it were a mysterious lover
Who went out to buy milk and never
Came back, and it makes me nostalgic
For the years I lived on coffee and bread,
Hungry all the time, walking to work on payday
Like a woman journeying for water
From a village without a well, then living
One or two nights like everyone else
On roast chicken and red wine.
discovered this poem through the nyc subway!!
I heartily recommend Life on Mars by Tracy K. Smith, the collection which includes this poem. I actually read it cover to cover like a novel, which is not something I’ve ever done with a poetry collection before.
Thanks for the recommendation! I’m going to try to pick it up from The Strand.
Thank you!
If my food is beautiful, I find myself asking “What does that food have to hide?”
I absolutely adored this piece. This is the kind of food I most aim for, the kind of food I always want to cook and always, always want to eat. I have a dream for a restaurant where I cook messy, gorgeous, intense food, and everyone eats all together from a deep communal dish, piling it onto bread and eating with their fingers… One day maybe. I loved this piece.
Sounds like you’re talking about an Ethiopian restaurant, where the communal central dish is all sorts of odd-looking stews served on injera bread. Yum!
Communal eating forever and ever. My mother raised our four-person family on ~three dishes and rice, and sometimes soup, all shared. When I started going out to eat with just my friends, I was so bewildered by the idea that everybody just buys their own meal?!
Two of the best meals I’ve ever had were with fellow vegans at vegetarian restaurants, when so many things on the menu looked good, we all just decided to order different things and share them all, simply because we normally didn’t get the chance.
The second time I did this, I’d been bicycle touring across the Canadian Rockies and prairies for nearly two months, and living on bread with margarine, wheat farina, and cheapo ramen; with occasional bags of shredded cabbage to prevent scurvy. (Also the occasional Subway or bag of All-Dressed chips.) So when I heard there was a vegan restaurant in Edmonton I was pretty excited. I went on my last night in Edmonton with three new friends, spent a whole week’s food budget, tried nearly everything on the menu, was so full it hurt, and regretted nothing.
I dare anyone to create a dish as awful looking as my sainted mother’s creamed eggs on toast.
I see your sainted mother’s creamed eggs on toast, and raise you my sainted mother’s creamed beef on toast.
Haggis and chips.
Yeah! Food politics! My favorite topic, and this is a great piece. Nicely done!
Sort of related, but if I ever notice a location tag for a restaurant on IG, I always click it to see which dishes people are uploading. I swear, almost 100% of the time, there are one or two dishes *dominating* the feed for that restaurant, and few stray snaps of other diners’ meals who didn’t get the memo. Try it out! There’s probably a trend in the dishes, I just haven’t pieced it together yet.
I noticed that too! You also see the same trends pop up in, say, Yelp reviews — somebody lays down the taste boundary, and then people seeking that specific thing generally have no reason to deviate from it. Or if something becomes a “specialty,” that tends to be the thing that dominates, despite the fact that there’s almost always better eats on the menu.
Yaaasssss, I’m glad you bring up the ethnic distinction when it comes to some people being snobby about how food “looks” unnecessarily. A lot of Southeast Asian foods are stewed and brown and meaty and very strongly scented, and it used to hurt me when people looked askance at them. Another way that people become self-hating because their food isn’t acceptably quiet enough for the majority then it gets snatched and prettified by fancy chefs. Sigh.
“Prettified by fancy chefs” is a whole ‘nother thing; the number of times someone clearly “enthusiastic” about Asian culture has tried to school me on dumplings or noodles…
Separately, the idea that somebody could take in a pungent, rich, complex food smell and not enjoy is totally foreign to me. (Only acceptable when the smell in question is stinky tofu, or durian.) Bring me your curries, your stews, your gooey meat messes.
Thank you for the reminder about LA’s Grand Central Market. I only went there once, about five years ago, and was so proud that I could order tacos in Spanish from one of the less-trendy (I’m guessing) stalls. I remember them being amazing. I probably ate them too fast to be aware of what they looked like.
Oh man, if you went to the market five years ago, you wouldn’t recognize it at all now. Many of the changes are for the better, but…
Yep.
A childhood spent eating mostly from the food bank and the handout line has left me with, among other things, a strong aversion to salmon loaf, Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey ice cream, and stewed tomatoes.
I still clear my plate, and have to consciously remind myself that there’s always more food, good food, that I can eat if I get hungry later.
And while I do buy discount yogurt and eat beans and rice, you can bet your ass it’s organic fancypants yogurt and heirloom beans.
Ugh, salmon loaf…why did you have to remind me.
When we were at our financial lowest, my school lunches consisted of cheap peanut butter hastily spread on a few saltines (not even those orange snack pack things, just standard saltines) and free school milk. Those were the times I remember actually being embarrassed about food.
On the other hand, we owned a used rental VHS copy of “Bugsy Malone” which I watched constantly. As a result of the soup kitchen song – “Down and Out” – I was always totally cool with eating canned tomato soup all the time. *shrug* Kids are weird.
this is great. i could read about food politics all day!
my mom has a story from her childhood in tunisia, where her family ate couscous every friday for shabbat dinner. one day, she invited a friend from school—a blonde daughter of british expats—and to her horror, her parents prepared mloukhia instead, which is…very very dark green and mucilaginous and pretty downright ugly. that “friend” never came over again.
Oh, I love mloukhia….I’m still kind of amazed that hummus (food from my actual heritage) is an accepted or even trendy food now, since the consensus when I brought it to school for lunch in 80’s and 90’s suburban New Jersey was that it looked and smelled like vomit mixed with shit. With that early schooling, so to speak, I’m still ultra-conscious of what smells and foods are “appropriate” for public appearance, and I envy my husband, who is not American and doesn’t see anything wrong with eating garlic (or pungent dried yogurt balls, or salad made of raw onions) and th6en going out and talking to people.
Yes, hello, Hilary here from BTS (Broke-Twenty-Something) News Network: Would you recommend a source for recipes that focus on “I have $15 to spend on food for the week?”
ramen and frozen vegetables got me through many a broke week.
Budget Bytes
Haha, you are like the Budget Bytes fairy!
I don’t have any off the top of my head but Budget Bytes (linked above) is a pretty good contender. Mostly, I make lots of things with produce and fruit, and add a grain (rice and angel hair pasta are my faves) of some kind to go against it. Also, slow cookers tend to have a lot of bulk recipes, so look out for those!
I don’t have a specific site in mind, but I’d check the Google machine for vegan recipes. It’s astonishing what you can do with a bag of dried lentils and some canned tomatoes.
One of my fave recipes is canned tomatoes and lentils spiced with hot paprika. (There’s also an onion and garlic, and maybe kale if you want.)
I enjoy the immense flexibility of the lentil-and-tomato base. You can add whatever spices you can scrounge together (ethnic grocery stores are your friend here), and then throw in any bonus vegetables you score in the “oh god these vegetables are deformed and nobody wants them” bin.
Seconded, although my usual MO is to get the veg first and find the recipes second. If you’re lucky, maybe there’s a market around that sells off overripe produce and day-old bread cheaply. When my CSA isn’t in season, I live for dollar bags of squishy tomatoes (perfect for sauce and stew) and bruised fruit (perfect for jam and sweets). It also takes some of the laborious decision-making out of cooking: if what you’ve got is a, b, and c, then the internet will be happy to tell you how make roasted a and b over c risotto or a-b-c stir fry or whatever.
I’ll also say that it depends on your employment status. I was living on $50/month for groceries when I was unemployed, but the unemployment meant I had plenty of time to cook things from scratch, so that was an advantage.
Jack Monroe, at http://agirlcalledjack.com/category/recipes-food/… does good cheap recipes, even cheaper than Budget Bytes (which is also great), and is a brilliant campaigner against food poverty in the UK.
Seconding this. Her recipes are really good and cheap and healthy. I make quite a few of her recipes on a regular basis and I’ve always been very happy with the end result.
When in doubt, I fill my slow cooker with dried beans (for about a buck), water, and half an onion and turn it on high until they’re tender. Then add any spices you have and make a bajillion bean burritos for the freezer. I also just scored 10 lb of potatoes for .99 so I’ll fry and add those in, along with anything else in the fridge (cheese, a lone tomato, some leftover rice, spinach that is looking wilty but can be steamed, etc.). Work lunches forever.
I just can’t believe how rude people are that commenting on someone else’s food is something they would do, especially if the comment is negative (I suppose that “ooh, that looks good… can I have the recipe?” is OK in certain contexts – otherwise, INTERNAL MONOLOGUE, thanks).
Thanks for a great article.
I’ve had *entire workplaces* that functioned like this. We’d sit down for lunch, and the entire lunch hour would be spent with every woman at the table commenting on each other’s meals (except for me). I would be sitting there thinking “We’re eating NOW. Why in the world would you talk about everyone else’s food? Should I be worried you’re going to try to steal my plate next?” It always looked like the women I worked with has zero interest outside of work asides from eating and cooking, no hobbies asides from cooking and watching cooking shows, no interest of society at large. These colleagues might have had other interests than food, but they never displayed them. Drove me crazy in the long run.
I think in some female workplace cultures it’s definitely considered a marker of class to constantly discuss food. The more elaborate and “healthy” and “fancy” the dish, the more you were respected at your job. It didn’t even matter how you performed at work or whether you were a decent human being as long as you were spending 2-3 hours a day after work getting involved in food. For the record, I never worked in a restaurant either – these were always white-collar workplaces.
Stopped eating lunch in my mostly female department because I could not deal with the endless round of fad diets, Atkins, slow carb, endless salads, etc etc etc. I have a really healthy self image they were making ME feel anxious. I’ll just sit at my desk and eat my leftover spaghetti in peace thank you.
This is terrific. Also, there is a special place in hell for colleagues who take it upon themselves to critique their co-worker’s food.
It boggles the mind. Why do GROWN PEOPLE think it is EVER okay to say “that looks like shit” about someone’s FOOD, within earshot of the person who is eating it? It’s the height of nastiness to offer the completely unsolicited opinion that you think somebody is about to ingest something that looks like excrement. WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS, I’M CALLING YOUR MOTHER
It’s a toddler thing to do, too, since it reflects the toddler eating habits of the speaker, because any well-rounded (or even not so well rounded) adult is surely aware that some of the best foods, yeah, look like glorp.
It makes me so ragey.
The opposite of that is when someone looks at my container of mysterious brown sludge and goes, “oh my god, I bet that tastes fantastic.” Thumbs up, friend. You’re in the know.
My cooking leans really strongly toward practical things that leave plenty of leftovers, so I loved every bit of this. It’s not just money. Time, which for a lot of families is the same thing as money, plays a role as well. Your typical one pot meal isn’t exactly a thing of beauty, but cooking isn’t everyone’s hobby or lifestyle. Sometimes it’s just a means of creating dinner, and that’s fine.
My grandfather used to make us something called “mujadavha” or something like that…not sure how it was spelled, but that was what it sounded like when he said it. I don’t know where he got the recipe, but he read that lentils were good for brain development so by damn his grandkids were going to eat lentils. It looked like sewage. It was delicious.
Nearly all lentil-based or bean-based dishes look like slop. So many of them are delicious!
One of my favourite lentil things is red lentils cooked with garlic, onion and water until they start to disintegrate, with grated cheddar stirred in. It is beige sludge, and wonderful.
Is it mujadara, lentils with caramelized onions?
I love this post.
I have this internal conversation basically everything time I cook.
Great article, but my single-minded pregnant self can really only focus on one thing: do you have a recipe for Japanese curry, because that sounds delicious.
Ah, here’s a recap of a reply to an earlier comment asking for a recipe:
My curry recipe is the one found at the back of every box of Kokumaro/similar store brand of Japanese curry (check your local Asian market), except that I half the water portion because otherwise it doesn’t solidify well/timely. I usually make mine with lots of onions, sweet potato and/or squash, and chicken thighs, but you can basically toss anything into it and if it has enough mass, it’ll cook alright.
Another commenter helpfully posted this: http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2010/06/how-to…
Good eating!
I didn’t see that comment until now, whoops. Thank you for the delicious-sounding recipe and advice!
Thanks! I’ll be buying the ingredients for a Japanese curry this week, because it sounds divine. Ugly food is the best food.
On Friday I made some soup. Before it was cooked, the ingredients were beautiful. The bean blend had a perfect medley of sizes, shapes, and colors. The four cups of assorted chopped bell peppers were beyond vibrant. The cooked sausage had just the right amount of browned bits.
And after cooking, it looks like absolute sludge. The vibrant peppers have melted away into the cooked down, homogenous beans. The crispy sausage pieces are coated in soup ooze. Take a picture, and you could believe it’s dog food.
But gods damn, it is delicious, and mad cheap (around $10, and my three quart crock pot was to the absolute brim). Plus plating each serving can hardly be easier, since I just slop it in a bowl.
I don’t know where I was going with this. Raw ingredients looked good but are inedible (raw bell peppers are the worst) while the final product is ugly and delicious. There’s some point there or something. I’m just distracted by my love of soup.
Haha I totally feel this! The raw ingredients for curries are beauuuutiful — and then you simmer everything together, add the sauce blocks, and there goes any non-brown coloration. Same for, as other commenters have pointed out, lentil dishes, and chilis too. Long live the ugly convenient eat!
Ah, here's a recap of a reply to an earlier comment asking for a recipe:
My curry recipe is the one found at the back of every box of Kokumaro/similar store brand of Japanese curry (check your local Asian market), except that I half the water portion because otherwise it doesn't solidify well/timely. I usually make mine with lots of onions, sweet potato and/or squash, and chicken thighs, but you can basically toss anything into it and if it has enough mass, it'll cook alright.
Another commenter helpfully posted this: http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2010/06/how-to…
Good eating!
Haha I totally feel this! The raw ingredients for curries are beauuuutiful — and then you simmer everything together, add the sauce blocks, and there goes any non-brown coloration. Same for, as other commenters have pointed out, lentil dishes, and chilis too. Long live the ugly convenient eat!
Seconding this. Her recipes are really good and cheap and healthy. I make quite a few of her recipes on a regular basis and I've always been very happy with the end result.
It boggles the mind. Why do GROWN PEOPLE think it is EVER okay to say "that looks like shit" about someone's FOOD, within earshot of the person who is eating it? It's the height of nastiness to offer the completely unsolicited opinion that you think somebody is about to ingest something that looks like excrement. WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS, I'M CALLING YOUR MOTHER
It's a toddler thing to do, too, since it reflects the toddler eating habits of the speaker, because any well-rounded (or even not so well rounded) adult is surely aware that some of the best foods, yeah, look like glorp.
It makes me so ragey.
The opposite of that is when someone looks at my container of mysterious brown sludge and goes, "oh my god, I bet that tastes fantastic." Thumbs up, friend. You're in the know.