Lens: Voigtlander color-skopar 35mm f2.5
Camera: NEX-7, ISO400, f2.5, 1/60, raw
We had dinner at my parents. They invited some colleagues from the old times, people I haven’t seen since ages. It was a very nice atmosphere, even with the extreme hot weather than is now making Italy very similar to a steam bath.
As most of the Italian mothers and grandmothers, my mum is an excellent cook. She’s also the kind of post 70’s feminist, so she avoided to teach my sister how to prepare a meal (that would have been sexist) but she imposed me to help her in the kitchen since I was a kid (so I would learn that a man has to help in the housekeeping). As a result, I’m an excellent cook while my sister struggles in the kitchen. I know she reads the blog from time to time, so, little sister, don’t be angry, you know I love and admire you for many things, your culinary art just isn’t one of these.
We are not the only case of post feminism asymmetric culinary education in Italy. Most of the girls I know are very little used to cook, while all the good cooks (of my age) I know are guys. Luckily, cooking has now become some pretty sophisticated, cool, and sometimes sexy topic, so we (guys who love cooking) don’t feel emasculated anymore, on the contrary!
Two of my cooking hero's Antonio Carluccio and Gennaro Contaldo have also expressed their concern about the young ladies of Italy who never learned to cook. They along with Jamie Oliver and a couple Canadian chefs have really made me take cooking on as a hobby. I've seen every picture you've taken for this project, I don't think you've posted a single picture of a dish you've cooked (correct me if I'm wrong). I find taking (nice) pictures of food very difficult so am reluctant to post any of my food creations.
You're right, I don't take pics of the meals I cook. This is basically for two reasons:
1) I like to eat food while it's still hot 🙂
2) Food photography often requires to “manipulate” the food so that it looks “delicious”. I don't like to manipulate a meal, I cook for the pleasure of eating it 🙂
That said, one of these days I'll try anyway.
My thoughts exactly, taking pictures of food is like playing with it 😉 Still I like to make my food look like someone might actually pay for it, although perhaps not much 🙂