Picture-perfect Instagram photos of freshly baked food may look inspiring on your feed, but there’s often a much bigger story to tell, lying just outside of the camera’s frame. For their campaign, titled A Kitchen Lived In: Perception vs. Reality, furniture company Wren Kitchens asks this exact question: “Behind the filters and clever editing, what does the full picture look like?”
They teamed up with five influential food bloggers (who all happen to be parents) to reveal what a lived-in kitchen actually looks like beyond the perfectly framed and carefully filtered photo. Mother and lifestyle blogger Bridie by the Sea submitted the above photo of the first time she baked muffins with her toddler. Despite the spills of flour and copious plastic wrappers, she tells Wren Kitchens that the day was a success. “It’s all about balance – enjoying the moment together regardless of mess and chaos.”
Scroll down to read more “human moments” that don’t always make it onto the Instagram captions.
“Anyone who has ever cooked with kids knows that the reality often involves mess, spillages, nibbling at the ingredients and even tantrums – it is definitely not Instagram perfect!” – says blogger Emma (@sebsmummy83), who knows how to give a photo a good crop.
@Californiamuminlondon has felt the pressure to produce high-quality content on social media for a long time. “I mainly ignore those pressures, it’s tough enough being a mother these days. I don’t want to add to anyone’s feelings of inadequacy. While I will sometimes share the better photos and not share the utter mess of my life, I like my blog and social media to be a fairly accurate portrayal of my family life.”
“Picture perfect scenes of beautiful culinary creations are undoubtedly beautiful and in many ways inspiring, but as a less-than-Pinterest-perfect mama, they sometimes leave me feeling deflated and lacking in the creative department,” says blogger Hannah (@buddingsmiles). This picture of hers is helping to break down that barrier.
Jack—a doctor, dad, and blogger of Working Family Food—is honest about his painstakingly thought-out Instagram posts. “I enjoy composing my dishes to look good and I spend time taking photos from all sorts of angles to get just the shot I think shows off the dish’s attributes. What you won’t see in my photos is the stack of mixing bowls, sticky utensils and scatterings of flour, splashes of milk or drips of sauce that have gone into making the dish. Would including the chaos and debris of reality make the food less appealing? Would there be less ‘likes’? Going forward, I will still put up photos I think ‘sell the food’, however don’t be surprised if a few shots of a toy-strewn living room or a child covered in his own dinner also make it up – this is the reality. Please don’t judge too harshly!”
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via [Fubiz, Wren Kitchens Blog]
All images via Wren Kitchens.