“I think if anyone has any interest in anything, just start posting and see if you can find people who relate to you. There’s someone out there who will really like what you’re posting, and you won’t know if you’re just scrolling.”
I’m from Ljublana, Slovenia, where I got a bachelor's degree in Cultural Tourism, thinking that would allow me to be more involved with food. I first started cooking for myself when I went vegan, and when lockdown hit I started doing it more often. Our final assignment was actually the catalyst that led to my instagram. We had to come up with an idea for an Instagram profile to boost tourism, and I immediately went to find a way to fit food into it. I posted a Krofi, a Slovenian jam-filled donut and I got some followers. I decided to change the name, and delete everything, but keep posting. And here we are now! So I can thank my school project. -imade.amess
I've always enjoyed cooking, and I got pretty into documenting what I was cooking. I just always enjoyed food and video and I chronically had to have video footage of everything that I did. I was that kid who was always recording things. I wanted to be a food blogger because I could take pretty pictures. When the pandemic happened I found myself missing all of that so I started cooking. It made sense for to document it, that’s how @foodjars was born. I wanted to catalog and share the things that I was doing but I didn’t have an outlet for it so I created one for myself, and it stayed even as the world kind of ‘re-opened’. -foodjars
I was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. I’m Iranian-American - my parents both immigrated here from Iran and I feel like that's already been a great source of inspiration growing up. I was always exposed to different cultures and was able to try new things. I made @bread.bitch in 2020 because of an old friend who was part of this community of people that share their food online. It was different to what I grew up around. It didn’t have the same connotations I associated with food in the media, where it’s either Food Network promotional content, or moms packing their children’s lunch. I felt like I didn’t have a space on instagram until I found this community. -bread.binch
“You never know where people currently are in their relationship with food and I’m very mindful of that. I have a platform so I want to be considerate of the content I put out.”
- @foodjars
Food is a powerful medium.
How are you using this to your advantage?
I think there's always a communal feeling to each post. You see photos of dishes that people cook for their families, for their friends and they’re beautiful photos. The people I surround myself with online are not people who think of food as fuel, or as something to be quantified in calories. It’s something that brings people together.
-@imade.amess
Food can be powerfully unifying,
especially for our generation growing up on the internet. If anything, I feel like having this platform has given me a chance to normalize food and eating. It’s special to have something centered around food and cooking and not bodies. I try to honour this, and I try to make it a very welcoming account.
-@bread.binch
Do you view your photography as a form of art?
“It feels nice to think that something doesn’t have to be gorgeous to resonate”
-@foodjars
I think so, but I struggle to call myself a creative person. It's kind of hard to have a vision or an aesthetic in mind with food because it just won’t work out as you want it to. Funny enough, the posts that I don’t really love aesthetically are the ones that do better, in terms of analytics. It feels nice to think that something doesn’t have to be gorgeous to resonate. -@foodjars
I think the community is creative and does a lot in inspiring each other.
There’s one post I did with a babka, and it actually looked like something out of a museum. Something to do with the light, and the way I took it, and I tried to replicate that same energy with all of my posts.
-@bread.binch
Any advice on young creatives wishing to pursue any sort of career in the same realm food photography or food-focused art?
Figure out what your aesthetic looks like, and that doesn't have to be like digging through or whatever but, I see myself trying to emulate others sometimes and just doesn’t feel good. Your art will never look like other peoples’. Everyone has their own thing, and you don’t need anything special to make art. Natural light, for example. I rely on that a lot because I use my phone, random props in my kitchen and it still looks okay. People can tell, I think, when you’re not being true to yourself, or authentic (which is a word I hate). Don’t be too hard on yourself, it usually comes across when you’re being genuine in whatever way that looks like to you. -@foodjars
I think if anyone has any interest in anything, just start posting and see if you can find people who relate to you. There’s someone out there who will really like what you’re posting, and you won’t know if you’re just scrolling! You gotta start somewhere. You can start from a dimly-lit kitchen, and some people won’t know or care. It doesn’t have to even look beautiful or appealing to be creative. There’s pressure for things to look perfect and flawless, which often makes me refrain from posting when it shouldn’t. Everyone makes mistakes. Start from somewhere, someone will like it!
-@bread.binch