- Food waste is on the rise globally – and the majority of influencers certainly aren’t helping.
- When meals are #gifted, food Instagrammers can order as much as they want in a restaurant, and most feel that having more dishes makes for a better photo.
- Some order far more than they’ll eat for the sake of the perfect Instagram shot and send lots of leftovers back to the kitchen, most of which get thrown away.
- Although some take a more responsible approach and only order what they’ll eat, others believe it’s their duty as a new generation of restaurant critics to sample an array of dishes.
- Some restaurants welcome influencers who do this, as their reach can offer a form of incredibly powerful promotion for them.
- Still, it’s a problem all parties involved need to help manage.
- Visit Insider’s homepage for more stories.
Angie Silver is never sure how much food to order.
One option is to choose a range of dishes that show off a restaurant’s menu, allowing her to sample various plates, and – most importantly – ensuring she gets the perfect photo for Instagram.
The other is to just order one dish, so she doesn’t waste any food.
The full-time luxury lifestyle influencer is known for her beautiful photography from London and abroad, showcasing the best restaurants and most aesthetically pleasing dishes.
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But, she admits that she sometimes orders more food than she's actually going to eat.
"I don't really know where I stand on this one," Silver told Insider.
"While I definitely don't agree with food waste, I must admit I don't finish every plate that you see in my photos.
"It's a tough one - as an Instagrammer I want the food picture to look as good as possible both for my grid and to please the restaurant, but equally I hate to think of all that food in the bin."
It's safe to say Silver is more conscious than the majority of other influencers.
Go out to any 'grammable restaurant and you'll spot them: posing by a flower wall, insisting on the tables with the best light, and ordering a selection of dishes at once which they'll then arrange into an artistic flat-lay shot.
So far, so harmless.
But what happens to all that uneaten food that gets sent back to the kitchen?
Food waste is on the rise
Despite the increasing number of startups aiming to tackle food waste - from apps allowing the public to give their surplus groceries to neighbors, to cafes creating dishes solely from previously thrown-away ingredients - the amount of food being thrown away is rising.
A recent report by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) suggested that annual food waste will hit 2.1 billion tons worth $1.5 trillion by 2030, a rise of a third from 2018 figures.
These worrying figures come at a time when our social media feeds are inundated with lavish abundance - whether it's piled-high freakshakes or flat-lays of excessive spreads, more is more when it comes to food photos on Instagram.
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A number of staff members at popular London restaurants confirmed to Insider that they do see influencers ordering extra food for the sake of their photos, though some wished to remain anonymous.
Prue Freeman, founder of Aussie-inspired London restaurant chain Daisy Green Collection, said: "There can be some waste in search of perfect photo." At her restaurants, however, influencers and regular diners alike are encouraged to take home any leftovers.
"We always offer everyone the ability to take home what they can't finish and people seem to love this," Freeman added.
She sees influencers coming in for meals as mutually beneficial - in fact, earlier this year the restaurants launched both vegan and meat-based sharing boards with Instagram in mind, because they're particularly flat-lay-friendly.
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When food is free, people order more than they would normally
More often than not, influencers' meals are complimentary, meaning they can order as much as they want for free.
Stricter rules from the Advertising Standards Authority mean it's more common to see an Instagrammer using the tag #gifted (to disclose their meal was a gift) than it used to be, but that still doesn't stop social media stars from ordering more than they would were they paying for their dining experience.
Sometimes this is organized directly with the restaurant, other times it's through a PR company.
However, in some cases influencers are given specified allowances specifically to stop them from ordering a ludicrous amount of food.
"When dealing with the budgets and reputations of our clients we're always really respectful and want to keep wastage to a minimum," said Frances Cottrell-Duffield, managing firector of Tonic PR & Communications, whose clients include popular London restaurants Honest Burgers, Rosa's Thai Cafe, and Pastaio.
"As an agency we don't encourage or facilitate the kinds of posts where lots of food has been ordered to make a spread look really indulgent - those pictures don't represent value or responsibility and they don't sit well with us, or our clients," she told Insider.
"We like to offer plenty to make sure people have a good time, but we also want to make sure the pictures are representative of a paying customer's experience at the restaurants."
For some PR agencies, however, playing middle man between restaurant and influencer can be tricky.
"Acting on behalf of our clients, but also having an understanding of how important that perfect shot is for the influencer we're working with, means that PRs are often stuck as the middle man," Tori Slater, managing director of Gerber Communications, told Insider.
But she believes the more organized an influencer can be, the less food is likely to be wasted.
"Being clear from the outset on what the influencer will require and on timings for their shoot often helps reduce unnecessary food waste, so we don't have redundant dishes lying around," explained Slater, whose clients include the oft-'grammed London restaurants Caravan, Gloria, and Gymkhana.
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"We will know already which dishes are the most photogenic or which might be best suited to that particular influencer's style, so can help curate things from that side, again reducing the amount of dishes being prepared that turn out to be 'not quite right.'
"From the client's perspective, we always make sure they understand the benefit of working with each influencer, and as much as possible involve them in the process - this leads to better content for the influencer, eg. photos and videos of the dish being prepared, and means the client sees first-hand the effort going into the shoot, and not just a stream of dishes flying out of the kitchen and being returned untouched."
However, Slater adds that most of the influencers they work with are true foodies who are pretty good at "tucking into the food" and not wasting too much.
Some influencers feel strongly about ordering responsibly
It's easy to sneer at influencers, but many of the best ones have become trusted arbiters of taste, replacing restaurant critics and travel guides, with their captions providing as much interest as their shots.
Despite the fact that some influencers may lack a moral conscience when it comes to food waste, there are many who do feel a responsibility to order ethically.
"I'm totally against over-ordering for the sake of a photo," anonymous Instagrammer Clerkenwell Boy told Insider.
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"I hate seeing food waste ... especially when there are so many starving kids out there (through raising awareness for #CookForSyria and other charity initiatives I've read up on a lot of reports about this)."
With this in mind, Clerkenwell Boy predominantly shares pictures of individual dishes with his 200,000 followers, rather than flat-lays of endless plates.
"If you look at my Instagram feed it's mainly championing signature dishes for example that Iberico katsu Sando from TaTa Eatery or those confit potatoes from Quality Chop House plus seasonally available dishes," he said.
"I really believe in championing the signature dishes plus then giving a little insight into the rest of the menu or the restaurant's vibes and ethos.
"If I'm going to a meal with a whole bunch of friends that's the only time I would order more from the menu so we can try a range of dishes ... Or go back another time. Plus I always believe in making sure I ask for a doggy bag in the rare occasions where there's any leftover food."
Influencers are the new food critics
Some influencers will argue that they're essentially restaurant critics reviewing the establishment, so ordering more food than they'll eat simply allows them to form a more balanced opinion.
If food influencers are the new restaurant critics, how does this behavior compare to that of more traditional food reviewers, who may have always ordered excessive amounts of food just without taking and sharing the photos on social media?
"As somebody who writes about food for a living, I often find myself ordering more dishes than I can consume in one sitting," LA Times restaurant critic Patricia Escarcega told Insider.
"I want to know a menu inside-out before I sit down to write about a restaurant. The only way to do that is by visiting a restaurant often and ordering many dishes."
Escarcega believes food waste is an "occupational tragedy of food writing" that is rarely discussed.
"It's a subject that's always lurking in my mind because I was raised by modest, low-income parents who grew up without running water or electricity," she explained.
"They rarely let food go bad and our dinner plates were always clean. My mother would rightly go nuts if she saw the way many diners leave half-eaten steaks on the table."
Read more: This British company is turning wasted bread into beer
So how does Escarcega pare this approach with her profession?
"If a restaurant has a particularly large menu, I try to mitigate the potential of food waste by bringing along as many people as I can to help me eat it all," she said.
"I also practice the art of reheating leftovers and giving my three dogs whatever scraps are safe to feed them. But food waste is something we food media folks need to contend with and talk about more."
A doggy bag in multiple senses.
Is food waste an unavoidable consequence of the profession?
In the eyes of some, ordering extra dishes is simply a requirement of the job, whether you're an old-school media critic or a food Instagrammer.
"The job description of an influencer, and it is a job for many, has a confused meaning," Tom Rogers AKA Gourmet Guy told Insider.
"For most, it means being used by a restaurant, PR, or other entity, to promote a specific project (whether that be a new chef, new menu, the existence of a place, or something else).
"This means you are invited in to experience a restaurant, try the food, gauge the overall experience and produce one single photo that sums all of that up in a 4 x 5 Instagram post."
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Rogers believes this can be particularly difficult because not only is an influencer a food photographer, they are also trying to portray the ambiance, taste, mood, smell, and texture, much like a critic would.
"To do this you do sometimes need more food than the average customer would need - remember, one lone pizza does not make a party," Rogers said.
While restaurant food appears to be the most photographed on Instagram, the increasing sway of influencers means the same problems are also arising at home.
According to a 2017 report by British supermarket Sainsbury's, an increasing number of young people are buying obscure ingredients they've seen foodie influencers use on social media, and then ultimately throwing them away.
But as food blogger Izy Hossack pointed out to BBC Newsbeat at the time, this is no different to people being inspired by TV chefs.
Influencers offer restaurants money-can't-buy promotion
For restaurants, having their dishes photographed and shared by influencers can offer money-can't-buy promotion, raising awareness of the brand in corners of the world they could never otherwise dream of reaching by more traditional advertising methods.
"Chefs and restaurants are stepping up to make their food look as beautiful as it tastes and I'm sure the edible flower business is booming," Zoey Henderson, head of operations at Redemption Seven Dials, told Insider.
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"The food coming out of kitchens not only now has to impress the immediate diners but the whole of social media where someone from the other side of the world is judging your product.
"This is great as it raises the bar. We love that people want to snap our dishes. It; free advertising and brings more people through the doors."
One of the most Instagrammable cafes in London, Elan, previously told Insider that it doesn't have to spend any money on advertising or marketing because influencers do that job for them.
Similarly, Loui Blake, Managing Director of vegan restaurant Erpingham House in Norwich, UK, told Insider that they consider working with influencers to be a "cost effective, genuine way" to achieve their goal of popularizing environmentally friendly diets.
"I would argue [it's] less wasteful than producing food purely to photograph - the plates always leave empty in our experience!" he said.
Restaurants are finding inventive ways to recycle food waste
Raw ingredients that don't end up being used in restaurants can often be whipped up into something new or redistributed elsewhere, but finding a use for food that is sent back to the kitchen when the diner has just ordered too much is slightly more complicated.
Of course, a half-eaten sandwich or an untouched side of fries can't exactly be deconstructed and re-served due to health and safety regulations.
One strategy, however, is to use it as compost.
"One of the initiatives we've been using for a few years now is the complete recycling of food waste to grow vegetables, herbs, and garnishes which then come back to the restaurant and on diners' plates again," David Moore, owner of Michelin star restaurant Pied à Terre, told Verdict Food Service in 2018.
"Whatever's not eaten by our customers from a carcass to bones to the fat is composted - we have also been recycling our used coffee ground now, which gets made into biodiesel."
Blake told Insider that at Erpingham House, they too compost "as much as possible" from customer leftovers.
There's no rule book for the new world of influencers
From how much to charge for a sponsored post to whether it's acceptable to order more food than you're going to eat or not, there's no etiquette guide on how to be - or work with - an influencer.
"The reality is that the ordering power of influencers has become limitless, restaurants often don't know how much to offer and influencers don't know how much (or little) they should order - the result can be wasted food, and it's an issue that's never been more prominent in the hospitality industry (and the world over) than now," Rogers said.
"It's a job for all parties involved to help manage: clear objectives from the PR, appropriate suggestions from the server or restaurant, and a level of restraint from the influencer."
Quite how much restaurant food waste is being affected by the rise of the influencer is yet to be quantified, but the conversation comes at a time when sustainable living has never been more on trend.
Much like being seen with a cardboard coffee cup will now make you persona non grata, it may soon be the case where influencers caught sending tons of food back to restaurant kitchens see their popularity falling as a result - beautiful flat-lay or not.
Insider has reached out to Instagram for comment.