Minimal Wellness is not a food blog. Yes, I post recipes and relevant photos, but the purpose of this site is not to publish as many drool-inducing recipes as I can create. In fact, it’s the opposite.
The purpose of the recipes I develop for Minimal Wellness is to provide readers with healthy, delicious, and straightforward meal ideas. My goal with food photography is to show that these recipes are simple, attainable, and easily reproducible, not aspirational. While I aim to make cuisine that looks appealing and tastes fantastic, I avoid fetishizing food as it can feed unhealthy dietary habits.
This is the primary reason I don’t do food photoshoots — I don’t have special lighting or a fancy camera (I use my iPhone) and I don’t retouch or manipulate the images. I want my photos to depict wholesome, realistic, and honest meals for real life — not a staged scene, perversion of perfect, or a cheap craveable. Of course I try to take pleasing pictures (I’m working to improve my photography via this fantastic course), but I’m not a photographer.
The other reason I don’t do food photoshoots is that I’m concerned with food and environmental sustainability, including the massive food waste issue in the U.S. So I don’t make recipes purely to take photos of them, I make a recipe, snap a few photos and then either eat it myself or serve it to my family. I use blemished, bruised, deformed, and past-its-prime produce. Sometimes a dish gets a little over-cooked. Occasionally a delectable recipe just doesn’t look outstanding. These are the unglamorous realities of everyday healthful cooking.
Food doesn’t need to be picture-perfect to be nourishing and worthy of consumption.