Pinterest Food Rules: A Guide

Okay folks, I know you know I'm addicted to Pinterest. This is no secret. I am the girl who plans on browsing for five minutes and ends up spending the next two hours pinning fan art from Howl's Moving Castle onto a board that she realized (too late) should really have been a secret board so no one realized how obsessed she really is. I use Pinterest for all sorts of things. I find crafts for the kids and teens at work. I find crafts to make as gifts or to make my life easier. I used a tutorial I found on Pinterest to make my own bike crate.

I also use Pinterest to find recipes for various Asian noodles, which I then consume in large quantities whilst watching The Gilmore Girls in and endless loop on Netflix.

While I peruse the various pins of food, I usually give up unless I find something quickly because the food on Pinterest is...not appetizing. Everything is drenched in cheese or canned soup with gloppy unidentified chunks of vegetable or meat inside, and it's just gross.

Now, I am not saying that the recipes don't taste awesome. They might. But no one will ever make these recipes for one important reason: THEY LOOK DISGUSTING. The finished dish you put out on the table should not look like vomit OR like a thick white goo. It should look like a meal, not like loose stool. Author and humorist Laurie Notaro even made a board dedicated to pinning only food that looks like it's pre-digested, so I'm not the only one bothered by this.

And now, visual evidence of the horrible meals I found in a five-minute skim of the Food and Drink category on Pinterest, just so you know I'm not making this up:

 What is this even? Blurry, dark photo of something oily, oversauced, and unidentifiable.

Again with the raw chicken?

These foods all cook at different rates, so I hope you like raw potatoes and overcooked chicken.

Why was this picture even taken? Cans, boxes, and raw meat.

Found on someone's "Mexican Cooking" board. There is nothing Mexican about this dish.

 Keep raw chicken off the internet. PLEASE.

Garnish cannot hide the sins committed here.

Most of these pictures are out of focus, perhaps the camera's way of protecting viewers.

Not one, but three cans of soup.

"Dump and Go" is something I do not want to associate with food.

No part of this recipe looks even slightly edible. Original source deleted blog in shame. 

This bread is made of cancer. 

We can fix this, Internet. I promise. Here's how we do it. We all have to follow this advice, on our blogs, our Facebook pages, our Twitter feeds, and our Pinterest boards:

1. Don't take pictures of raw meat.
2. Skip out on this "Dump and Go" thing. It sounds like a bowel movement and doesn't look much better. 
3. If you don't have good lighting in your kitchen or a decent camera, forget trying to be a food blogger. 
4. If you blog your meals, don't combine all your pictures into one long strip, if any part of it is badly-lit, out of focus, or RAW, it will make your readers projectile-vomit onto their computer screens, and they will blame you.
5. If the finished meal is completely hidden under mounds of cheese or soup, you need to reassess your life choices.
6. Putting your photograph through Photoshop does not help if it makes the raw chicken you photographed look Pepto-Bismol pink.
7. Putting food into a muffin tin does not automatically make it taste good.
8. Food coloring is not a good way to make your kids eat. It is a good way to give them tentacles and extra limbs.
9. This is hard for me to say, because I love bacon, but adding bacon to a recipe doesn't always make a dish better. If you wrap it around a meat loaf, hot dogs, or other substances, it will stay flabby and gross. None of the fat will render out of it, and it will kill your gallbladder.
10. If canned soup is your most-used ingredient, learn to make a roux and save your kidneys the horrible death they'll suffer if you keep using soup to make all your meals. Reduced sodium soup doesn't reduce the sodium enough to keep you healthy.

BONUS: Don't repin anything that breaks the rules, and save the rest of us from whatever the heck that rainbow bread is up there.