Digital Media Concepts/Social Media Effect on Diet

Introduction
Food Videos Became a popular hit amongst millennials when people would travel across places and local restaurants to try out new cuisines and what is the restaurants specialties. People would often try to take videos of the food that they were ordering and post it on various forms of social media. Most of these videos and pictures are clicked in high definition angles and makes one want to try out what they are eating. Different forms of Social Media do present videos on unique foods being made such as You Tube, Facebook ,Instagram, food blogs and TikTok. It became popular when people started to use the social media world in a more interactive way for example people living in California started making short clips of them eating at a local restaurant that was famous for its specialty. We can see in the picture of the fish tacos the picture looks very elegant..

Since these websites/apps have been very user friendly and makes food very attractive and makes people want to try out that particular thing. However other social media sources because of the shorter duration and people spending more time on it makes them more hungry and want to taste what the other person is trying.

Psychology
Posting pictures and videos of food on social media has a huge psychological effect on people's mind as they are spending most of their time on social media .Food photos are huge on social media because they're both easy-to-produce and relevant to everyone. It is often seen that if a person is watching more videos or liking pictures that relate to junk food they tend to eat that particular thing more often and also it may be more tastier as their minds are constantly subtly thinking about it. Photographed food can taste yummy even if we wouldn't normally enjoy it, reports New York Magazine quoting a recent paper published in the Journal of Consumer Marketing. However if we see more pictures or videos that make healthier foods then we can actually tune ourselves to eat healthy foods. Seeing other people's photos of 'healthy' food can trick us into believing that it's delicious.

Pandemic Affecting our Diet
When the pandemic began schools and college became distant learning as well parents started to work from home that caused most of us to be snacking due to anxiety and stress and also constantly being under the home environment. The boredom and restless energy that can come from being quarantined may cause some people to want to reach for snacks as a way to self-soothe. When the quarantine began people started to post more food videos and shared more content globally of different kinds of foods through social media. People created trends as making short videos to make quick snacks in quarantine. Most people did try making the stuff they saw online. When we post food pictures online, we create an atmosphere of intimacy. Food is a universal language, and sharing it only virtually helps us bond with each other .People bought more chips and more processed that was easy to eat at any point of the day than healthy foods. Consumers are reaching for foods that trigger a comforting childhood memory or are simply their go-to snack when they need to relieve stress. One popular trend that made people try out was Dalgona Coffee that became a popular trend in TikTok during this pandemic. This trend was tried by most people who had never made it before and just did it because it was being popular on social media for a very short phrase during the pandemic. Most people around the world started sharing videos of them making it within 10 minutes and how delicious it was.

