The Grub: Please silence your phones

I have a love/hate relationship with my cell phone.

Within this appendage I carry around every minute of every day, I hold resources my journalism predecessors would beg to have.

There’s a camera with video. There’s Twitter. There’s Instagram. There’s a voice recorder.

And it’s all getting in the way of a good meal.

There might be few things worse than a phone resting on the table while eating. It’s a bad habit of mine, too. But instead of giving attention to what I should be doing—marveling at this Maxwell’s Market tenderloin Caesar sandwich—I’m thumbing through updates, waiting for a buzz that says, “Hey, someone is talking to you. Answer them now or die.”

A cursory glance around the small café, and I realize I’m not the only one. I pick my head up and see this couple, finishing up their lunch, their necks arched down at their phones, buried in something that can wait.

Then, if I’m a food reporter, I must take a photo of what I’m eating and show everyone in the world, “Hey, did you see that I ate this? Well, I did. Here’s proof.”

How obnoxious.

I get the notion to snap a photo of something if you cooked it. If I make a grilled cheese, then I’m probably going to take a picture of it and show the world, because even the idea of cooking for myself is a rarity.

But when I’m eating at a restaurant by my lonesome or with some friends, the cell phone has got to be out of sight, out of mind. By trying to endlessly capture the moment, we lose the experience of just being there, even with food.

These new phones—which are starting to get as big as my head—do hold some merit for food reporters, I guess. I can’t complain too much about having everything at the palm of my hand.

Nowadays, I can snap a photo of that messy tenderloin sandwich and share it with my friends as if to say, “Look at this thing I ate. Later on, I’ll describe it, but I had to show you now for instant gratification.”

We all do it, constantly making trivial status updates online while missing out on what we could be enjoying in the moment, hoping for a modicum of acceptance from our social media peers.

Instead of eating said sandwich, I get wrapped up in the show and tell. The truth about the elementary event of eating a sandwich is that it is boring to everyone except the person showing and telling.

But the one thing these phones will never have is what comes with the awkward conversation of a first date, the slurp of a strawberry milkshake and the crunch of perfectly fried chicken.

That’s the happiness and reality we can miss when we’re rummaging through the egocentric apps on our phones.

Right on time, I get an alert—a text message, another like on a photo. Should I punch in the code to unlock my phone and see if someone got my ill-fated attempt at humor?

The rest of this sandwich says otherwise.

Matthew Sigur covers food for 225 Dine. Sign up for our weekly 225 Dine newsletter or read about the latest restaurant news at 225batonrouge.com/food.