10 Things We Wish Lebanese Food Bloggers Would Stop Doing

By default, food bloggers are obnoxious. But add the Lebanese twist to them and they become all the more annoying. Yes, we sometimes post pictures of our favorite dishes from around the city on our Instagram page, but, that does not stop us from bitching about people who claim to be bloggers just because they have a smartphone. From fetishizing food to elaborate tagging of all the products that can fit in the small square that Instagram allows, here are the things we wish Lebanese food bloggers would stop doing.

1. Pretending they are ‘obsessed’ with an obscure brand of a very obscure thing to be obsessed with

OMG I love this @NaturalLebo sea salt soooo much that I find a way to tag it in every single photo, even when it’s the rogue photo I post of my family. Is @NaturalLebo your only sponsor?

2. Annoying usernames

@TanyaLovesBurgersButDoesntLoveHotdogs (we don’t care), and then the ones who were too late in the game so their ideal username became unavailable and they had to resort to something like @Fo0d1eInLeb_a_n___o_____n.

3. Sponsoring their posts

If you’re annoying enough of a person to only post pictures of food incessantly on Instagram, trust us, we have deliberately made it a point not to follow you. Please stop sponsoring your pictures – we don’t want to see your face and your poorly lit pictures of a pasta from Roadsters.

4. Pretending like it’s a major feat to eat food

Is that the only thing you’re capable of doing in life? It’s like, a basic bodily function, it’s not even a hobby. Stop making it seem miraculous that you like fries. We all fucking like fries. Have you ever read a book?

5. Fetishizing food

With obnoxious captions like ‘can’t wait to get my hands on those buns’……………………..please stop. It’s creepy and it makes me uncomfortable. Are you going to take ‘those buns’ home and pull an American Pie on them? If not, then stop. It’s not a good look. It makes people think you’ve never been capable of having a functional human interpersonal relationship and that your only hope in being sexually satisfied is by fucking your burger.

6. Daily elaborate morning breakfast routines

We get it. You make oatmeal on occasions and usually rely on your mother or housekeeper to lay out some labneh, olives, and chopped vegetables every other day of the week. You also have them make you nescafe 3 in 1, and you document the process on your Instastory. It’s literally a sachet of sugar and 1% coffee that’s ready made. You just have to add hot water. Do you know how to make water hot? Impressive.

7. Be surprisingly impressed with every new restaurant in town

We know you’re only impressed because you’re eating there for free – and deep down inside, you’re really only impressed that you’ve passed as a legitimate form of a food critic and that people even invite you anywhere.

8. Overtagging

Fine, tag the restaurant who invited you to a free burger. Fine. Do it. FINE. But when you go so far as to tag the @Heinz ketchup and the @Sohat water that is so sadly placed on the table as if they’re posing for @VogueFood’s next Arabia cover, it makes us feel really sad for you and everyone who pretends to be your friend (they just hang out with you cuz they sometimes get free fries).

9. Pretending that every photo is spontaneous

Listen, we know you’ve used three different photo-editing apps and 5 Instagram filters to get to this off-putting post of a steak. We also know that you’re pretending to bite into the steak, and that you probably didn’t finish it or even like it that much (that is, if you even took a bite at all). Stop pretending like every heavily-staged photograph is spontaneous. By default, your username suggests that everything you do is a desperate cry for attention, so we are fully aware that none of this is spontaneous and that you’re really just here for a false sense of social validation in the form of (hopefully) over 100 Instagram likes.

10. Claiming that ‘pizza is your boyfriend’

Wait, you mean, you don’t actually have a real, human boyfriend? Who would’ve thunk it?!