We live in a food culture that no longer trusts the reader.
Everything must be shown. Explained visually. Proven in advance. The image comes first, the thinking later — if at all. A recipe without a photograph is considered incomplete. An idea without a video is considered weak. Silence has become suspicious.
This didn’t happen because visuals are inherently bad. It happened because imagination demands effort — and effort does not scale easily.
Visuals offer certainty. They close the gap between expectation and result before the reader ever engages. You see the finished dish, the perfect crumb, the gloss, the steam — and you are reassured. You know where you’re going. There is no risk of misinterpretation. No ambiguity. No room to get lost.
Imagination works in the opposite direction. It opens space instead of closing it. When you read without seeing, your brain has to construct meaning. You picture texture, temperature, movement. You anticipate outcomes. You participate. That participation is fragile — and modern content systems are built to eliminate fragility wherever possible.
Books understood this long before food media forgot it. For centuries, readers entered worlds without images. Entire landscapes, characters, emotions were built internally. The experience was personal, unrepeatable, shaped by memory and reference. Two people never imagined the same thing in exactly the same way — and that was the point.
Food writing once operated similarly. Descriptions mattered. Language carried weight. The reader was trusted to translate words into action, to engage senses through thought before engaging hands. The recipe was not a promise of replication; it was an invitation to interpret.
Somewhere along the way, that trust eroded.
As food became content, visuals became proof. Proof that the dish works. Proof that the author knows what they’re doing. Proof that the reader will succeed if they follow along. Images stopped being complementary and started becoming compulsory. Without them, a recipe feels naked — even if the writing is precise.
This shift didn’t just change how recipes are consumed. It changed how they are written.
When visuals dominate, language weakens. Description becomes redundant. Precision is replaced by reference: it should look like this. Instead of teaching readers how to recognize doneness, texture, balance, we show them a finished state and expect them to reverse-engineer the process. The result is passive cooking — replication without understanding.
There is also a deeper cultural discomfort at play: imagination cannot be controlled. Visuals can.
Images standardize experience. They flatten interpretation. They create a shared reference point that platforms can optimize, measure, and reward. Imagination resists all of that. It produces variation. It slows consumption. It cannot be tracked reliably. From a systems perspective, imagination is inefficient.
So we train audiences out of it.
Scroll culture reinforces this conditioning. Images stop the thumb. Text requires commitment. A photograph delivers instant gratification; a paragraph asks for time. In an economy built on speed, imagination is a liability.
But something is lost in this trade.
When everything is shown, nothing is discovered. When outcomes are predetermined, curiosity collapses. The reader becomes a consumer of results instead of a participant in process. Creativity is outsourced to the creator, and the audience is reduced to execution.
This is not progress. It is convenience masquerading as accessibility.
Choosing not to lead with visuals is often interpreted as elitist or nostalgic. In reality, it is a refusal to underestimate the reader. It is a belief that people are capable of more than we currently allow them to be. That they can read carefully. Imagine actively. Engage deeply.
Imagination is not a romantic ideal. It is a skill. And like any skill, it atrophies when unused.
When readers are never asked to picture, infer, or interpret, they lose confidence in their own perception. They stop trusting their senses. They look outward for confirmation instead of inward for understanding. Cooking becomes an act of compliance rather than exploration.
Visuals will always have a place. But they should support thinking, not replace it. They should open questions, not close them. When they dominate, they narrow experience instead of enriching it.
A recipe without an image is not incomplete.
It is unfinished in a different way — waiting for the reader to step in.
And that moment, where imagination takes over, is where creativity actually begins.
Not on the screen.
In the mind.
© 2025 Deborah Wehrens/ KooK Studioo. All rights reserved.
This essay may not be reproduced, adapted, or republished without written permission.
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