The founder told Bored Panda that the community that's grown around their IG page keeps them passionate about continuing the project. "Many followers are sending me submissions about bad food, so that’s what makes me keep going," they said.

What's more, I was curious to get their take on the importance of how food looks and where the line between good and bad dishes lies. "It’s a mix of how it looks, tastes, and costs," the founder explained that we tend to focus on several things. But if you're taking photos of meals for social media, then it's the first of the three that you need to give extra attention to for obvious reasons.

"For Instagram, how it looks is the most important one obviously. A dish could be the most delicious dish you’ve ever eaten, but if it looks bad it ruins everything, in my opinion. I think most people think this way too."

The Instagram page that celebrates the ugly beauty of bad food has over 15.7k followers and we see that number increasing in the future. After all, in a perfectly curated Instagram feed that’s full of beauty and aesthetics, ugliness stands out even better.

One of the draws of the account is that it’s very candid and open with its content. It doesn’t try to sugarcoat anything. You can even see that in the account’s name—the humor is so blunt, we can’t even write the full name because the social media censors would bleep everything. Alas!

Keep in mind that first impressions mean everything in the world of food. The look, the smell, the first bite—it all comes together to either make or (in this case) break the meal. And though trends might change (just have a look at some of these vintage foods), there’s a general gut feeling that we have about whether or not something is a timeless classic or complete slop.

During an earlier interview with Professor Nathalie Cooke from McGill University, I learned that even if meals might look very peculiar decade to decade (and completely weird from where we’re currently standing in 2021), we should still be familiar with most of the flavor profiles.

“The taste combinations—savory and sweet (tuna waffles, ham and bananas) or sweet and sour (mayo with lime) are surely very familiar,” Professor Cooke told Bored Panda.

According to Professor Cooke, some meal trends were driven by “corporate marketing departments” and this led to some truly weird combinations like main course dishes having marshmallows in them.

As for the future, the professor had some ideas about what it might hold for the world of gastronomy: “Perhaps that we try to ‘eat’ food without any taste at all—in the form of vitamin pills? Or drink it—in the form of smoothies? That we replicate the animal kingdom and encourage children to consume it—as gummy bears, cracker fishes, dinosaur eggs in oatmeal? That we continue to be mystified by the miracle of bread and milk?”

One thing’s for sure, though—as long as we have amazing-looking meals, we’ll have unappetizing ones, too, lurking in the shadows.