A photograph of food becomes art when it goes beyond showing what a dish looks like and begins to explore something else, beauty, memory, excess, ritual, labor, desire, waste, identity, or loss.
Food in contemporary art is no longer just a subject. From about the 1980s, artists around the world have used food as medium, performance, politics, and provocation.
Food in Pop Art is food as everyone already knows it, from the supermarket shelf, the fast food counter, the advertising hoarding, the television commercial.
Food in Baroque art is rarely just decoration; painters used bread, oysters, fruit, wine, game, and imported luxuries to show wealth, technical mastery, and the fragility of earthly pleasure.