Symmetrical Breakfasts

In 2013 Michael Zee made breakfast for himself and his partner Mark van Zee; having laid it out symmetrically, he posted a photo online. Doing this every day since, he now has an Instagram account with 770,000 followers.

Symmetrical breakfasts created a distinctive new genre within food photography, itself a recent digital extension of subjectivity thanks to phone cameras and platforms like – and now especially – Instagram. The contents and presentation visibly show imagination; the concept and curation manifest invisible agency. Breakfast, Zee observes, is often a rushed meal so his versions offer a fantasy of unrushed expressiveness. Each breakfast is a work of art with a visible investment of time, care, and precision; each is also a labor of love, a creation in which imaginative cooking and curation becomes an expression of intimacy in an off-the-page relationship. “People wonder if I’m crazy or obsessive,” Zee says, “but it is a declaration of love, really. I’m dedicated – both to breakfast and to Mark.”¹ The visibility of imaginative agency partly masks the labor and costs of production: Zee put in long hours of research and preparation; he got up very early or cooked ahead. Making it look easy garnered a compliment from the co-founder of Instagram, Kevin Systrom, on his website: “It just shows how you can take the everyday and make it beautiful.”²

Why is symmetrybreakfast such a success story? Breakfast is arguably the most diverse meal around the world; Zee features lots of glocalised food, fusing ingredients and conventions. On January 8, 2018, for instance, he posted “Monday: Fluffy Japanese style hotcakes with mango from Hainan and strawberries from Jiangsu, which are now strangely in season in Shanghai!” Most of the breakfasts nudge 20k likes; this one had 22,367 likes. Viewers recognize and applaud Zee’s imaginative agency: as one puts it, “So amazing omg I want a symmetrical breakfast every day.” And they are beautiful. An aesthetic of pattern and repetition reassures, giving emotional steadiness to narrative and viewing; variations show colors and crockery are clearly chosen, and thoughtfully; composition is arranged to as to achieve harmony; there is an impressive balance between color and texture, shape and detail. Above all the food looks fresh and delicious. Curation is uppermost: there is never any cutlery though it isn’t all food you can eat with your fingers, suggesting utility takes a back seat to beauty. The principle of symmetry is a powerful one: like a Rorschach test, symmetry seems to enable meaning yet split it. Twinning links to the uncanny, with its predilection for doubles, and the pleasure of “spot the difference” in pairs of images.

Zee’s project acquired a story: he gave up his day job, published a cookbook, set up a website, proposed to his partner. Interviews with him go over this story, though it is fascinatingly absent from the breakfasts which maintain absolutely the same aesthetic throughout. It may be significant that the project is not titled symmetricalbreakfast: instead, in symmetrybreakfast all syllables are equally stressed, and the purpose of symmetry is not subtending, as an adjective would, but partnering its companion word. A grammatical rule is dispensed with; egalitarianism prevails. There’s agency in that, and imaginative binding of food and relationship into a romantic commodity. In a 2015 interview for a dating agency, Zee said the success of symmetrybreakfast was “something we gloat over daily.” He added, “I like to think that people also like our story – a couple coming together every day, just for a moment, to sit and eat before going to work. It’s not just food, it’s commitment.”³ Imaginative agency here serves ideologies through curation as much as content, though viewers may bring their imagination to bear in perceiving a romantic story. Or indeed any interpretation, even a cynical one.