I’ve made the pitch before: Facebook, when you scroll past all the AI slop, is a veritable oasis of delightful and odd foodstuffs. You get restaurant recommendations unfettered by Instagram Food Trends, groups like the Dull Men’s Club that luxuriate in plain cooking, and, most importantly, all manner of food photos — the stylish, the plain, and the decidedly un-aesthetic.
Dion Lim — yes, the local KGO-TV news anchor — is one of these small-time Facebook food influencers. (Or in her words, a “micro-micro-micro” food influencer.) On Thursday, she posted one of the wilder creations I’ve seen in this young year so far: pizza meatloaf. A meatloaf where the bread crumbs were subbed out for…milk-soaked pizza. Just say the phrase “pizza meatloaf” out loud a few times; it really rolls off the tongue.
The anchor’s photo is decidedly not a feast for the eyes. It sits in a glass baking dish atop her stove, a light-brown casserole-y block smothered in a ketchup-y sauce. Flecks of green onion peek out from the shiny surface. While a few comments on the post seemed repelled, a majority of the responses mentioned her creativity and resourcefulness. Many were at least willing to give it a taste.
Naturally, I had to ask Lim about her odd culinary creation, which she wrote was the “best tasting meatloaf I’ve ever made!” She was surprised (and a bit amused) that I called her up about this of all things, but she graciously obliged.
“I mean, I was tickled pink by the responses because I laughed out loud at some of them,” she told me. “The genuine ones didn't even seem real, the people who said, ‘Mm, this looks really delicious. I want to try it.’ I was like, What? Who wants to do something like that?”
As with many an odd-but-good home kitchen creation, it was borne out of necessity. After ordering a just-OK vegan pizza a day prior, Lim and her husband were in a bit of a bind, with nothing in the fridge save for a pound of ground chicken and the pizza leftovers.
“I remember reading a recipe somewhere on the internet that if you soak bread in milk, it makes for a very moist meatloaf,” she explained. “So, I thought, well, gosh darn it. I don't have any frozen bread. I have no panko breadcrumbs. Let's just grab the pizza.”
Lim proceeded to chop the ‘za — first, with a cleaver, then with her bare hands — and soak it in some milk. She added green onions (she was out of yellow ones), an egg, and a bit of garlic she had left over. She topped it off with a ketchup-maple syrup glaze. With a prayer and her oven set to 350 degrees, she let it rip.
The verdict? She’d do it again in a heartbeat, even if it felt a bit like the end result of a tough Chopped challenge. It served its purpose; her husband and child both polished off and enjoyed their shares. To Lim, it was primo ugly delicious — the sort of meal where the presentation belies the flavor.
“I look at what’s on social media and everything is so curated and perfect,” she said. “I remember being really hungry and thinking like, okay, I'm gonna take a picture of this and no matter what happens, you know, (laugh) we'll see what I do with this picture.”
She makes a good point, even if I'm not quite chomping at the bit to dig in. Most of the meals we eat aren’t going to look good on camera, or even to the casual eye. They’re not going to be served on hundred-dollar ceramic plates or look like it could feature on Bon Appetit or Eater. But they’ll feed us and the ones we love. When so much of our world is presented to us pre-engineered for maximum appeal, there is comfort in the un-manicured, off-the-cuff food photos which can so often be found on that cursèd platform.
Toward the end of our conversation, Lim brought up Martha Stewart’s Twitter, and the bad photos she’d post of her meals back in 2013, most of them over-exposed and unflattering. The time is ripe for a return. Let’s bring back bad food photos in 2025.
