The world was blessed with yet another food photography app last week, underscoring (or fuelling?) the growing obsession with visually recording everything we eat. From slices of toast to smears of jus, countless millions of us now feel so compelled to snap our dinner it seems that our ability to sit down and just enjoy a meal is in danger of being lost.

Platter, a new app that tags and shares food images, joins a host of social media that allow us to enthral the world with photos of what we eat. Leader of the pack, Foodspotting, has had more than 1m food images uploaded to its site in the past two years and others likeFoursquare, fidd.me, SnapDish and Instagram are driving the trend. Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest are also awash with plates of food; one of the most prolific Flickr groups is I Ate This, where more than 25,000 members have uploaded 470,000 images ranging from plain oldMarmite on toast though to various expressions of molecular gastronomy.

To read the full article visit the Guardian’s Word of Mouth section