When my tech-savvy brother gave me a crash course in web development, one detail caught my attention—the “burger menu.” If you’ve ever accessed a website (especially on your phone), you’ve probably seen it: three horizontal lines stacked on top of each other, resembling—you guessed it—a burger.
That got me thinking about how much of life revolves around food.
I’ve always been fascinated by houses. In my first blog post, I mentioned how I used to create builds in The Sims Freeplay—a hobby that lasted nearly a decade (from around 2012/13 to 2021). In architecture, there’s something called a “panhandle” property, named for its shape, much like the handle of a frying pan.
Another food-related term that comes to mind is spaghetti roads—those complex, looping highway interchanges that resemble a plate of tangled pasta.
It’s fascinating how often we associate everyday things with food.
More controversial, however, is the habit of describing people’s skin tones using food references—caramel, brown sugar, chocolate, coffee. This is something I’ve seen people critique on social media, pointing out how often people of colour are compared to edible things. On the other hand, U.S. president Donald Trump’s skin tone has frequently been likened to an orange, with some jokingly attributing it to an overindulgence of carrots.
Pets and babies are frequently named or nicknamed after food—Peanut, Biscuit, Cookie, Toffee, Oreo, Pumpkin, Bean. And since we’re in the month that Valentine’s Day falls on (eye roll), let’s not forget the pet names lovers use for each other—Sugar, Honey, Sweetie.
A discussion I recently came across on Twitter (X) offered an interesting learning moment about “ethnic food” and open-concept kitchens. It was sparked by a woman who tweeted:
“At the airport with the jacket I left in the living room while my ppl were frying fish… I’m so embarrassed.”
This led to a broader conversation about how open-concept kitchens are a largely European concept. Many argued that in African and other non-Western cultures, kitchens have traditionally been built separately from the living quarters because the rich aromas of “ethnic food” tend to linger.
Once again, it all comes back to food. Whether it’s web design, architecture, naming conventions, or even the way we structure our homes, food has a way of sneaking into our everyday lives—much like love itself.