been seeing more people using the CW field for, uh. food. lately. and that feels familiar and not necessarily in the best way. a suggestion: just tag it #food. people who have issues seeing such talk will muffle the tag, if they know that's an option.
tag muffling is a setting option you can customize as you need to, and is pretty effective at preventing people from seeing things that they'd be disturbed by personally (or just don't want to deal with). all this, without making the assumption that a CW does that everyone might be bothered, and leaving them to disable hiding the CW on their own.
sharing recipes or good take-out finds is a normal thing. some people need to know in advance that they're about to encounter such a thing. both of these are fine, but CW-first is a pattern that existed in some spaces because tagging was either clunky or non-existent. it works way better here!
the same goes for other tags one might consider that aren't obviously "most people would need a warning for this even if they don't expect they do." just make the tags as easy to figure out as possible and folks will be okay.
There was also a discussion early on on here where a lot of people recovering from ED specifically requested that a cultural difference here be that we don't put food behind a mandatory CW. That it's something that these particular people found more harmful than helpful with recovery. It's been a year since then so new users wouldn't have seen these posts and they were made before features were implemented that would now let me find them
Please just tag it with food, please dont create a culture which describes food as inherently dangerous. Its really harmful
This site is architected pretty well that I can always-open the CW in cases like this were the content warning is itself harmful. I think that's the only word of caution I want to administer for people who want to be helpful though: which is that CW'ing food is not inherently harmless; it is actively harmful both to people recovering from eating disorders and for cultures where food is an important part of their identity, and the site has been (smartly!) built so that people who would be harmed by that CW can mitigate the harm.
This is why we have focused on the idea that a culture of CW'ing food is harmful. It is not as an individual act, and it's completely understandable if anybody needs to either have that content forewarned or needs to apply the CWs for their or proximate-others benefits.
But the idea that having a cultural expectation of filling in the CW field with "food" is neutral-or-helpful is false. It is harmful-or-helpful, and you need to do that math if you're going to actively choose to fill in the CW that way.
If you don't want to do that math or you're just trying to help without an intimate understanding of what's going on, please just tag.
