The Face You Make When It’s Actually Good

After a long enough workday—the kind that grinds twelve hours into something gray and featureless and deposits it at your feet when you finally get home—food stops being fuel and becomes the only thing between you and actual despair. Not food in the abstract. Specific food. The exact meal you’ve been constructing in your head since around 2pm, in increasingly elaborate detail, as a kind of psychological survival mechanism.

Fresh sushi, cold and clean, with enough wasabi to light up your sinuses and that first sharp hit of soy sauce. Or a properly built cheeseburger—fries that are actually hot, mayonnaise in quantities that exceed all reasonable recommendation, a Coke so cold it fogs the glass. Or a wheel of camembert baked until it’s liquid at the center, with bread you tear rather than cut, and grapes as a kind of intermission between the serious business. There’s a face you make eating food like that. You know the face. You’ve made it in an empty kitchen at 9pm and you have no regrets.

The website genussgesichter.de—"pleasure faces" in English—is built around exactly this observation. It shows photographs of people mid-expression and asks you to identify whether they’re experiencing sexual climax or a particularly excellent bite of something. The results are harder than you’d expect. The faces are genuinely difficult to tell apart, which is either the funniest thing or the most honest thing, depending on your state of mind when you click through.

I closed the tab and kept thinking about it. I’m still not sure what that means, but it means something.