Cats on Pizza

There’s this Instagram account where someone photoshops cats into pictures of food. Cats on pizza, cats on ice cream, cats sitting on an orange like they own it. The artist is Ksenia, a Russian illustrator, and the account is called Cats in Food. That’s it. That’s the whole concept.

The Photoshop is sometimes clumsy, sometimes pretty good, but it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that it works—something about a cat’s face, specifically that look of vague indifference cats do so well, makes food funnier. Makes it better, somehow. Put a cat on your dinner and suddenly your carefully composed food photo becomes a small joke, a moment of weird chaos where a cat has decided to exist on your plate and could not possibly care less what you think about it.

I scrolled through these images feeling that specific internet pleasure of finding something perfectly stupid that shouldn’t be as entertaining as it is. Cat content everywhere, food photography everywhere, and yet this combination felt fresh. No narrative, no message, just a simple question: what if this cat was here? What if this cat, this specifically unimpressed cat, was sitting on your pizza right now?

There’s something true about cats in there, something about how they exist in their own headspace, completely unbothered by the compositions we’re trying to build around them. Online, we love them for exactly this reason—they’re indifferent. They don’t perform. Put one in your food photo and it becomes honest in a way that carefully styled images usually aren’t.

I haven’t actually put a cat in my food. I’m not going to stage some elaborate brunch with cats as decoration, though the image is funny enough. But I get why someone would want to. There’s comfort in the idea: sit down, here’s your meal, and here’s a cat, looking supremely unimpressed by the whole situation. That’s better than most dinner conversations.