Tove Danovich of NPR writes that in the 1600s, when famous still life artist Jan Davidsz de Heem was eating, people showed off their meals with paintings.

A new study by Cornell’s Food and Brand Lab found that capturing and showing off decadent and expensive meals is a decidedly old-fashioned practice. Brian Wansink, author of Slim by Design, and Andrew Weislogel, a curator at Cornell University’s Johnson Museum of Art, studied 140 paintings of “family meals” from 1500 to 2000 and found that the majority of foods depicted were not part of the average fare. Some of the most likely foods to appear were shellfish, ham and artichoke. For the common classes during the time these paintings were made, Wansink says, more likely items to eat would have been chicken, bread and the odd foraged fruit.

People don’t usually Instagram frozen foods they put in the microwave. Instead, the most successful #foodporn is often an item the photographer laboriously made in the kitchen or found in either an expensive or out-of-the-way restaurant. A recent top #foodporn on Instagram is a photo of seven elaborately decorated eclairs. In the caption the food blogger behind @dialaskitchen compares the Toronto-made pastries to some found a couple years ago, “while at L’atellier de l’éclair in Paris.” Wansink says that today’s social media food posts often attempts to convey that their creator is worldly, adventurous and has money to spare. “None of these things are about food,” he says.

In the paintings, some of the most popular foods are ones that had to be imported or were highly valuable. “It wasn’t Italian paintings that had olives,” Wansink says. “It was the countries that had to import them.” Olives, he points out, are somewhat useless nutritionally and aesthetically. “They look like black marbles,” he says. Even if they are delicious.