IN THE PHOTOGRAPH, 16 raw yolks sit in a plastic ice-cube tray, each compartment brimming with albumen. Around the tray lie broken eggshells, cast off on a dimensionless blue surface. As a composition, it’s simple and striking, with saturated Jolly Rancher colors, the kind of image that pops on Instagram. But it doesn’t tell the story we’ve come to expect from food photographs that dominate social media: There’s no teasing promise of deliciousness or even edibility. The yolks are sunshine-yellow yet eerily rectangular, filling their ice-cube cells, which reflect the dimensions of the photograph itself. Nature has given way to artifice; shell has been separated from yolk, form from content, food from function. There’s nothing to eat here.

The duo behind the image, Josie Keefe and Phyllis Ma, both 31, have made photographs, zines and stop-motion videos together since 2014 under the name Lazy Mom — an invocation of the cultural boogeyman of the “bad mother” who neglects her children. Instead of assembling a proper after-school snack, Lazy Mom indulges artistic impulses, taking close-ups of a smushed mustard packet or a pane of Wonder Bread immured in Ziploc, the light catching on plastic creases with a Vermeer-like luster. In working with food — which means playing with it, something “we’re told not to do,” Keefe says — the women are among a cohort of American artists for whom food is both material and subject matter, carrying on a tradition that reaches back centuries but has expanded in range and theme dramatically in the past few decades.

Their forebears include the Swiss provocateur Dieter Roth, who printed his 1968 poetry journals on bags filled with sauerkraut, lamb or vanilla pudding (the last spiked with urine), and the British sculptor Antony Gormley, whose 1980-81 “Bed,” built of 600 loaves of bread, featured depressions as if left by sleeping bodies. In 1991, during the Persian Gulf war, the Cuban-American artist Félix González-Torres spilled gray licorice candies on a gallery floor, invoking a fallen hail of bullets. Food has also been long exploited for surrealist sight gags, as in the British artist Sarah Lucas’s 1997 “Chicken Knickers,” in which she posed with a whole raw chicken, disemboweled and strapped to the front of her underpants. Elsewhere, it’s been rendered unrecognizable: In the American artist Dan Colen’s early 21st-century canvases, chewing gum supplants paint; and for 2009’s “Cola Project,” the Chinese conceptual artist He Xiangyu boiled down 127 tons of Coca-Cola into an oil-dark residue that he used as ink to emulate paintings from the medieval Song dynasty — a product of the industrial West transmuted into an emblem of old China.

Image Fallen Fruit’s "A Portrait of Atlanta" wallpaper (2013), a compositeof photographs of orchards throughout Georgia. Credit... Fallen Fruit (David Allen Burns and Austin Young), “Peach Wallpaper Pattern/A portrait of Atlanta,” 2013, from the exhibition “The Fruit Doesn’t Fall Far From the Tree,” commissioned by the Atlanta Contemporary

What’s different for the artists emerging today is that their work is born out of, and must on some level contend with, a culture that has turned food into fetish. In the disembodied world of social media, food is appreciated as an almost exclusively visual medium, enshrined in hyper-processed, highly mannered photos without true corollaries in the physical world. It exists in a kind of suspended state of imagined deliciousness, never to be actually tasted by most viewers: a totem of eternally unconsummated desire. This is a perspective of extraordinary privilege, to be so secure in our food supply that we see food not as a requirement for biological survival but as entertainment — encouraging a strain of frivolity of which Keefe and Ma are wary. (According to a United Nations report, an estimated 821 million people around the world suffered from undernourishment last year.)