We know that Australians do it obsessively. We know that Heston Blumenthal has no time for people who do. Here at delicious. we’ve told you how to do it better and even who its best practitioners are.

But what would it have been like to Instagram your food in the 18th Century?

Swedish furniture giant IKEA thinks it has some idea. The global retailer’s new advertisement, released last week with the title ‘Let’s Relax’, pokes fun at those who let their food go cold while they search for the right angle, light and filter, showing how ridiculous the procedure is by relocating it to the days of still-life paintings and powdered wigs.

The result is a hilarious romp in which a family waits while an artist paints their dinner and then schleps the picture around by horse and carriage in order to get people to like it. Those who see it – everyone from the hoi polloi to the aristocracy – express their feelings the same way we do on Facebook and elsewhere: with a thumbs up.

One would love to know the advertisement’s budget. It’s a miniature epic, with a period-appropriate classical score, that deliberately calls to mind Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon – down to the inclusion of a pistol duel, which is interrupted so the participants can express an opinion. (They get in another fight about it.)

The spot ends by returning to the present day, where the paterfamilias hovers above a plate with his phone, to the obvious annoyance of his wife and children.

Realising he’s being a little silly, he sits and the family begins to eat. The tagline comes as a light rebuke: “It’s a meal. Not a competition. Let’s relax.”

(The song that plays over the final moments sounds like Nina Simone or someone, but Google turns up nothing, which leads us to suspect it’s a very well-disguised original. The words? “Each little moment we’ve got / no one must see / no one must know.” Quite.)

The advertisement follows The Mystery Hour’s wildly popular ‘Instagram Husband’, which was released last year. That piece, filmed in the ubiquitous mockumentary style, was about men whose sole function in their marriages is to take Instagram photographs of their wives. “I’m basically a human selfie stick,” says one.

“Yeah, we used to eat our food,” he says later. “Now we just take pictures of it.”

Let’s relax, indeed.