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It's been just over two years since TikTok really blew up in the food scene. I remember talking to my neighbour in London in April 2020, just as the lockdown was beginning to lose its glamour (two weeks in). She was shocked that as a chef I wasn’t on TikTok. She insisted I get on it. I didn’t. In fact I didn’t pay it any attention until the recent surge in crossover of food videos from TikTok to Instagram. It seemed as though all of a sudden I was being fed a repetitive and endless loop of what could be vaguely described as ‘recipe’ reels. Except for the fact that they weren’t recipes at all. They were short cooking videos (15 seconds to a couple of minutes) made in the form of a TikTok video. Engineered to catch and hold your attention for just long enough to see it through to the end, they were a carryover from the seemingly unstoppable influence of the TikTok movement.
In two years it has changed the face of food media as we may have normally conceived of it, elevating chefs and cooks alike to new unforeseen heights, and giving rise to a form of engagement around food now referred to as FoodTok… The pandemic did this to us. It did it all. While we were trapped, scratching at the walls for entertainment, FoodTok was born. I didn’t understand it two years ago. I don’t think I understand it now. Nevertheless it seems like it’s here to stay and along with it are the FoodTok superstars like Eitan Bernath, Jeron Combes, Emily Mariko, Jon Kung, Nadia Munno and Tiffany Chen.
I mean this is Emily Mariko with 1.8million followers and looking at it it begs the question what the actual fuck is going on? She has sliced a cauliflower thick. Really thick. Put down some sausages and roasted a purple sweet potato. Who the fuck cares? How is this content creation? Is the future of food content going to lean directly into the simplicity and mundanity of the every day? In this video she roasts salmon on a heat that is far too hot with some butter and some chopped red onion. Salmon can be delicate and so easily over cooked (I’ll save you question, she over cooks it). All she does in this video is put salmon in the oven and turn on the rice cooker and it has 471 thousand views, including the four times I watched it, each time more confused than the last. I can’t help but feel that she understands something much greater than I will ever know. That she has figured out the algorithm1 that aligns with the insanity in this realm and can as a result take advantage of it. The thing I can’t understand is, how does terribly cooked middle class food become entertainment? This content is entirely dull. I’d rather watch someone open a jar or pasta sauce and heat up the pasta. While this form of the everyday is boring, at least it is realistic, and accepted, and in a sense, as a result, comforting.
Which is what the Australian Instagram (Foodstagram) star ‘Nat’s what I reckon’ rallies against with a straight forward message of “Fuck jarred sauce." His objective (it seems to me) is to show people how simple and easy it is to cook good, reasonably healthy, tasty food - no fucking strings attached. If you haven’t watched anything by Nat, click here. To summarise it for anyone who hasn't seen an episode of ‘Nat’s what I reckon,’ he more often then not spends five or six minutes “punch(ing) on with a jar of shit2,” and demonstrating how to make something yourself at home that is far better than what can be found in said jar. He isn’t a chef. He can cook but he’s self taught and broadly speaking just a home cook. It acts as a direct rebellion to the lack of value that Australians attach to the knowledge of how to eat and how to cook, a rebellion that resonates with a demographic internationally, given his recent success.
He is an honest voice on how bad most of the food we buy in the supermarket really is. Which is refreshing, entirely. I understand that it’s somewhat, nowadays, a luxury to be able to cook with ease and excitement. While it is something that comes naturally to me and fits comfortably in my every day, cooking and being able to cook is sadly now considered to be a privilege3. What Nat tries to communicate in his cooking lessons is that it doesn’t have to be a luxury or a privilege to cook and that food “has been made a fuckin thousand ways” and it’s easy if you try. This is clear in every one of his videos.
The educational aspect that is clear in Nat’s videos is not clear in FoodTok videos. I must say, after watching hours of them it’s not clear what the point of any of it is. Broadly speaking it is promoted that TikTok Food influencers are showing a new generation how easy and accessible cooking is at home. I call bullshit4. These videos are not instructional5 nor informative in any way around how to best cook at home.
Yet the creators on FoodTok believe otherwise. Eitan Brnath who recently turned 19 years old, taught himself to cook from youtube and the food network truly believes that he is teaching people how to cook through relatability: ‘If this 18 year old Eitan can cook this so effortlessly, then I can, too.’ Except for that fact that it isn’t cooked easily or effortlessly. It is shot into tight attractive, dopamine producing snaps of a cooking process often times mixed very well with an ASMR-like recording of any action within the shot. It is a pleasure to watch the weirdness of it all and the repetitive scraping of the board and bread but it is in no way educational or informative or inspiring.
In fact it leans into an almost kitsch quality in production and repetition. Creators have tag lines and signature moves that seem all important to capturing the attention of the viewership. Almad Alzahabi is a great example every time he eats where everything is the best thing he has ever eaten6. Tiffany Chen excitedly declares at the end of each video “Look…at…that!”, with great enthusiasm for everything she makes from salad dressings to popcorn tofu. Nadia Caterina Munno signs off her posts with the tagline “Gorgeous…just like you are.” The intention of the videos is not so much to show people how to cook but to make them generally just feel good about themselves. Or in the hope, as good about themselves as the creators do. As if by just watching, they’ve somehow made the dish themselves.
Yet creators on FoodTok disagree. It is understood given the sharing of viral recipes on the platform that a point of difference exists on FoodTok beyond the creation of content as ‘food porn7’. TikTok insists they now have gotten people cooking off the base of the platform, whereas in the past it wasn’t the case. In an article for The New York Times in 2021 ‘Tik Tok, the Fastest Way on Earth to Become a Food Star,’ Almad Alzahabi describes the the engagement pre FoodTok “Recipes that (were) going viral on social platforms (were) just visually appealing, you drool over them, but you never make them.”
Not all creators push this line on FoodTok though. Sad Papa appears entirely disenchanted by the FoodTok system given his tone and the approach he takes in how he speaks to the viewers. This can have a certain angry chef charm to it but I can’t help but feel he distinctly resents his 1.8million followers, especially for not sustainably harvesting wild ramps8.
Jon Kung (formally a private chef doing pop up dinners in Detroit), seems almost at odds with the fact that he has an audience. Many of his FoodTok videos are used as a means of communicating his feelings politically or socially. His motivation for being a creator in this space are not as clear as others. In fact he is as shocked as anyone that he could be considered a career content creator describing his feelings in the same article for The NYT in 2021 “Even six months into posting videos and stuff if you told me that this was going to be my career, I would have asked ‘What are you on?’ The trajectory of all this just is not believable.”
If it’s even unbelievable for someone finding success within it, the question stands - what happens to all of these content creators when the game changes again? Will the stars of FoodTok and subsequently Instagram be able to pivot into a new form? It’s hard to say where their value in a market as content creators really lies. There is money being made if you have a following. A few of my friends fall into this category. A monetiseable amount of followers but not quite an amount where they can be considered an institution. With an average of 100-200k followers they charge (broadly, client depending) between $2k & $5k for a product endorsement that includes three story tiles, one permanent tile post and an active, engaged reel. It may seem like a lot of money but you have to consider what is being offered here. These advertising dollars are going to influencers who are in turn handing over their face, their product, their creative direction, writing, shooting, editing, and mastering. People are building ads with a guaranteed audience that would otherwise cost tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to execute in the past. The chef / influencer is doing all of the work by offering up their platform.
While the sums of money can only grow as the following grows (some of the FoodTok stars we have highlighted in this article have in excess of 10million followers), I do wonder what happens when the system shifts? How does someone pivot at some point on the trajectory towards a more sustainable, long term career model? Because it also has to be remembered that a lot of these FoodTok stars are not developing their own recipes or their own style of cooking - the recipes shared on FoodTok aren’t in any way original9. The cooks on TikTok are replicating recipes they have found online or in a cookbook, and while there is never any claim that the individuals cooking in the videos developed the recipes they are sharing themselves, there is also never any credit attributed to the origin of the recipe. It’s a grey area within this form of content and, personally a strangely off-putting aspect of these videos.
It delegitimises any sense of creative agency and originality within the form. Because the recipes are not their own and because they don’t attribute credit to the origin of the recipe, who is to say who actually is responsible for the creation of the core of this content? For a while it’s all well and good to be making cooking videos, but the recipe is the core of that offering and without a tried and tested recipe the whole prospect and legitimacy of TikTok food videos falls apart. I cannot think of any other aspect of creative industry where this kind of grey, muddled, opportunist abuse of copyright and appropriation exists. Let alone an industry in which people are able to so clearly profit.
However, compared to traditional food media, FoodTok is in many ways the great equaliser as Hira Qureshi wrote for The Post last year: “legacy food media obviously still has a long way to go toward addressing racial inequalities” and TikTok is available to anyone who has a smartphone. Everything can be done with just one device, reducing dramatically the barriers to entry for anyone who has a desire to be a food content creator. Yet even while that is the way it’s promoted, it is far from perfect and has been reported for not affording the same access and promotion within the algorithm to content creators of diverse aesthetics as it would for those who are considered ‘good looking’ by a certain standard, of certain ethnic origin, and physically able.
I’m not convinced that the platform doesn’t just promote attractive people cooking bad food. My feed daily is made up of oftentimes lightly dressed white women making vegan food, traditionally handsome men making protein heavy low calorie food, or someone healthy and charming making indulgent Americana food. There is no inspiration, no education, and no information on how to improve in the kitchen outside of the offering on uncredited recipes.
Though it isn’t all bad. Some of the recipes that have gone viral, while contentious in their offering, have made the last couple of years locked at home more bearable for friends around the world. Dalgona coffee took the world by storm after going viral on TikTok featuring in most major publications, cross continentally (at least in English speaking countries), TikTok pasta was for some reason a revelation in a time where takeaway dinners were consumed all so regularly alongside the same menu of repeated home classics, #icecreambread is reported to have 30.7 billion views, and most recently a cake I haven’t seen spoken about by anyone for 15 years (since I learnt how to make it) has become wildly popular as the crispy filo cake (see my OG recipe here).
The last two years have been unquestionably wild in what they have asked of us all. The fact that we have found comfort in short, sharp, dopamine producing food content maybe isn’t all that surprising. However, where that will lead is hard to predict. One thing I have taken away from being a late adopter is that if someone tells me to start cooking on a new social forum - maybe I should. Any predictions on what’s next, send them through.
Donald Glover, in an article on March 5th 2018 ‘Donald Glover can’t save you’ By Tad Friend declared that very early on he ‘figured out the algorithm,’ to life and learning and success. He can see what others can’t and as such understand the industry, the market, the listeners, and the audience in a way other cannot (or at least very few can). He stamps it as a superpower.
24 seconds in.
I mean, look I would contend with this thought. Broadly speaking however it’s a social perspective that it’s a privilege to be able to cook. I don’t think it’s a privilege to be able to cook. If you want to do it all you have to do is pick up a book or watch Nat (presuming you have access to a kitchen). However, I understand it’s not that simple for everyone. The kitchen can be intimidating, scary, dangerous even. However, it is a skill that can be learned. It will be learnt through failure and fuckups (believe you me, I’ve got a few and not too few not to mention. A few. A lot. Always), but that's the game. Learning anything takes time, learning a new skill especially one that you sort of need to be proficient at, will absolutely take time. Don’t dismiss this. Food you cook for yourself and those you love tastes better. Always. Always.
Lies, by bullshit I mean absolute bloody lies.
Outside, of course, of showing someone watching how to add the different ingredients into a pan.
Which is confusing, at least to me because that just isn’t how cooking works. A 100% hit rate seems unfathomable in any kitchen professional or home. Just imagine the joy that you could bring to everyone’s life, not just your own, if everything you made was THE BEST THING you had ever eaten. Just imagine. I mean, fuck, take me to that place. Take. Me. There. It’s aspirational, sure. It’s also entirely untrue.
There are plenty of ways to think about the definition of food porn and truthfully some of them are inappropriate, people can be weird. In this instance think about it as the glamorisation of the visual process of cooking and eating. It is not a penis in a bun, although if that’s what you are after it can be found here and also here and most grotesquely here (please beware this final link is NOT SAFE FOR WORK. Or for children. Or really, at all in a public forum. You have been warned, after all it will direct you to reddit).
A ramp is a specie of wild onion mainly found in North America and Canada with relatives around Europe and the UK and Asia such as wild leeks, wild garlic, wood leeks and ramsons. They are really great.
This is definitely not always the case, the friends of mine on Instagram referenced before develop all of their own recipes and if they are using someone else’s recipe they credit the chef or the author or the inspiration for their take on it. This is not the case as I have seen on TikTok.
Words by Daniel Wilson
Daniel has a Masters in Food Culture from The University of Gastronomic Science in Pollenzo, Italy. He is a writer, a chef, and recovering restaurateur
Absolutely love this mate! Can't wait to read more. Best writing on modern food trends I've read for some time.