A few months ago, a decidedly unsexy, 1970s-era diet food began
flying off supermarket shelves. Nearly overnight, cottage cheese was as trendy
as Barbie pink.
اضافة اعلان
People put it in dips and pasta sauce. They turned it into ice
creams, even breads. Cottage cheese suddenly could do it all.
Cottage cheese
Who or what, exactly, revived your grandmother’s afternoon
snack? TikTok. Across the internet, videos of cottage cheese dishes abounded.
Maybe you even bought a tub yourself.
Cooking videos have never been more persuasive, more
inescapable, more addictive, more entertaining. And they’ve never been a more
powerful driver of popular culture.
Videos on TikTok with the #foodtok hashtag have been viewed more
than 64 billion times. But cooking videos are not only an unavoidable part of
being online, they have also infiltrated physical spaces. TikTok-esque cooking
videos air on large vertical screens on New York City subways and on iPad-size
displays in the back of cabs, in the lobby of the Department of Motor Vehicles
and the waiting room at the doctor’s office. They are everywhere.
From Julia Child to ‘For You’
TikTok may be the look of today, but cooking videos have
captured our attention for decades, shaping how we eat along the way.
In the 1940s and ’50s, they emerged as
instructional television shows on local stations hosted by cooks such as Julia
Child and Joyce Chen. These shows were meant to educate above all, and many
were “almost sterile in tone,” said Ashley Rose Young, a food historian at the
Smithsonian Institution.
In the 1990s, an entire channel
devoted to cooking emerged: the Food Network. Shows such as “Emeril Live,”
“Good Eats,” and “East Meets West” brought both instruction and personality,
and were filmed in studios with state-of-the-art kitchens and cameras that
could capture the carefully styled glisten of a roast chicken. Food Network
popularized the idea of celebrity chefs, who were as charismatic as they were
good at cooking.
In the early 2000s, the arrival of
YouTube allowed anyone to upload a clip to the internet in the hopes of going
viral. Many of the tropes that are widespread on social media now — such as
re-creating dishes from movies, making outrage-inducing portions of
calorie-laden foods and creating cake-decorating tutorials — got their start on
YouTube.
Starting in 2015, hostless cooking
videos shot from overhead — or “hands and pans” clips — put viewers across
Facebook and Instagram in the driver’s seat. Using little more than a stand and
a camera, these videos were, critically, cheap to make, said John Gara, a
former producer at BuzzFeed Tasty, which pioneered the style.
In 2016, TikTok arrived in the United
States, but COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020 supercharged its use, as many Americans
stuck at home began scrolling the app’s algorithm-driven, hyper-personalized
“For You” feed.
Appetizing and Bite-Size
TikTok transformed videos into interactive two-way conversations
with tools such as Stitch and Duet, which allow you to combine other people’s
clips with videos of your own.
All of this benefited every category of video on TikTok — but
especially cooking videos. While television shows guided viewers through the
entire cooking process and Instagram brimmed with stylish photos of the final
dish, on TikTok, people could have both, said Sunny Xun Liu, a research
scientist at the Stanford Social Media Lab.
“It changes the whole hourlong cooking process into 15 seconds,
30 seconds, 45 seconds of entertainment — consumable pieces,” she said. “The
product and process become one video that is entertaining, appealing, and
satisfying. That is what makes these videos so engaging.”
Cooking on TikTok, three ways
Today, there isn’t just one way to make a successful cooking
video. What matters most is not creating a delicious, foolproof recipe, but
grabbing someone’s attention immediately. On TikTok, three styles of video define
the genre:
The turbocharged MC: An energetic host
injects every slice and sauté with personality.
“They are in a nice Hedley & Bennett apron or denim or
black,” said Hetal Vasavada, whose TikTok account, @milkandcardamom, has 54,000
followers. “They will have their kitchen in the background. They will cook and
talk and shove food in your face and bring the knife up and quick shots. But it
is always like, ‘This is the sexiest potato you will ever have,’ and chop,
chop, chop.”
The gentle storyteller: A soft-spoken creator
soothingly tells a winding story played over hands-and-pans clips.
Althea Brown, who runs the Caribbean food-focused TikTok account
@Metemgeeblog, recently started making more videos that feature her cooking set
to the tune of her own voice recounting childhood memories. People, she said,
“don’t want to just feel like they are being fed some tasty creation and there
is nothing connecting them to a broader story.”
The mad scientist: A frenzied cook prepares
Frankenfood designed to outrage.
These videos are made not for instruction, but for rage-baiting.
“I feel like it has started to swing back to where it was in the early Facebook
days, with this maniacal TikTok twist to it,” said Gara, formerly of BuzzFeed
Tasty. The mentality is, “‘I don’t care if this is a good recipe; I am going to
do it and people will watch the car crash.’”
Impact
Are these videos still teaching us how to cook? It depends on
your perspective.
The pressure to assemble a picture-perfect dinner is certainly
less intense on TikTok than on, say, the Food Network. And the quality of a
recipe doesn’t matter as much on TikTok.
“People now want to buy into the human behind the camera rather
than just the recipe,” said Ahmad Alzahabi, who runs the TikTok account
@thegoldenbalance.
But TikTok’s algorithm doesn’t reward originality, diversity, or
complexity. The thing that trending recipes — such as Baked by Melissa’s green
goddess salad dressing or cottage cheese ice cream or butter boards — have in
common is that they are “low-cost and easy to execute,” said Liu, the social
media research scientist.
That is the catch of going viral: The lowest common denominator
will always prevail at the expense of innovation and individuality.
Cooking is such a personal, deeply human activity. But the
evolution of cooking videos represents a broader shift: Algorithms and
artificial intelligence increasingly drive everyday behaviors and can stifle
creativity.
This can be discouraging to the very people whose videos we
can’t stop watching.
“It is democratizing but also narrowing the field down in a
sense that you’ll just see the same trend,” said Vasavada of the
@milkandcardamom account. “I don’t want to see 100 versions of feta pasta.”
Cooking videos began with a clear aim: to educate. If that’s still
the goal, they’re not as effective, said Gara, the former BuzzFeed Tasty
producer.
“We had a really cheesy but earnest desire to help people learn
how to cook in some way and eat things that tasted good,” he said. “We got so
far away from that.”
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