Social Media's Impact on Food & Cooking - PDF

| Next | Section menu | Main menu | Bytes of bites What do feta, cucumbers and cottage cheese have in common? Social media and the internet are changing how people cook and relate to food 12月 05, 2024 06:14 上午 FIRST THEY came for the eggs. Then the feta cheese, caviar, cottage cheese and cucum...

| Next | Section menu | Main menu | Bytes of bites What do feta, cucumbers and cottage cheese have in common? Social media and the internet are changing how people cook and relate to food 12月 05, 2024 06:14 上午 FIRST THEY came for the eggs. Then the feta cheese, caviar, cottage cheese and cucumbers. In some countries, these ingredients even sold out: Iceland experienced a shortage of cucumbers, and feta briefly vanished from grocery-store shelves. The reason for the raids? Aficionados of online cooking were eager to recreate viral videos in which each of these ingredients starred. Few topics are as appetising to netizens as cooking, especially over the holidays. Food is the fourth-most popular subject on the internet (trailing only films, music and phones), up from 17th place in 2009, according to GWI, a consumer-research firm. No other subject’s rank has risen by more in the past 15 years, except sport (though it remains less popular than food). The abundance of online-food content not only causes occasional ingredient shortages when a video goes viral. It is also making cooking more social. TikTok videos starring chow attract tens of millions of viewers. Mukbang (eating broadcast) videos, in which people gorge in front of a camera and field live comments from viewers, started in South Korea but have spread to the West and are now popular globally. The internet has propelled people without notable restaurants or cookbooks to chef stardom. For example, around 21m people subscribe to the YouTube channel of Nick DiGiovanni, a 28-year-old, Harvard-educated food personality, about the same number as subscribe to that of Gordon Ramsay, a famous British chef. The fact that social media have caused interest in food to rise as fast as home-baked bread should not come as a surprise. Everyone has to eat, and cooking is a common hobby. Video is also an efficient medium for instruction—more precise, in many ways, than the written word. Americans who recently cooked turkeys for Thanksgiving can testify that “golden brown” to one cook may look underdone to another and even burnt to a third. People who learned to cook in kitchens or through books may scoff at the spread of online-cooking videos. But chefs have long embraced technology to instruct, share their culinary visions and build their careers. In the early 19th century Marie-Antoine Carême, a Parisian chef who cooked for leaders such as Tsar Alexander I of Russia, wrote a series of beautifully illustrated cookbooks that simplified recipes and helped codify French cuisine. In the 1960s-70s Julia Child used television and helped popularise mass- market cookbooks, demystifying French food for those cooking at home. She both recognised and stirred up a market: cooking was becoming a leisure activity rather than a chore and “foreign food” something to create at home rather than scorn. Successful online food personalities “recognise and make a real effort to meet the specific needs of their viewers”, explains Madeline Buxton, culture and trends manager at YouTube. Some viewers want to be entertained; others want to learn, travel or eat vicariously through people more adventurous than they are. Online chefs and food boosters sell a lifestyle: you are what you eat, how you eat and what you watch about eating. Unlike cookbooks and cooking shows on TV, barriers to entry for online- cooking videos are low. Creators who think they have a winning idea do not need to persuade agents, editors and network executives; they can shoot a video themselves on their phone and see if people like it. Niches, therefore, abound. Some online-food content is “straightforward, recipe-driven, what you probably would expect to see in a traditional TV cooking show”, says Ms Buxton. Other videos walk viewers through native cuisines, showing how to hand-pull Chinese noodles or grill Turkish kebabs. University students on tight budgets can learn to make better instant ramen, whereas skilled cooks who want to impress their friends can replicate Popeyes’ wildly popular chicken sandwich from scratch. Some YouTube channels bridge the gap between entertainment and instruction. Many more people will watch Andrew Rea, whose channel specialises in food from films and TV, make the tortilla-chip sombrero from “Despicable Me 2” than will try to cook it themselves. “Village cooking” videos, which show people in remote areas preparing food, are popular in Pakistan and India, perhaps as sources of wistful escapism and nostalgia among urbanites. (Actually copying village cooking would require space for a giant bonfire and several skinned and dressed chunks of mutton.) What’s the recipe for success? Established media companies have got in on the act, too. They have cooked up online videos that take viewers around the world to show how Uzbek chefs cook 350kg of rice pilaf, for instance, or where cab drivers in New York like to eat (unpretentious South Asian restaurants on the east side of Manhattan). But the internet is mostly full of shorter content. It predominates on TikTok and its imitators, such as YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels. Whereas adventurous TikTokers have tried their hand at coulibiac and other complex recipes, approachable food tends to perform best: one reason recipes for baked-feta pasta and cucumber salad went viral is that it is easy to melt cheese and slice cucumbers. It also helps to be visually attractive: viral videos tend to show off the texture and crunch of food. Sometimes creators are surprised by which of their videos take off. Mr DiGiovanni recalls his first popular video, which showed him making a chocolate bar from whole cacao pods; it was “poorly shot: the lighting was messed up; it was overexposed”. But it has attracted almost 14m views. Today, Mr DiGiovanni employs half a dozen people and can spend more than $50,000 on a single video. He earns money from advertising revenue on YouTube, and he is doubtless helped by his good looks and regular-guy appeal. Recent videos have featured him trying Japanese fast foods (Burger King’s “Great White” cheeseburger, with a horrific amount of mayonnaise, was a hit) and rare foods (water collected from Amazonian “air rivers”, which appeared to taste a lot like water). Much as other food creators do, he shows viewers things they would not otherwise see, and he has a good time doing it. This points to an important aspect of online food culture: fun. Julia Child certainly mastered the art of French cooking, and people who followed her recipes may have enjoyed themselves, but she most believed in the haute part of haute cuisine. Reverence does poorly in the democratised world of online content, where training, pedigree and even experience matter less than likeability, production value and whether a video makes you want to pick up a skillet and start cooking. Now can you please pass the feta? For more on the latest books, films, TV shows, albums and controversies, sign up to Plot Twist, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/culture/2024/11/29/what-do-feta-cucumbers-and-cottage- cheese-have-in-common