A Grumpy Line Cook's Rant about Social Media "Chefs"
A Grumpy Line Cook's Rant about Social Media "Chefs"
A long(ish) read in defence of knowing what you're talking about
Hello dear readers,
Welcome to The Recovering Line Cook. The newsletter where I, some guy called Wil Reidie, share recipes and stories from a career in restaurant kitchens.
Something a bit different this week though.
I’ve been considering writing something about social media food content for a while now. This week I’ve taken the plunge.
I’d love to know what you think. When/if you get to the end (it’s a bit longer than my usual newsletters), please leave your thoughts in the comments.
Thanks,
Wil
PS. I’m delighted to announce I worked out how to make a paid subscription discount! Use the below link by end of February to get 25% off a yearly upgrade. Your support makes this newsletter possible!
In summer 2015, I spent a great many hours in a hot and muggy central London basement slicing potatoes into a tray of liquid duck fat.
I had to use one of those terrifying Japanese mandolins and lived in constant fear I’d lose a fingertip with each slice.
The specifics of the job were important as well. The slices (of potato, not my fingers) needed be no more than 2mm thick, the duck fat was to only lightly coat each slice, and, of course, the seasoning needed to be spot on. The potato was then carefully layered and gently baked before being pressed and refrigerated to firm up overnight. The next day they’d be sliced and deep-fried to order.
This does sound labourious, I agree, but the result was the most popular side on the menu at Portland Restaurant: the “mille-feuille potatoes”.
They had originally been developed by Shaun Searley at Portland’s “sister” restaurant The Quality Chop House (also in London) where they were called confit potatoes. And in the months and years after I helped make them at Portland, I would always feel a twinge of pride on reading articles about how popular they had become and occasionally even celebrated by Britain’s food writers.
It was only a fancy fried potato, I know. But it felt good to have a hand in making something that people really loved.
One of the things I did on becoming a restaurant cook was to consume as many books and videos I could about food and cooking. An important part of this was following all the cooks and food writers on Instagram I could find.
In a very real way I’m still suffering from that decision today.
Following Twitter’s implosion, Facebook being redundant, and my not understanding TikTok, I don’t use much social media anymore.
Instagram, however, I just can’t stop myself from scrolling through at least 30 times a day.
Hanalei Souza’s ladylinecook account, for example, is always a joy. I will never tire of the hilarious chef memes from for_the_chefs. The allezceline account might just be the funniest cultural artifact in existence for a restaurant cook like me.
I’ve started by listing these favourites in an attempt to balance the negativity of what follows.
Bare with me as I try to summarise the food horrors to be found on social media in 2024. This is what I call The Bad, The Ugly, and The “Good” of food “content”.
Ugly: from Old Norse uggligr ‘to be dreaded, fearful’
The world is a noisy place. The sad truth is that beautiful writing and images often aren’t loud enough to draw much attention.
This doesn’t matter to The Uglies of social media food content because beauty is the least of their concerns.
Their goal is to create nightmares.
And nightmares are very hard to ignore.
For The Uglies, food is the paint and canvas with which they create the monstrous, the gag-inducing, the should-not-be-seen-anywhere-other-than-a-particularly-nasty-David-Cronenberg-film.
In my feed recently, courtesy of such Ugly accounts, I’ve seen:
A video that details “dry-aging” a steak for 6 months in Nutella.
Some kind of casserole that consists of potato chips, sour cream, and processed bacon bits slow-cooked to a gluey mush in a Crockpot.
A perfectly good steak, shoved rudely into a jar, then boiled for an hour. (I did see this before you sent it to me
, our algorithms must be aligning 😉)And one more for fun. A video that starts with someone cutting a hole in a steak, then placing in that hole an egg (still in its shell), covering the steak with marmite (a thick, bitter paste made from yeast), then finally cooking it all together in a pan with some kind of cheetos snack.
Jar-boiled steak and whatever the hell the egg/marmite/cheeto thing is
Of course the results are horrible. And of course this is precisely the point.
The comments of disgust and shock rank in the thousands every time. And since the shares and comments always outnumber the account’s followers, one realises these videos are for the horrified masses that, having stumbled on these nightmares on their FYPs, comment in despair and send the videos truly viral.
Lesson 1: You want to cut through the noise on social media? Think ugly, not beautiful.
So bad it’s, well, still pretty bad
The Bad food content creators are a step up from The Ugly on the “trolling” scale. The Bad create content that, superficially at least, looks edible. Certainly not as unrepentantly offensive as that which The Ugly serve up.
Nevertheless, The Bad can’t quite give up on the powerful growth hack The Ugly have perfected: they still always add to their videos something mistaken or controversial that viewers can’t help but comment about.
An example I’ve seen in recent weeks is that of a wellness/healthy food “creator” who shared what she called a “2-ingredient sourdough bread recipe”.
Those 2 ingredients were:
self raising flour
kefir
On finding this in their FYPs, the sourdough community passionately took the creator to task in the comments for their use of the label “sourdough”.
Lesson number 2: Not perverse enough to massacre food like The Uglies? Put obvious mistakes or baiting titles in your videos and boost your engagement from upset people in your replies.
And, finally, the “Good” food content creators…
For as long as there has been food on TV there have been great food personalities for us to watch make it. For me as a boy it was Jamie Oliver. As I got a little older I would watch Rick Stein, Keith Floyd, Nigella Lawson and Nigel Slater. What I still love about these writers/presenters is the way their personality reflects the type of food they create.
Read or watch Nigella and you feel the intimate, indulgent and uncompromising food she wants you to experience. Reading and watching Nigel Slater is an experience that totally corresponds with his homely, comforting, and straight-forward dishes.
TV was always more the point when it came to Keith Floyd. But his shows, full of over-filled glasses of wine and episodes of him screwing things up such as a dish of piperade in the full glare of a French madame who knew better, perfectly capture who he was and what food was to him: an exploration of the world and people and fun.
When he screwed up, that was half the point.
I mean just watch this thing and try not to fall in love with both Keith and his French friend.
If art gives us the means by which we share lived experience, then I believe food is, if not art itself, then structurally identical to it. Great food writers and presenters use words and videos to replicate this shared experience. Much as they are “personalities”, their art does not merely show off who they are, their art is the way a viewer can experience their food without even tasting it.
This brings me to The “Good” food creators of social media. This is the group of talented young people, genuinely passionate about sharing appealing dishes, that are building huge communities even though they don’t really have any training or professional experience.
I’ll be honest, when I first started writing this, the idea was to take these guys to task, to call them out on bad technique and chopping skills. But having given it thought, I can’t imagine doing anything so petty or pointless.
Because it’s these creators, genuine in a way The Bad and Ugly aren’t, who are the real victims of the short video form they have chosen to work within.
These creators are servants to two opposing masters: the recipe that demands detail and care and personal connection and The all-important Algorithm that demands brevity, a focus on loud personality, a zeitgeisty niche, replication of latest trends, and of course, video production skills that bare no relevance to good food development.
That’s a whole lot of (often conflicting) demands my food heroes of previous decades never had to consider. And the unfortunate consequence of these demands is clear in the videos themselves when watched with a careful eye.
I’ll give one example of what I mean.
This week I watched a short video from a British food creator with hundreds of thousands of followers. Between his jokes and his “crowd work”, I noticed how he added a spoon of raw cornflour directly to the sauce he was making. He didn’t make a slurry first, he just threw it straight in.
The following cut, however, his sauce was smooth and entirely lump-free. In real life, if anyone tried to make his recipe this way, that cornflour would have rendered the sauce a lumpy mess.
Yes, this sounds like unforgivably anal nitpicking. But these creators have hundreds of thousands of followers, they are treated as this generation’s Nigella and Keith. Details matter in recipes. The demands of the 30 second social media form may require compromises. But sharing recipes half-heartedly and editing over errors should be the last compromise they are willing to make.
Size isn’t everything
I’m probably missing the point, aren’t I. Maybe the details of the recipe aren’t important. Maybe these creators are less about technique or reliability and are just meant to be a fun, food-themed diversion.
And that’d be fine.
The real problem for me comes when the publishing houses step in. They identify a creator with a big enough following and elevate them into a position of genuine authority in order to sell books.
In writing this piece, I looked at the “about me” page of a young, now published, Instagram food creator. It’s as though they are now smart to the criticism that they are just funny video makers skilfully recording the dinner they make. This individual says they are “still learning” “not a chef, just a cook” even that they “don’t know what [they’re] doing.”
It just leaves me wondering why we are now being sold books about a subject the author admits they don’t know much about.
Why did actually being a professional, experienced, authority on food who has spent years testing and refining their craft stop being important?
Is an ability to grow an Instagram following really all that matters? What multitude of stories are we depriving ourselves of if the only people allowed to tell them must have built 50,000 Instagram fans first?
And there is already evidence the rush to publishing social media food stars isn’t without risk. One name I will be specific about is that of Elizabeth Haigh. Haigh amassed tens of thousands of followers across Instagram and YouTube after appearing on a popular UK cooking TV show. When she was eventually given the opportunity to publish a book for the first time, the publisher was almost immediately forced to pull it from shelves when huge sections were found to be plagiarised.
Haigh has never publicly explained her actions. And, though there’s no excuse for stealing another’s words, I do wonder whether publishing houses, keen to get access to a creator’s community to sell books to, are as much to blame.
Haigh wasn’t ready to write a book of her own. She chose to steal someone else’s to make up for this. The alternative (publishing something by her own hand she knew might not be very good) was clearly a less appealing option to her.
Others in such a situation haven’t been so proud.
As much as he was mocked at the time for doing so, I didn’t blame Brooklyn Beckham when, aged 18, he was honoured with his own coffee table photography book. I felt it reflected badly on the publishers for taking advantage of a young artist still learning his craft.
Brooklyn is a “chef” himself now, of course, (with an even bigger following, brand deals, and an Uber Eats collaboration under his belt already). I really hope he has learnt to give himself time before agreeing to lend his name to a cookery book.
Considering he’s already had a TV cookery show, I’m guessing maybe not.
Credit where it’s due
But there is another consequence of the ease of access to, and fluidity of, content that social media has afforded creators: what were once food recipes with specific authors are now food trends that belong to everybody.
This has never been more clear to me than in 2021 when I saw a familiar dish whenever I looked at my Instagram feed. It was for a dish consisting of thinly sliced potatoes coated in duck fat that had been pressed, slow-cooked, then cut into rectangles and deep fried to crispy perfection.
It was The Quality Chop House confit potatoes. This time, however, as I learnt in the many articles and videos and recreations of the “trend” on Instagram, they were known by the name chosen by the creator who made them go viral: 15-hour potatoes.
How many Google results are there for “15 hour potatoes”?
Almost 140,000,000
How many for the (far more generic) title “confit potatoes”?
Less than 12,000,000.
Tomorrow’s artifacts
Who knows. Maybe the 15 hour and confit potatoes were created separately by coincidence. It’s possible. And I’m not saying the “creator” of the 15-hour potato willingly ripped Shaun Searley off. But I can imagine the person in question had seen them from the significant coverage they received in London over the previous few years and, doing what content creators do, recreated them for their community to enjoy.
But I think something is lost in this. I think something is lost when we lose the author. I think there’s a lot to benefit from knowing the process by how something is created. The story behind it. The reason for its existence.
When recipes become trends that any creator can co-opt to show off their own personalities, I feel something of a recipe is lost. It becomes standardised. Commodified. Soulless.
Whenever I see a flavour of the day Instagram “chef” getting a book deal, I just despair. I know it’s naive of me. I know publishing houses, more than ever it seems, need to give book deals to people that can help sell them. But I think food and recipes and sharing how things are made is serious work. Not all books can be published. And I can’t help but feeling those we do publish should be genuine cultural artifacts with potential relevance for decades from now.
This is why I’d love to see commissioning editors search out people who know what they are talking about. My modest, unassuming sous chef at Oaxen in Sweden, for example, who taught me this dish. I really want to see, if you’ll forgive me being a fellow Substack suck up,
’s book on shop shelves, or on veganism. I’ll put money down today for a printed edition of the concise yet deeply thoughtful words writers like and share through their newsletters.I want to benefit from these writers’ years of food experience and commitment to the written word, not a kid who, though entirely convinced of their own abilities and very fun to watch, still has rather a lot to learn.
I suppose you pays your money and you takes your choice.
As well as those writers above, please check out my full list of newsletter recommendations here.
And if you enjoy chef memoirs, here is a great one from Hanalei Souza (of Instagram’s LadyLineCook fame) who writes about her journey to become a leader in the professional kitchen.
See you next time!
Wil
PSA: At least 20% of my motivation for writing this was so I could post that video of British food hero Keith Floyd.
Yes, Wil! Yes! I couldn’t help but nod along in agreement as I read this.
Social media has changed our consumption of food and changed our expectations surrounding cooking: from an in-depth craft to just an enticing yet flavorless bite. (In many ways, social media’s treatment of food mirrors the desire meal kits and delivery services aim to satisfy for so many…) With the short-form format of these “cooking” videos, no one bothers to savor the technical details or the “why”. Food has become just a prop, in many ways.
I truly feel that only long-form food content, like cooking shows or books, really savors the whole experience and process of cooking, honors it. And only someone immersed in that world/process (like a chef) can truly understand it from start to finish. (That’s not to say the home cook can’t learn a thing or too, but they have knowledge gaps a chef doesn’t.)
And when you task a short-form creator to create long-form content (like a book), those gaps in knowledge show. When food content creators who don’t have formal culinary training or bother to become truly self taught and proficient get book deals, they don’t understand the depths of the world and knowledge that they’re being tasked to put into words.
This trend in publishers jumping to offer book deals to content creators/just anyone with a built-in audience is disheartening. And it’s sad to know that there are some really talented writers and/or people with a deep knowledge of a certain craft or topic who will likely forever be overlooked by publishers simply because they aren’t seen as valuable, in the sense that they don’t already have an audience. Social media has enticed publishers to just follow the numbers. It seems they don’t want the challenge of sifting through all the writers out there and then marketing a book from scratch. Instead, they’d rather find an internet celebrity with a built in audience and coax them into writing a book to then be able to call them an author. Is that type of authorship well earned? Does anyone really benefit from reading what they write? Maybe some, but in large part I think it just creates more dampening, soundless noise. It’s bad enough the internet is so full of noise…now bookshelves may become a reflection of that reality.
All my rambling to say, this piece hits home, was validating to read, and the ideas are applicable beyond the food space. Cheers!