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Wil Reidie's avatar

PSA: At least 20% of my motivation for writing this was so I could post that video of British food hero Keith Floyd.

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Margaret May's avatar

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!

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