A Line Cook Rants Again: Social Media Videos vs Memoir Recipes

A long(ish) read on form and content in food media

“Here form is content, content is form. You complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read - or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something; it is that something itself.”

Samuel Beckett, ‘Dante... Bruno. Vico.. Joyce’ (1929)

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film that emotionally destroyed me quote so much as Florian Zeller’s 2020 film The Father. I didn’t stop crying for half an hour once the credits rolled on that one.

I mean, yes, I admit it, I do also cry at episodes of Star Trek and The Gilmore Girls on occasion, but even so, I really was a mess at the end of that film.

The story is simple enough. An elderly man (the eponymous father) is living with dementia and having trouble finding a caregiver. But it’s the unique form the narrative takes that makes it so powerful.

The film is full of dead-ends, contradictions, characters emerging with one identity before disappearing and returning as different people entirely. As viewers, we assume the position of the father. The form of the film renders us confused, disoriented, uncertain, just as the father must be living with dementia. If art is a way of sharing lived experience, by using the form of the film to confuse and frustrate the viewer, we learn a little of what the character’s life with dementia is like.

I love Star Wars, I’m a sucker for cookie-cutter mystery and, though I’d never dare admit it publicly, the occasional rom-com.

But when art makes unique use of form to reflect content, really special things are created.

The Father is an example of this.

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A question of form for social media food creators

When thinking about the mass of food content we have available for us to enjoy (or avoid, depending on your inclination) can we agree the following forms might be at opposite ends of the spectrum?

1. 90 second Instagram Reels that rush through a trending recipe

2. A long and winding written recipe intertwined with a personal anecdote or piece of life-writing

In a recent article of mine, I gave a quick overview of some of the more heinous stuff one can find on food social media. I called the broad group of Instagram channels giving us recipes for boiled potato chips and “two-ingredient sourdough” (a mix of self-raising flour and kefir???) “The Uglies”, and “The Bad”.

But, as one reader noted in the comments, I was pretty generous when it came to what I called ”Good” social media food creators.

Frankly, I didn’t want to come off as a late-thirty something moaning about the young influencer whippersnappers.

Since then I’ve looked a little closer at how these popular food creators are really using the short social media form to make their "content”. Particularly since this group, thanks to huge follower numbers, are far from mere “gonzo” video creators at the periphery of the food media ecosystem. With their book deals and TV appearances, they are this generation’s most relevant food personalities.

Rules of engagement

Do you know what happens when you spend hours over many days looking at the world’s most popular food creators on Instagram and TikTok?

You end up wishing for someone, anyone, to do things a bit differently.

Because having watched the work of personalities ranging from those with millions of followers to “merely” tens of thousands, it is remarkable how much their content seems standardised and formulaic.

But I’m not trying to be a dismissive hard-ass.

In fact, far from laziness on their part, this seems to be because standardisation is the key to success on these platforms. Here’s a few ways this standardisation is encouraged:

1. For one thing videos will often use the same music as others. When videos make use of so-called “trending sounds” they get a potential boost by being offered to people who have engaged with such “sounds” (music) in the past.

2. They optimise for search keywords, which, on a time-sensitive, algorithm-based platform such as Instagram, encourages the duplication of “trending” content that people are already consuming.

3. “Gaming” the system for more views/engagement by “looping” videos so the end loops into the start, making people accidentally watch the video more than once, increasing view rate, and likelihood of being served to more people.

The most professional creators, those who really know what they’re doing, won’t offer public links to their full recipes. A common tactic is instead to tell viewers to “comment ‘recipe’ and I will DM you the full recipe” and use the enthusiasm for a more complete version of their brief video recipe to get more post engagement.

Others, particularly the largest accounts, will not have any method details on their recipe at all, despite listing full ingredients. The result? Scores of comments about how to do things that didn’t feature or weren’t clear in the recipe video itself.

My point is this: The limitations of their recipe form are used to manipulate viewers to take actions that increase circulation and encourage growth of that flawed form.

Ad Hominen

The number 1 strategy for social media success, however, is a big personality.

And it’s this focus on the person that reminds me of what would normally be considered the polar opposite form of food content to these social videos. The memoir recipe.

Neither form, for example, is really about the recipe. The social media star’s recipe video can’t be because it serves as little more than a way to promote their personality and “channel”, not detailed, empathetic guidance for a follower trying to recreate a dish.

Memoir recipes are not about the recipe either. But, unlike a 50 second video, they also aren’t not about the recipe.

This longer form, when done well, manages to enhance the recipe by giving insight into a genuine personal story, just as the recipe gives content to that personal story. One isn’t the same without the other and neither are compromised to accommodate the other.

In contrast, social media recipes, lacking detail and insight, often do little more than help the creator show off exaggerated, optimised-for-attention caricatures of themselves that seem anything but sincere.

No way is this more clear to me in the trend for food videos to obnoxiously sexualise food. I despair when I see yet another creator “spanking” a raw piece of meat, or add comic sound effects when mayonnaise is squirted from a tube.

I don’t want to be a humourless killjoy here, but this is all behaviour that wasn’t tolerated in the safe and inclusive restaurant kitchens I worked in. It makes my eyes roll to see it delivered to millions as indicative of the work of food professionals online.

Examples of food creators who really like to sexualise recipes or slap dead fish

The section in which I hide behind the sofa and get specific about content creators but do so sympathetically…

Josh Weissman is an interesting example of this. He is a very popular food creator and former restaurant cook. I’ve seen his videos pop up over the years without giving them much attention. What I found interesting reading about him and delving into his comments over the past weeks, is how so many of his followers lament the fact his videos have become less and less informative and increasingly “meme-worthy” in recent years.

As though he is optimising for attention and growth online over the value of his video recipes.

Gianluca Conte (pictured above) is another food creator famous on TikTok for being loud, wearing little under his apron, and saying “bitch” a lot. He is also being published by Penguin in a few weeks. In an interview on the Growing Up Italian podcast, he talks about the way he “up-plays” his Italian character as a natural consequence of being on camera.

If you’ve never seen his videos, well, I don’t recommend it. If social media community-building is said to demand authenticity, it is odd to me how a great technique to break through the noise is to undermine your authenticity in place of volume, attention-seeking, and potential virality.

The price of democratisation

Let’s put it simply, digital platforms like Instagram and TikTok allow young “cooks” to bypass gatekeepers and find an audience. But if the tactics I’ve mentioned are what the form demands of them to find that audience and get their attention, I wonder about the consequence of this. I wonder how this rigid form impacts on their development as creators of genuine art.

Perhaps this is the price of democratisation. If we are to take it that young creators, discovering their artistic being, are able to commodify and monetise themselves from day one of their artistic journey, how compressed has this journey become for them? And if the book deal depends on the caricature they depict on social media (note: Gianluca is in a typical state of undress on the cover of his new cookbook), at what point are they allowed to grow beyond it?

Once again, I find myself far from critical of young food creators. I worry the fashionable form they work in is incapable of allowing natural growth and artistic development, particularly when big business (seemingly incapable of marketing for themselves) gets involved early on to take advantage of the huge following they may have built.

The good (without sarcastic air quotes)

Long before Instagram accommodated videos, social video came from the 6 second video platform Vine. The humour and imagination on display as a consequence of that time restriction was really something. It encouraged a perfect balance between the form and good content. As a very geriatric millennial, Vine is the only social platform I (occasionally) miss.

Instagram videos have been getting longer for years. Meanwhile, the algorithm continues to demand regular content updates, unique views, and fresh engagements. Condensing a recipe that would take 10 minutes to detail on a TV show into 90 seconds on Instagram is not my idea of creative use of a new form we consider to be so important to our cultural landscape.

There’s a reason, after all, that the stories of 20th century Modernist stream of consciousness novels of Joyce and Wolff tended to span a few hours or a day. If that form tried to accommodate the elaborate stories of 19th century realist novels, those novels would be tens of thousands of pages long.

New forms require unique content. This is so much the fun of artistic and technological progress.

Thats why I’ll finish with some accounts I think use the limits of social to create fun but worthwhile content. In short videos, Sandwiches of History gives genuinely interesting peeks into sandwiches of long ago. They are in turn very funny and interesting. I also appreciate the short form work of restaurant cook Matt Broussard whose insightful videos never resort to eye-rolling click bait or trends. His “recipe videos” are concise but limit themselves to specific techniques and ideas, not entire dishes. He does so without resorting to obnoxious, character-led persona that, accordingly, means he feels authentic and human to me in a way some of the most popular food accounts really do not.

And a particular mention to

Sarah

of A Good Table who does something newsletter writers like me could make note of. She runs a very elegant Instagram account creating beautiful content that often promotes the longer form work she creates here on Substack.

This diversification across platforms is something I really should try harder at.

Why I love memoir recipes

I suppose we’re all just crazy for recipes, aren’t we. It’s why recipes are being crammed into short video clips in the first place, it’s why the comments sections bulge with people demanding more details, it’s why people complain about having to scroll through a memoir essay to get to the fluffy pancake recipe they’re looking for.

All that matters is the recipe.

But when it comes to what I call the life-writing recipe form, there’s so much to miss in thinking this way.

A writer has to earn the attention of the reader with every word of course. Writing is not of value on the basis it is true alone, just as writing is not worthless simply because it might be a pack of lies.

I believe great memoir can transcend the personal to the universal. This is no different when that memoir revolves around a personal connection to a plate of food and how to make it.

But just because you have a profound relationship to a banana split, it doesn’t mean to say we need to know about it.

All stories are worthy of a chance, it’s up to the writer to make good on it.

I want to show a simple example of this. It is a modest extract, but it is entirely beautiful. It comes from a work I hold very dear: Nigel Slater’s first volume of The Kitchen Diaries. The following is the entry dated February 21.

There is something romantic about falling snow. This is the first decent fall we have had this year, in two hours covering the box hedges and settling on the grey branches of the plum trees. By mid afternoon, with a single trail of fox prints to the kitchen door, the garden looks like a Christmas card. The cats, huddled together round the Aga, look as if they are not amused: “Oh, that stuff again.”

Every sound is muffled, the grass across the road sparkles in the streetlights, not a soul passes the front door. It is as if everyone is asleep. It takes something magical to make this stretch of road look as it does now, like a scene from a fairy tale. There is a leg of lamb in the fridge that I intended to roast as usual, with mint sauce and roast potatoes. With each windowpane edged in snow, I now want something more suited to a world white over…

Why does this enhance the corresponding recipe so? Why is it perfect recipe life-writing? How does the form work with the content and make it so much more?

The form of Slater’s recipe, that of a diary, gives shape to the lived experience of a person deciding what to eat that day. Look again at the quote. He writes sentence after sentence of delicate prose about the falling snow, covered hedge boxes, and unimpressed cats. Then, with no introduction or authorial hand holding, Nigel’s lamb is front of mind. It is almost a stream of consciousness itself.

The recipe could function without this passage. The ingredients, the method would remain the same. But his kitchen diary offers something else. On a practical level it gives a sense of what weather, what situation, this dish would be good for. On a more literary level, it makes cooking the dish at all irrelevant to the value of the writing. This life-writing manages to let the reader share in an experience, without the need to replicate that experience at all.

To me, this is a very special kind of food writing.

Form is content

I am one of those romantic people that feels all food is slow food. Even the “fastest” of dishes has a history and story that is anything but “short form”. Recipes that are preceded by or interspersed with life-writing are capable of reflecting that slowness and significance of food, its history and its meaning. Not wholly unlike the way a confusing film, full of dead ends and contradictions, leaves you empathising with the the main character’s struggle with dementia.

This is what happens when form and content coincide successfully.

Though it was about a very different subject (that being how very unique James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake was), this use of form is what I’m reminded of when I read the Beckett quote I started this piece with.

Maybe you’ll let me finish by rewriting that same quote, now in defence of the kind of food-writing I so enjoy.

Here form is content, content is form. You complain that this stuff is irrelevant to the recipe? It is not a recipe at all. It is not to be cooked from - or rather it is not only to be cooked from. It is to be looked at and listened to. This writing is not about replicating a food experience; it is that food experience itself.”

Wil Reidie, butchering his hero Samuel Beckett’s quote to make his own point (sorry Sam and his estate)

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