Dismal bytes
Despairing at “food” on the web
This article is taken from the March 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
“But you must! They’re revolting!”
My wife wants me to see American women hawking recipes on Instagram. The source of her fascination is horror. The performances — grinning frighteningly in kitchens as sinister or rickety as Frankenstein’s lab — resemble auditions for extras in a Hammer movie. The dishes look like the black lagoon the green creature came from.
Social media are amongst the many modern enthusiasms I cannot understand. I am too snobbish or insufficiently leisured to bother with them. My excursion into Instagram cuisine only deepens my bafflement. “How many people watch this stuff?” I ask. The followers number between 200,000 and three million.
I hope they watch ironically. There are some accounts of genuinely gastronomic interest, in which slick professionals peddle complicated recipes. Amateurs, however, offer a lot of the most popular output: they present, with apparent sincerity and evident self-delusion, prospects of meals easily made and rapidly devoured. I am afraid that at least some people mistake their practices for cookery and do what they say.
The notion that cuisine consists in flinging processed foods together at random pervades Instagram. The standard format unconsciously lampoons the style of celebrity chefs, with the cook in camera, extolling her swill. Most presenters add an urgent tone, which perhaps explains their success with audiences of click-happy computer-junkies whose attention-spans twitch and wink. Rapid delivery and the promise of fast results are the defining features of the genre.
A homely momma with a dixie accent empties cans and packets into big pans at alarming rates to create thrombotic, unpredictable concoctions that are “nice ’n’ chaotic — the way I like ’em”. One of her dinners comes straight out of the packaging in which it left the fast-food outlet: “It doesn’t have to be perfect,” is her reassuring mantra for harassed fellow moms as we hear her brood clamouring hungrily in the background.
She serves instant mashed potato and gravy from a jar in what look like dog bowls of dull tin and livid plastic: the dish garners 10,000 “likes”. “Beautiful! Beautiful!” our chatelaine exclaims, ladling shredded chicken that looks as if it has already been digested. She has 235,000 followers.
To a marimba beat, a specialist with 537,000 viewers devotes herself to creating themed salads. She mixes a bowl for Martin Luther King Day by spilling a can of black-eyed peas into an incongruous mélange of croutons, Mexican turnips and raw greens.
“Don’t forget to wash your hands,” is her best advice. She praises her Thanksgiving salad for its unorthodoxy, but makes it by shoving together all the typical leftovers, including cranberries and cold sweet potatoes.
The effect of a few minutes amongst the Instagram housewives is depressing
A young mother replaces the usual bouncy enthusiasm of her breed with an air of sad-eyed detachment as she mixes ready-made ingredients with one hand, using the other to balance a toddler on her hip. The result is allegedly a “five-minute dinner”.
A Texan woman, who recommends her own cookbook, achieves spellbinding originality by wearing Amish attire and offering recipes that supposedly reflect the traditions of that forbiddingly austere and industrious sect. But the Amish are known for rigour that her style belies: the tags of her bonnet drag slackly; she spurns precision, assuring us that she never measures ingredients.
“Not healthy, but this is Amish,” she assures 225,000 followers, as she thickens hot milk with huge globs of processed cheese as a sauce. A contrasting account attracts 2.6 million viewers. The camera is always close to the food. The only human image is of hands mixing or chopping at a fast-forward clip, shuffling ingredients with a card-sharp’s dexterity.
A wooden spoon flashes like an illusionist’s wand. The voiceover is correspondingly brisk, robotically uninflected and as uncompromisingly imperative as a Dalek. A disproportionate number of recipes yield “puff-pastry savouries”. A favourite ingredient is tomato ketchup.
The effect of a few minutes amongst the Instagram housewives is depressing. Millions of people, it seems, can waste their lives wandering the web or oscillating between apps, but have — they think — no time to cook.
Food is regressing. A hundred thousand years of civilisation, in which our ancestors discovered that eating is more than nourishment — a source of joy and a means of forging friends and uniting societies — are betrayed by fast-feeders whose only desire seems to be to get their meals over and done with, lovelessly and thoughtlessly, like the furtive hominids who scavenged for survival millions of years ago. My horror yields to despair.
