As our project shows, cooking recipes have a long history and their relevance is not declining. Today, the internet and social media provide a seemingly endless well of cooking recipes. Online platforms containing recipes reach from food blogs, by celebrity chefs or laypeople, to Instagram accounts dedicated to the how-to of cooking, to Tik Tok videos by hobby cooks and celebrity chefs. Accounts devoted to particular (e.g., plant-based) diets and national cuisines also feature prominently. Such content tends to be glamorous, using filters, artificial lighting and expensive technical equipment. But more recently, creators have also embraced the challenge to “be real,” and so today’s social media users get to watch “low-income trailer-park mums of four”, most of them single and under 30, preparing simple meals designed to make ends meet. Those videos feature tired-looking mums with expressionless faces, preparing meals in the trailer park, while kids are playing in the background. No explanation or instruction is provided: such cooking videos are designed to give the impression of unmediated authenticity. Time and again, particular recipes also go viral: from one-pot-dishes and banana bread during the pandemic to, more recently, crispy chili oil and the inescapable Pasta Assassina. A related occurrence is the ‘kitchen hack,’ currently represented by the use of a waffle iron to make almost anything (from Hot Dogs to Mac and Cheese).
Where there is a lot of similar content, another phenomenon is bound to occur: parody and humour. As a self-confessed foodie and passionate hobby cook, I do follow a lot of food content online. Attuned to ‘everything how-to,’ I have been noticing a ‘new’ development in the socials: more and more content is dedicated to poking fun at the ways the platforms are utilising the cooking recipe to new ends. While their humour can be difficult to understand for less avid social media users, both these new media recipes and their parodies can tell us a lot about the functions of (staged) food-making in our post-digital world: Cooking recipes are involved in shaping (group) identities related to class, gender, and ethnicity; they can be sources of social or emotional validation; or simply generate monetizable traffic.
Perhaps the most straightforward forms of humour are memes deriding the copious prefatory material typical of modern food-blogs: while their particular aesthetics (e.g., pastel colour palette and high-quality photos) are meant to make the blogs visually appealing, readers eager to find out how to cook a meal have to make their way first through long narratives about how the recipe came into being, what inspired the (hobby) cook to make it, what emotions the ingredients and the finished meal are supposed to generate. Suspense can easily turn into frustration when scrolling becomes so cumbersome that users leave the website before they have found what they came for.
Memes such as the following draw on this shared experience:
Arguably, though, like Facebook, food blogs have become almost obsolete by now. Most recipe producers have meanwhile turned to other types of social media, especially the image-sharing platform Instagram and the video hosting service Tik Tok. On both platforms, however, videos or ‘reels,’ have become the predominant medium of the recipe. The platforms use algorithms designed to maximise user engagement and promote trending content. This proliferation of similar content does not just inspire imitation by users but also parody.
Of the many different humorous food-related how-to-videos, by far the most popular currently are the ones that make fun of elaborate food-making processes. Such recipes are an offshoot of the so-called ‘trad-wife’ trend: young girls glorify traditional gender roles and share their daily lives as housewives on the internet, in a nostalgic turn to the past. This content is selling dreams of self-reliance and the allure of making things with one’s own hands – a ‘back to the roots,’ a life more attuned to the cycles of nature, with a new appreciation for homegrown and home-made food. While shocking to many feminists, this is also a life free from the stressors of a society in which women are expected to be caretakers and perform ‘like men’ at the same time as gender inequality is still alive and well. As such, tradwives and the ‘stay-at-home-girlfriend’ can be seen as symptoms of a young generation tired of the expectations of modern life and longing for a simpler way of life. These videos often showcase young girls, dressed in garments from the fifties, filming themselves as they prepare familiar meals from scratch in elaborate processes that can take several hours. Widely popular Tik Tok star Nara Smith has set the aesthetic standard for these videos, often paired with soothing voice-overs, jazzy music, and medium-close-up shots of her perfectly styled face and outfits, which alternate with close-ups of her hands and ingredients. While the videos enjoy huge popularity online, critics of this new trend have of course picked up on their distinctive aesthetics and content, caricaturing them in videos like the following:
Such parodies highlight the problematic gender roles that these recipes perpetuate and point to the unrealistic standards they establish. Not only do they reduce women to the roles of mother, wife, and caretaker of the family, they also are mostly a white-middle-class phenomenon and are steeped in nationalistic ideologies.
Similar criticism can be levelled at a comparable social media how-to trend: that of mums sharing how they fill their kid’s lunch boxes. In these videos, we see their perfectly manicured hands, as they fill huge coolers with a combination of expensive ready-made snacks and home-made food, with carrots shaped into stars and hearts, and accessories like expensive tumblers (another social media trend), little charms, and hand-written notes expressing how precious the little ones are to them. Such ‘super-mums’ take pride in spoiling their extremely picky children – and users have been quick to ridicule these over-the-top performances of perfect motherhood.
Fake nails fulfil another function in a lot of recipe content. Tapping on surfaces, they produce satisfying sounds that are often tagged as ASMR: “autonomous sensory meridian response” – a response that goes beyond merely “hearing” but produces a tingling sensation – a kind of full-body experience. In videos such as these, we hear the satisfying sounds sizzling oil, the chopping of cabbage on wood, and the tapping of fingernails on packaging. Often, these creators also disseminate notions of clean eating, offering healthy alternatives to recipes normally rich in calories – as if the ASMR is supposed to make up for the lack of other sensorial pleasures. Users critical of diet culture have been quick to produce parodies of such glamorised cooking performances and their appeal to the senses:
While food, eating, and erotics have always been closely connected, social media certainly has no shortage of sexualised performances of food-making. There are, for instance, Russian-born Tik Toker Dina Kalanta’s coffee recipe creations. The model’s lascivious Russian accent, stern look into the camera, and her characteristic use of a milk frother have become trademarks that many users have copied and poked fun at:
While the majority of such recipe videos are made by women, this rule is not absolute: When men cook, they also like to dramatize themselves as ‘hot cooks,’ spanking pieces of meat, suggestively squeezing out lemons, sighing in disbelief over how well they have performed/cooked, and generally showcasing a lot of arm muscles. Both women and man have jumped at the opportunity to engage with such content:
In this bewildering world of social media recipes, when reactions, engagement, and clicks are of primary importance, it can become exceedingly difficult to differentiate between what is ‘serious’ and what is ‘skit.‘ Dina Kalanta is certainly aware of the humorous components of her videos. And men’s oversexualised handling of ingredients may well be designed to spark calculated outrage (so-called ‘rage baits’). It is not always clear, therefore, whether such recipes are not merely created to trigger a reaction from general, or very specific users. The affordances of Tik Tok promote the creation of such reaction videos, also called ‘duets’. For instance, accounts like @chefreactions entirely build on ‘roasting’ recipe creators who prepare large quantities of ‘trashfood,’ using highly processed ingredients and mixing them up in disposable tin foil pans with their bare hands. It has been suggested that some creators upload such content only to provoke reactions like these:
Lest we are left with the awkward impression of a white men dismissively commenting on a woman’s poor cooking performance, I present you with black content creator “Kiki’s” take on the matter:
In her reaction video, she subtly makes fun of not just the typical features of these videos (overconfidence, use of bare hands, unhealthy ingredients, and disposable dishes), she also hints at the fact that most of these recipes are made by white stay-at-home women cooking for their middle-class families. And she garnishes her critique with a smack of environmental criticism.
The list of recipe culinary comedy goes on and below is a selection of similar content (that I might add to whenever I come across more):
- There are parodies of complicated recipes posing as quick and easy while turning your kitchen into a battle field:
- This can also take the form of making simple recipes look way more elaborate than they are:
- Related to this is the issue of compressed temporality, when long processes are cut up and strung together to produce clips of only a few seconds, making it impossible to replicate the recipes:
- Specific exotic ingredients that have become trendy have also been referred to:
- And a lot of (unintentional) laughter is also sparked by the comment sections of online recipes:
- One form of humour should not be missing: the absurd. There is a sub-brand of absurd mock recipes that have been popularised through the YouTube account “HowToBasic” (active since the 2010s). Starting off as regular how-to-tutorials, they suddenly descend into complete chaos and destruction:
All of these types of culinary comedy can tell us more about the work that recipes perform today. In a post-digital world, how-to recipes have various functions many of which have little to do with cooking. The commodification of how-to content means that recipes and their sharing are designed to bring profit: through ads, clicks, and the amount of time spent on the site. Content creators want users to engage – ask for clarifications, dm for the full recipe, visit their other platforms, e.g., blogs, etc. All in the hope of making money. The algorithm, not the quality of the content, determines what goes viral. The logics of repetition and multiplication shape what is prominent, where content that has been successful is endlessly reproduced and copied. Such repetition can quickly become tedious – and it naturally invites humorous imitation.
Users are quick to identify repetitive patterns: not just in terms of content, but also particular aesthetics: camera angles, filters, music and sounds. And they use these observations for various kinds of critique. While they can offer a form of escapism and entertainment, recipes and their parodies are highly politicised: they address topics of race and national identity, social background, and gender roles. They highlight the impossible demands of modern life and the way social media presents young people with a fake and glamourised world that they cannot live up to.
Rather than being mindless consumers, culinary comedians are acutely aware of not just how social media trends work but also what problems they pose. The online recipe can forge group membership and identity, but it can also be divisive and foster individual gain.
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Alina Lange (September 18, 2024). “What’s cooking, Nara Smith?” Culinary Comedy: Online Recipes and Their Parodies. Tracts for Action. Retrieved October 11, 2024 from https://howtobook.hypotheses.org/1576