Food Is Not Content

Something happened to food somewhere around 2012, when Instagram made the overhead shot of a flat white as common as the flat white itself. The thing that happened is this: food became content.

This is not entirely bad. Democratizing food media has meant that regional cuisines, immigrant traditions, and working-class food cultures have gotten attention and respect they never would have received from the old apparatus of white-tablecloth restaurant criticism. The fermentation revival, the global hot sauce moment, the reclamation of so-called peasant foods — none of this would have happened at the same pace without social media.

But something has also been lost, and I want to try to name it.

When food becomes content, it gets optimized for the platform. This means it optimizes for visual impact over flavor, for novelty over depth, for the first bite over the fifth. The burgers get taller until they are structurally impossible to eat. The desserts get more extreme until they are theater first and food second. The recipes get shorter and faster until the slow cooking processes that produce depth of flavor are designed out.

I am not being a purist here. I understand that format shapes content and content shapes culture and this is just how media works. But the specific optimization of food media toward visual spectacle has downstream effects on actual cooking culture that I think are worth examining.

Consider the cooking show. The old cooking show — Julia Child, Keith Floyd, the Galloping Gourmet — was fundamentally instructional. It was built around the premise that the viewer might cook the thing. The new cooking show, from the compressed drama of MasterChef to the ten-second TikTok technique, is built around the premise that the viewer will watch the thing. The pleasure is vicarious. The skill transfer is incidental.

This is not the fault of individual creators or viewers. It is what the attention economy does: it extracts the pleasurable surface of an activity and delivers that surface as a substitute for the activity itself. You can watch forty episodes of The Great British Bake Off without learning to make pastry. You can follow four hundred food accounts without learning to cook.

I cook badly and slowly, with plenty of failures. But I cook. And I notice that the people in my life who cook — who have the patience to brown onions slowly, to taste and adjust, to understand why a sauce breaks and how to fix it — have a relationship with food that no amount of content consumption produces.

The knowledge is in the hands, not the eyes. The pleasure is in the process, not the scroll.

Food is a practice. Content is a commodity. These are not the same thing, and the conflation is producing a generation of excellent food photographers who have never made their own broth.