Corruption Cooking
With our BITE MARKS report expert Jago Rackham
MØRNING. Last week we gave you a taste of BITE MARKS, our brand new report on the sullied spectacle of food (download the report here).
Luckily for us, this week’s newsletter is a second serve from Jago Rackham, chef, author of To Entertain and BITE MARKS contributor. Here, he dives into the drivels and delights of spoon-fed algorithmic eating, and what this means for the seemingly incorruptible act of cooking.
Open wide…
Everything is becoming so online - so much that the distinction between the real world and the world of our phones is more and more blurred. We are tethered to them, chased and seek escape. This seems impossible, even utopian. At the same time, and partly because of this, people young and old are taking up self-consciously earthy pursuits. Or, to be more specific, are advertising these pursuits on social media: hiking, working out, all manners of crafts, real world parties, gigs, even literary readings. But most of all cooking.
Because cooking, to a large extent, feels uncorrupted by this blurring: you cannot slice a carrot or cry from an onion on your phone, through a screen you cannot taste or smell. Cannot burn your hand or tongue or the sauce. After all, cooking is a refuge that even AI cannot break into.
It is ironic, then, that the chief cultural driver of the food we make and eat, in restaurants and at home, is social media - Instagram and TikTok most of all. I should know: from 2017 I’ve used a food account called @ecstasy_cookbook, and from about 2021 it’s provided me with my main source of income - it is my job.
At the beginning what I posted felt like it came from the minds of my collaborators and I, simply flung into the ether unselfconsciously. Was it a happier time? Certainly it was simpler. As the account’s popularity grew, I spent more time with it. I thought more and looked more too, at reels and other’s creations, the way they lit their photos, the china or, more and more, metal they used, the neatness of their food.
Such creative influence is part of any art movement. Indeed, social media’s role in the gigantic increase in images of food, professional, semi-professional or entirely amateur, is probably an important reason that cooking is more and more considered culture and not simply craft. A friend in her 60s said that when she was 30, her friends talked about what they’d seen at the theatre, but now people talk about the restaurants they’ve visited.
What a nice thing! People sharing pictures of what they’ve made, complimenting each other, becoming inspired and inspiring in turn, sometimes even making money or getting TV or book deals! How good for cooking, always a creative endeavour, but one left mostly to women and working class men, rarely taken seriously, to be thought of as real culture. Thank you, internet.
But there’s another thing - the way social media works, something few (me included) don’t really understand: its algorithm. The algorithm feels like a third person in the conversation, who asks leading questions and talks over anyone he doesn’t like, forcing something natural into a certain direction.
It likes shiny and bright things best: and so white china plates have been replaced with metal ones, clear white with bright orange wine. It likes the human face, so cooks more often appear with their creations: grinning madly after taking their first bites. It prioritises engagement, which comes fastest not from finding something beautiful, but from anger and guilt. People cook nonsensical things or perform perfection in a way that seems designed to inspire feelings of inadequacy. If you keep looking/watching, maybe you’ll be better.
It knows what it likes, and that’s what it knows: and so a great deal of food posted online looks the same. There was the time for butter, there was the time for bread, and the time for pies is now upon us. This flattening effect, something intentional - for we are fed by the algorithm, and cannot escape it - is a tragedy. For the algorithm is not interested in creativity, but views and engagement, and so roots out creativity in favour of base manipulation. It crushes culture, replacing it with a simulacrum, a churning mass of sameness, a barely perceptibly flavoured stew. Such sameness makes its way onto the menus of restaurants and into our kitchens, nullifying the escape we seek through food, blurring the line between the real and the digital after all.
Until next time, readers!
Words by Jago Rackham. Edit by Sui Donovan. Brought to you by @morning.fyi.
 | A guest post by
|