Picture
him, scrolling
Instagram. He slows down for a flash-lit image of pasta on
someone’s crowded, linen-draped dining table. For a sunlit reel of chickpeas
and olive oil breaking down into a golden pulp. For a bubbling pot of oxtail.
اضافة اعلان
He might not plan
to cook these dishes — in fact, he probably does not — but each post makes his
thumbs tingle. Instinctively, impulsively, he begins to type:
“recipe?”
“recipe?!”
“recipe??!”
You could say that
recipe guys represent a major area of growth for reply guys. And anyone can
become a recipe guy: You just have to believe that every time you see an image
of food, you are also owed a recipe, then insist on it.
Cooks and recipe
developers who share their food on social media can ignore it, or at least try
to, but the nagging chorus of “recipe?!” is present, and it is reshaping social
content in real-time.
“Social media was
this way to be spontaneous and low-key and casual, but at some point, when I
shared parts of my personal life, people started to expect a professionally
tested recipe, too,” said Nik Sharma, a Los Angeles cookbook writer and
photographer (who also contributes to The New York Times).
Developing
recipes is work, and it takes time. Sharma never intended to create them for
home-cooked dishes he posted informally — say, a quick dinner of fried rice
with ketchup he made after a busy day shooting cooking videos and writing his
newsletter. He also didn’t want to come across as rude to commenters or to let
them down.
“The easiest
thing was to go, OK, I’m just not going to post what I eat, unless I’m working
on the recipe,” Sharma said.
He keeps his
off-duty cooking private now, drawing a line between what is personal and
professional — a challenging exercise for food writers, since the two areas
continuously overlap.
Is it work, for
example, when you cook dinner for your parents? Recipe developer Pierce
Abernathy started sharing the meals he made for himself and his family during
the pandemic, when he moved back in with his parents. He produced practical
cooking videos on Instagram, filled with visual reference points and raw
cooking sounds, and included the whole recipe just below in the caption.
“The goal is to
build an audience — the core of my business and how I make money is around
engagement and numbers,” Abernathy said. “But I don’t want it to be a
restrictive environment where I can’t be myself.”
Like many
social-first recipe developers, he plans to start publishing recipes on his own
website soon, to monetize and own his content, and worries about how his
audience will respond to that change. Will they have the resolve to leave the
post, to go out and find the recipe?
Though he
occasionally shares ideas and techniques without detailed recipes, like a
clean-out-the-fridge salad he made recently before heading to the airport, and
images entirely unrelated to food, Abernathy finds that most posts that don’t
include recipes can be a source of tension.
“And when you do
get those comments,” he said, “it feels a little demoralizing and
dehumanizing.”
Lucia Lee, a
middle school teacher in Brookline,
Massachusetts, posts photos of kimchi
jjigae and seared mackerel to Instagram: neatly framed, overhead shots of
simple, well-lit plates. She started her account as an archive of her home
cooking and celebrates the romantic possibilities of her favorite ingredients
and techniques, often with loose, narrative recipes and notes on who grew the
food or whose original recipe served as inspiration.
Lee is often
under pressure, in comments and direct messages, to offer more detail and more
structured recipes, and her instinct is to jump in and be helpful. But posting
is a creative outlet for her. “I respond sometimes, if people are polite — a
‘please’ and a ‘thank you’ really go a long way,” Lee said. “But this isn’t my
job; I can’t just pump out recipes for you.”
In many ways,
“recipe?!” is a familiar online demand that has flourished on social media.
Every few months, for years now, a small but vocal group on the internet agrees
that the people who share recipes and the stories behind them should just get
to the recipe.
They usually
blame food bloggers for taking search engine optimization too far, or for plain
old long-windedness and vanity. They demand that free recipes appear online
without ads, introductions, process shots, context, or stories — without any
trace of the people behind them. This unreasonable request has become a
damaging cliché, a way of demonetizing the work and dismissing the writers —
particularly women who write about cooking for their families.
An animated
Maritsa Patrinos comic, published on BuzzFeed in 2018, illustrated the early
mood: A cheerful young man scrolls through a post about a “delicious lasagna
recipe” and wastes away to a skeleton before he can reach it. In the years
since, that comic has become darkly self-referential — it may as well be about
the get-to-the-recipe conversation itself. It never ends.
In the last few
months, though, I have come to think of “recipe?!” on social media, and of all
its brash, insulting little iterations, as the last possible stage of this
conversation, a kind of de-evolution with nowhere left to go.
It is a way of
treating the people who share their cooking online entirely as products. But I
think it’s also a way of becoming a bit less human. Of becoming more like
compulsive web extensions, our only mission to scan, to want, to send the same
command out into the void, over and over again, on our sad and infinite loops:
“recipe?”
“recipe?!”
“recipe?!!”
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