Love Bite: TikTok Food Videos are the Internet’s Saving Grace

January is rough. It’s freezing, it’s tax season, and there’s no more Christmas cheer to keep everyone from sinking into a month-long despair soundtracked by an excessive amount of TikTok and the Elliot Smith albums you are listening to on exclusive rotation, because you’ve essentially said “when in Rome!” to the concept of misery.

I’m right there with you. I always start the new year feeling positive and like I am going to make Lasting Changes In My Life in the first couple of weeks, but by the time the middle of the month hits, I’ve usually ditched Dry Jan and failed to read a single page of a book. 

I will say, though, that there is one thing that tends to ground me in these trying times, and that is just the simple act of cooking. I find cooking fun and relaxing generally, but in January, when the nights are cold and money is tight and there’s a bit less going on, I love going home and making something delicious for myself. As I write this, I’ve got a belly full of noodles, tofu and kale, which I tossed around in a tahini sauce I made. I whacked a fried egg on top for good measure. 
___STEADY_PAYWALL___

The idea for the meal was one I picked up from the endless Instagram and TikTok food content I am served on an incessant daily basis – you click the like button on one video of someone making tempura prawns and all of a sudden your entire feed is like “Katsu tonight? Katsu tonight queen?” – but unlike a lot of the other stuff I tend to be served by the algorithm, I’m actually usually pretty happy to see recipe videos. 

I often feel like a lot of the time I spend on my phone – looking at social media or dating apps or even just texting – is time that I could and should be spending doing something better for me. When I’m served up recipe videos, however, I don’t mind so much, because in watching them, usually I am passively learning something valuable. It was because of recipe videos, for example, that I discerned that the tahini sauce I prepared earlier would benefit from a bit of rice wine vinegar; they have also taught me how I should be chopping vegetables, and how best to prep a steak for the frying pan. Recipe videos have shown me how to get the most out of my food, and I think that is genuinely cool and rewarding. 

“It’s so boring when everything looks the same, and food shouldn’t be boring. If you believed one side of the internet, though, you’d think we were all blonde women called things like MaddieTaste, eating bowls of butter beans tossed in increasingly complex dressings, made in pristine new-build kitchens illuminated by megawatt ring-lights.”

Obviously as TikTok and Instagram Reels have proliferated more and more, however, food videos have developed their own conventions, just like every other genre of internet video. There are, therefore, some things about recipe videos that I absolutely hate. The shots of forks ripping into egg yolks, or of someone performatively swirling a piece of bread around a soup, or – worst of all – the awful little smiling head nods people give to the camera when they take a bite of their finished dish: all of them, if I had my way, would be made illegal.

This is largely because they feel smug and I think food should be the opposite, but also because of the homogeneity that they symbolise. It’s so boring when everything looks the same, and food shouldn’t be boring. If you believed one side of the internet, though, you’d think we were all blonde women called things like MaddieTaste, eating bowls of butter beans tossed in increasingly complex dressings, made in pristine new-build kitchens illuminated by megawatt ring-lights.

That’s why I get such a kick out of people like TikTok user @lazypotnoodle, making videos of themselves cooking ridiculously complex meals in their uni dorm rooms, at their office desks or in their cars. It’s purposefully obtuse and unglamorous, and it is, obviously, also hilarious to see someone whip up a full beef Wellington while they’re watching a play-through of a Zelda level on their laptop screen in bed. 

While my own cooking isn’t quite that extreme, it also doesn’t look much like the super bright, high-spec videos either – it’s somewhere in the middle. My kitchen is pretty small; I often have to put my ingredients on top of the microwave because they don’t all fit on the surface.

I don’t know if, without internet recipe videos of all kinds, I’d have felt like I had the space or the access to try the more adventurous cooking that I can now do confidently. I think the greatest thing about the internet in general is the fact that it’s a democratisation tool, and while the algorithm is responsible for a lot of bad (such as exactly the samey-ness I mention above), there’s a lot of cool food-related stuff that I’ve learned because of it too. 

All of this is to say that if, like me, you are feeling a bit under it this January, I really do recommend seeking out a fun recipe video online and giving it a go. You might not get it right the first time, but that’s all part of the fun – I messed up a recipe just the other day, but when I improvised to sort it out, I made a different, equally delicious meal. Cooking for yourself is always something you’ll be happy you’re able to do – and with the amount of recipe videos online, showing you exactly how to do everything, it couldn’t be easier. Even if your name isn’t MaddieTaste. 

Words: Lauren O’Neill