I follow a lot of cooking accounts on TikTok and Instagram, so I’m getting more and more cooking content, but I’ve noticed a change in style over the past few years.
My feed was dominated by the video style popularized by BuzzFeed’s Tasty series in the 2010s. The action was usually shot from above or from the side and featured close-ups of the creator’s hands cutting the ingredients. But these days, more and more cooking video creators appear without their faces, and most of them are bland and unappealing. Sometimes they don’t even seem like they’re cooking in the traditional sense. I watched a lot of videos of them just assembling sandwiches with premium ingredients like speck and burrata. I don’t know about you, but I don’t need a chef to tell me that a ham and cheese sandwich is good.
It’s gotten to the point where I don’t know if these recipes are delicious or if the people giving me the recipes are just looking good and getting paid by social media algorithms.
I realize that today’s “culture” is incredibly siled and what I get offered in my bubble is completely different than what other people get offered in their bubble. Masu. But the “beauty premium” that economists have long observed has grown even larger now that individuals with varying levels of expertise can gain career advancement through a strong social media presence. I wondered if there were any. Vox’s Rebecca Jennings writes, “The Internet has made it possible for anyone, from a nine-to-five middle manager to an astronaut to a housecleaner, to develop a personal brand, no matter who you are or what you do. It has become impossible to escape from tyranny.” ”
IZA World of Labor article “Does Being Beautiful Make Money?” Ewa Szerminska and Karan Singhal state, “Empirical results show that “better-looking” people receive a wage premium, but “below-average” people receive a wage premium. ‘This supports the fact that people who look like this face a wage penalty.’ In their overview of research on beauty premiums, they explain that men are actually more exposed to the plainness penalty than women. We also know that being attractive is especially important in jobs that involve customers. Customers like to associate with attractive salespeople and waiters, and as a result, more attractive people are attracted to those types of jobs.
In a sense, when someone posts a video on social media, anyone who consumes it becomes a customer. But in addition to humans’ personal preferences for beauty, there is also invisible algorithmic selection. I called Kyle Chayka, author of the new book “Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture,” to talk about how we’re seeing more content creators showing their faces and bodies on screen, and how attractive they are to a few. I asked whether it would be given more weight than the case. years ago.
Chayka said she noticed the same thing I felt about culinary creators, and explained how and why that is happening. “At one level, an algorithmic recommendation is a set of variables and equations programmed by engineers at a technology company. So they’re trying to figure out what factors are going to determine whether something gets promoted or not. And a leaked report from inside TikTok suggests that sometimes the company should cut down on the “ugly” people who appear on its feed simply because it was obligated to. ”
At the same time, Chaika thinks it’s human nature to enjoy looking at attractive people (I agree, maybe it’s hardwired into us). “So is it because of some mathematical variable that attractive people get promoted more, or because more people naturally pay attention to them? , that’s a little difficult.”
That said, he believes there’s more pressure these days for people with all kinds of expertise (or lack thereof) to immerse themselves in their content. Let’s say you are an expert in Excel spreadsheet hacks. Where once you just put your spreadsheet on the screen, now you put your mug there too. “I’ve certainly talked to a lot of young people who are on TikTok, and they say there’s even more pressure to put their faces on the internet in order to make TikTok,” Chaika said. “He has to expose himself, his whole body, online in a way that he didn’t have to, for example, on Twitter or his Tumblr or even early Instagram.”
Don’t get me wrong. I learned a lot from watching cooking videos on social media, from the trick to peeling garlic to marinating really delicious chicken, and I really enjoyed it. But I’m finding it increasingly difficult to trust the quality of recipes I get from the most followed food influencers, so I’ve gone back to paper cookbooks and tried-and-true cooking websites. I found myself reading some.
These sites seem to be less subject to the whims of algorithms. The algorithm doesn’t just screen for attractiveness. Often, a single random ingredient or cooking style becomes popular and then begins to be seen everywhere. For a while, it was a block of cream cheese, or feta cheese randomly melted into a recipe. Lately, it’s all about French onions. For now, I believe that my taste buds will have a better user experience if I guide you through the process.