I follow a lot of cooking accounts on TikTok and Instagram, so I’m seeing more and more cooking content, but I’ve noticed a change in style over the last few years.
My feed was full of videos in the style made popular by BuzzFeed’s “Tasty” series in the 2010s. They were typically shot from above or the side and featured a close-up of the creator’s hands slicing ingredients. But nowadays, cooking video creators are increasingly appearing in their natural state, and most of them are just blandly attractive. Sometimes they don’t even seem to be cooking in the traditional sense. I’ve seen a lot of videos where they’re just making sandwiches with fancy ingredients like speck or burrata cheese. I don’t know about you, but I don’t need a chef to tell me that a ham and cheese sandwich is delicious.
It’s gotten to the point where I can’t decide if these recipes are any good, or if the people who are sharing them with me are only doing it because they look good as judged by social media algorithms.
I know that today’s “culture” is incredibly siloed, and the services I receive in my world are entirely different from the services other people receive in theirs. But as economists have long observed, beauty may be at a higher premium now that individuals of all levels of expertise can advance their careers through a strong social media presence. “The internet has made it so that no matter who you are or what you do, from a nine-to-five middle manager to an astronaut to a housekeeper, you can’t escape the tyranny of the personal brand,” writes Vox’s Rebecca Jennings.
In an article in IZA World of Labor titled “Does it Pay to Be Beautiful?”, Ewa Sierminska and Karan Singhal explained that “empirical results support the fact that ‘good looking’ people receive a wage premium, while ‘below average’ looking people experience a wage penalty.” In their overview of research on the beauty premium, they noted that men experience a larger plainness penalty than women. They also found that attractiveness is especially important in customer-facing jobs, because customers prefer to interact with attractive salespeople and waiters, and as a result, attractive people gravitate towards such jobs.
In a sense, when someone posts a video on social media, anyone who watches it becomes a customer. But in addition to individual human preferences for beauty, there’s also the unseen filtering by algorithms. I called Kyle Chayka, author of the new book “Filter World: How Algorithms Are Flattening Culture,” to ask if we’re seeing more content creators putting their faces and bodies on screen, and whether there’s even more of a focus on attractiveness than there was just a few years ago.
Chaika says she’s noticed the same thing I did with cooking creators, and wondered why it was happening: “In a way, algorithmic recommendations are a set of variables and equations programmed by engineers at tech companies, meaning they’re actively deciding what factors determine whether something gets promoted or not. And leaked reports from inside TikTok suggest that at times the company was simply issuing orders: We want fewer ‘ugly’ people in our feed.”
At the same time, Chaika said it’s human nature (and probably innate to us) to look at attractive people, “so it’s hard to say whether attractive people are more likely to get promoted because of some mathematical variable or because they naturally attract more attention.”
That said, he believes there’s been increased pressure lately for people of all expertise (and none) to include themselves in their content. Say you’re an expert on Excel spreadsheet hacks. Whereas before you’d only have to put a spreadsheet on the screen, now you’re putting your face on there, too. “I’ve spoken to a lot of young people on TikTok, and they’ve told me there’s increased pressure that to make a TikTok, you have to put your face on the internet,” Chayka says. “You have to put yourself, your whole body, online in a way that you didn’t have to on Twitter or Tumblr or early Instagram.”
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve learned a ton from watching cooking videos on social media and have had a ton of fun, from garlic peeling tips to really tasty chicken marinades, but I’m finding it increasingly difficult to trust the quality of the recipes I get from the most-followed cooking influencers, so I’m going back to physical cookbooks and reading some tried-and-true cooking websites.
These sites seem less subject to the whims of algorithms because they don’t just select for appearance. Often, one random ingredient or preparation becomes popular and you see it everywhere. For a while, it was random chunks of cream cheese or feta cheese mixed into recipes. These days, it’s French onion in everything. At this point, I believe it’s a better user experience for the palate if I guide the process.
