The use of audiovisuals to teach and entertain an audience eager for cooking recipes originated with the birth of television. Today, thanks to social media, recipes that would actually take up to three hours are condensed into one minute, and it is rare for any social media user to have escaped exposure to one of these videos. Do people really cook from these videos as a form of instruction, or is watching cooking a somewhat voyeuristic form of entertainment, with no intention of preparing what is shown? How is it that, despite their short duration, these videos have managed to construct a metalanguage from other elements that distinguish them?
From Julia Child to Chepina Peralta, the most iconic television figures of the past century often included women who represented the archetype of the experienced lady sharing her cooking recipes with viewers, offering tips on technique and tricks to achieve dishes that, at a certain time, conferred an accomplishment beyond the dish itself: from stretching the family budget to reproducing dishes from other latitudes at home (as in Child’s case with American viewers and French cuisine). It seems that cooking shows gave way to another genre that does not necessarily seek to teach cooking, but uses it as an element around which entertainment is generated, such as reality shows.
This didactic ambition shifted from television to social media, where increasingly specialized content creators prepare cooking recipes with astonishing synthesis, editing, and narration, summarized in one or two minutes of video content. Short cooking videos capture attention worldwide. It has become a major genre in which, under the umbrella of cooking, all kinds of content exist: those specializing in a type of cuisine, a particular instrument (like the grill), and those that include elements making them more distinctive. In this way, metalanguages are created within the videos themselves that sometimes attract more viewers not for the recipe, but for what is created around it. For example, preconceived ideas about a culture are leveraged to exploit the exotic elements a foreign recipe might have. In other cases, it is the peculiar way of narrating the recipe that draws viewers to listen. Sometimes, it is the character making the recipe who attracts attention, based on the identity created on social media, such as someone with a different lifestyle. Thus, for example, there are creators in rural settings or belonging to specific religious groups who share their recipes and simultaneously offer a glimpse into their ideologies or ways of life.
Around all these elements, probably few people reproduce exactly the recipes they watch, or even, the recipe itself matters little. The language of food is what attracts us, allowing us to approach other ways of eating, but also of being, speaking, thinking, creating, or even believing.
— This article was originally published in Spanish by Liliana Martínez Lomelí. Translation generated with AI from the original text.
Read in El Economista →