#Social Media Diet
TikTokers might iron chicken and whip coffee, says David Ellis, but the internet’s top chefs have never had more influence
TIKTOK might be the app you think you’re too old for, but it looks like it’s too big to fail. The most watched television broadcast of all time was the 2012 London Olympics when, from July to August that year, 3.6 billion people tuned in. Meanwhile TikTok’s biggest foodie triumph, the #TortillaTrend, is on four billion views and counting. With every hit spilling onto Instagram, YouTube and even into newspapers, it isn’t going anywhere.
The tortilla thing started a couple of days before New Year’s Eve. Australian TikToker @crystalscookingfun uploaded a few seconds of her #wraphack, taking a knife to her tortilla, cutting it at three o’clock and putting different ingredients in each quarter before folding it in four. Crystal is not, by the app’s standards, a big noise — today she has 4,419 followers — but owing to its viral-hungry algorithm the video was viewed 31,000 times in 15 hours. When Alexandra Johnsson spotted the hack and shared it with her million or so followers on @simplefood4you, she pulled in 69.5 million views — about three times the number that watched last year’s Oscars — and suddenly supermarkets worldwide were scrambling to meet demand. In the UK, Sainsbury’s saw a 56 per cent spike in sales, Waitrose a 37 per cent rise. A couple of weeks later, a 2018 recipe for feta pasta was revived on TikTok (earning 600 million views) and the same thing happened all over again: the great February feta rush.
Lockdown, having made home cooks of us all, willingly or not, has taken things to a new level. Not every hit video makes it into our kitchens: there are mercifully few copycats of @itsmeju1iette, who boils her meatballs in an electric coffee maker and scored 15 million views for cooking steak in a toaster. Still, more than ever before, TikTok and Instagram are changing what we eat and how we do it.
Though TikTok does have its fair share of teenagers drinking whipped instant coffee (#DalgonaCoffee, 460.4 million views) and making blue loaves of bread from egg whites, cornflour and plenty of food colouring (#CloudBread, 3.1 billion views), the new wave of food-lovers aren’t all stuck in secondary school. In fact, TikTok’s biggest user base is aged 18 to 24, and most of the biggest names in eating are older.
Gordon Ramsay — a handsomely crinkled 54 — is undoubtedly TikTok’s king of food, although he’s part jester too. #RamsayReacts, where the chef takes a typically pantomime approach to other people’s culinary attempts, has been watched 5.5 billion times, provoking users to try evermore outlandish kitchen exploits in a hope of appearing in front of his 20 million followers.
Ramsay says: “What I’m fascinated about is that people are cooking in hotel rooms: they’re using irons to grill a chicken, or using percolators to boil eggs. But that’s the advantage of lockdown: everyone and everything has got super creative.”
“Creative” might be a kind way to describe ironing chicken, but lockdown has given rise to a lineup of chefs who look to be the latest Jamies and Nigellas. Poppy O’Toole, 27, had spent a decade in kitchens, training at the Michelin-starred Purnell’s in Birmingham. When lockdown hit, she was working as a sous chef at women’s members’ club AllBright, which let her go. With no job to turn to, she started @poppycooks.
“I was sat there thinking what on earth am I going to do? I’d lost my job. I felt completely useless,” she says. “But then I thought, I’m going to be cooking anyway, why not show people how to get their skills up a little bit?” O’Toole is modest about her success — “it just snowballed from a few basic videos” — but she now has 1.4 million followers, almost half aged 25 to 34, and built on the back of potatoes every which way, quick tips-andtricks and fine dining hacks. “Sometimes I’ll do my gels and purées and people love it, I’m kind of flexing my cheffy muscles.” Within a year she’s established herself as one of the biggest names in recipes and a cookbook is due in
September, which she says will make a dream come true. “You know how it is with some little girls and weddings? Me with a cookbook.” She could soon pop up as a guest chef once restaurants are allowed to reopen, and she won’t be doing the kind of thing she used to. “I’ve learned my style and how I like to cook; TikTok helped me discover it,” she says.
What about the viral things? Or are they too silly? “Sometimes I see things and I think: no, don’t do it, come on, you can think of something else. But then I’m like: nahhh, looks delicious!”
Is it a realistic portrayal of food, though? “When I was at work, I served food and it looked perfect. But at home? I make mistakes constantly. I want to show people that you don’t have to be perfect to make good food. It’s all right to burn something — I’ll show you how to make it better.”
While O’Toole’s chef background set her up for success,
Eloise Head, aka @fitwaffle, used her business savvy to build her 972,000-strong TikTok following. As her job as a personal trainer became unviable — lockdown will do that — Head decided to cook. This was something new. She says that before this, she sometimes used to bake with her auntie. Head uses the numbers to see what works, and taps into what’s popular: her recipe for an Oreo and Nutella cookie pie has four million views, her cookie dough bars 11.5 million. “I ended up creating very short, simple, sweet recipes,” she says, “and these do really well. A lot of people were asking for edible cookie dough, you know, like no-cooking stuff. They were asking for ages so I thought, you know, I’ll just do it. It’s performing really well.”
Like O’Toole, there is a book in the works. Head has an engaged audience, with thousands of comments on every post, but says 60 seconds is too long for a typical video. “I’ve found that a lot of my best-performing videos are around sort of the 15 to the 17, 18 second mark, though I can probably push it to about 25, maybe 30 seconds max and still get a really good response.”
Perhaps it’s no surprise that social media, which has conditioned us for instant gratification, should be a platform where a few seconds of content is enough for enormous success. But it’s impact is plainly real — the sheer volume of copycat videos and spikes in supermarket sales attest to that.
It’s affecting restaurants’ bottom line, too, and not just on TikTok. Plain old photos on Instagram are far from done — and still are changing menus. Claridge’s have sold 600 of their lobster Wellingtons for delivery since December alone, not bad for a £75 dish. “Lockdown certainly gave this a second wave. People were stuck in their homes desperate to make the everyday special, and of course, then documenting this on social media. And the lobster Wellington, with all its visual splendour, makes for wonderful Instagram content,” says Martyn Nail, the hotel’s executive chef. Wellies seem to be what you might call click-plate: at the Holborn Dining Room, Calum Franklin says that once his beef Wellington and “Welly Wednesdays” took off, “it changed our customer base on a Wednesday night altogether. It would almost purely become guests who were obsessive about food, and it wasn’t such a casual crowd. We’d get orders and it would be one of everything on the menu.” He manages his social media himself and says that, instead of traditional applications, he has chefs direct message him for work.
Some of Instagram’s original influencers have upped their game during lockdown, too. Madeleine Shaw says she’s “created more recipes with an immunity focus” since last March, and finds “there’s a lot more engagement and recreation of my recipes. People aren’t just tapping the like button, they’re making it at home. Food is a huge proponent bringing joy to us in a time where we need it the most”.
Elsewhere, Clerkenwell Boy still regularly shares his favourite dishes with his 275,000 followers, but he’s used his influence support to invest in Big Night, a new delivery service. Tim — his surname is a closely guarded secret — wanted to help it get off the ground, “because it’s supporting small, independent restaurants. It’s actually created by restaurants for restaurants”.
With restaurants reopening now on the distant horizon, what’s next? Will TikTok and Instagram lose the restaurant-craving crowd? Hardly likely, reckons O’Toole. “Surely, some kind of TikTok trend restaurant will open? It would be sad not to do something like that!” Snap us in the inevitable queue.