PROJECT: GRANDMA
Internet has a boundless appetite for watching wholesome women go about the business of their lives
Ionly intended to watch one of the snack-size shorts from the new season of “Grandmas Project,” a web series in which film directors document their grandmothers as they cook at home. But in a couple of hours, glued to my laptop, I wolfed down the entire archive.
Made by mostly French directors, and featuring their immigrant grandmothers, the shorts had the same irresistible flavor as Martin Scorsese’s 1974 documentary “Italianamerican.” In its opening scenes, Catherine Scorsese, the director’s mother, sits on a shiny, plastic-wrapped couch and considers the silliness of her son’s film: “What should I say? You want me to tell you how I make the sauce?”
I have watched it countless times, always noticing some new, magnificent idiosyncrasy in Catherine Scorsese’s tone, her gestures, her humor, the precise clutter of her countertops and shelves. I thought of her again when I watched the charming short by Zeynep Dilara.
Dilara’s grandmother Munise Bostanci sings a beautiful, mournful song in Turkish while she simmers bulgur wheat with potato and onion for their lunch. She’s a little embarrassed by her singing, but says she doesn’t care. “Who’s going to watch anyway? My children and grandchildren?”
How typical of a grandma to underestimate her popularity and her reach! To treat a professional film shoot like a kid’s class project. In reality, grandfluencers command large, multigenerational audiences on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. The internet has a boundless, almost compulsive appetite for watching wholesome old women go about the business of their everyday lives.
I’m thinking of “Pasta Grannies,” Vicky Bennison’s gentle YouTube series documenting the techniques of Italian grandmothers, which later became a cookbook. As well as larger amateur accounts like the familyrun Veg Village Food, which features a 73-yearold Punjabi woman named Amar Kaur and typifies the genre.
More than 5 million followers tune in to watch Kaur cook bamboo biryani, golgappa with homemade puffs of pastry, eggplant pakoras, pizza, milkshakes, Oreo cakes and all kinds of twists on packaged noodles.
Kaur has a simple setup in her family’s courtyard — a wood-burning stove and outdoor tap for washing vegetables — but she cooks meals for about 100 children in her village, sometimes more. She works steadily and hardly speaks, except to identify the names of ingredients as she tosses them into gigantic pots and bowls.
Hardeep Sharma, one of her grandsons, shoots the videos and runs the account, and various cousins and uncles often help Kaur with the prep. In November, riding the popularity of the account, the family opened Veg Village Food, a restaurant in Mohali, in northern India, though Sharma told me his grandmother doesn’t work there — she still prefers cooking at home, as a public service, always giving away the food she makes. Fans adore and admire Kaur, and Sharma often translates the nicest comments for her.
Watching a grandmother cook can be educational, ambient or entertaining. It can be deeply nostalgic and emotional, too. It’s not a coincidence that, as Hannah Giorgis reported in The Atlantic, traffic for grand-fluencer food accounts on TikTok tends to spike around the holidays, when younger users may be aching for familial connections they lost, or never had.
But the exhilaration of “Grandmas Project” isn’t in the cooking. The most interesting moments come when the grandmothers themselves offer commentary about the process of being turned into images of grandmothers — and their discomfort with it.
Lola Bessis’ Italian grandmother, who goes simply by “nonna,” was so uneasy about projecting an image of cozy, aging domesticity that, at first, her granddaughter explains, she resisted the project entirely. That resistance is understandable: Grandma content tends to flatten women out into an archetype: an industrious, uncomplaining source of hard-won knowledge, or a cute, benign, twinkly-eyed craftswoman.
Many of the women in “Grandmas Project” are also sad, tired, angry and sometimes a little incoherent. They’re pottymouthed and funny and inconsistent. They are lonely, or nostalgic, or eager to fix a date with their crushes who live downstairs. They are even, sometimes, sick of being filmed.
Munise Bostanci, who sings while she cooks, has had just about enough by the end of the shoot. She makes fun of her granddaughter for getting excited about the light streaming into the apartment, casting a dramatic shadow of cut roses on the wall. She cracks her granddaughter up with her complaints.
When Zaga Sondermajer-Stankovic bakes an elaborate Moskva torta for her granddaughter Mila Turajlic, she insists that Turajlic take a good look at the amount of pineapple spread on the first layer. The camera dutifully zooms in. But as far as Sondermajer-Stankovic is concerned, she isn’t doing this for an audience. “It’s not the camera that needs to look,” she insists, clearly annoyed. “It’s you!”
Justina Teres talks about the sex she used to have with her late husband, and how it could feel transactional for her. She shares her recurring dream of being the kind of woman who lives on a prairie and carries a rifle. The portraits are brief, but intimate, and it’s easy to forget that these women are speaking to their grandchildren — not to us.
By Dani Blum
On social media, diet enthusiasts claim that a sludge of papaya seeds can fight off parasites. A TikTok user whose account is devoted to weight loss says that a whirl of lemon juice, pineapple, ginger and cucumber, blended until frothy and consumed twice daily, can help you melt off 10 pounds in a week. Bright “elixirs” pledge to rejigger your gut, while a set of six drinks each day (made of carrot juice, apple juice and green vegetable juices, among others) compose “the Skinny Cleanse.” Celebrities, too, have sworn by these sorts of diets, including Beyonce and Gwyneth Paltrow, who regularly advertises the “detoxifying” products of her lifestyle brand, Goop.
Every year, the wellness world hawks “cleanses,” often liquid diets that mainly consist of vegetable and fruit juices. A day or three (or eight) of drinking all your meals, and you’ll purge any toxins from your body, manufacturers say. Your skin will clear; your stomach will shrink. You will feel, more or less, pure.
But there is scant evidence to back these claims. “There’s no major research done on most of the cleanses that are out there,” said Dr. Melinda Ring, an integrative medicine specialist at Northwestern Medicine. However, some do say they feel better while on a cleanse — that they sleep better, have more energy or think more clearly. Nutrition experts say people who try cleanses may report positive benefits in the short term — but not because of the specific slush they’re drinking. And cleanses come with plenty of risks. Here’s what to know.
Do you need to ‘detox’?
The case for “cleansing” comes from the idea that harmful toxins build up inside the body, and that the secret to improved health is to release them. “People have this magical impression that what’s in the body are weapons of mass destruction, and somehow flushing them out is going to make them better,” said Dr. Gerard Mullin, an associate professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins Medicine who specializes in gastroenterology.
But our bodies themselves have plenty of filters, said Beth Czerwony, a registered dietitian at Cleveland Clinic’s Center for Human Nutrition. Kidneys, livers, skin and bladders all work to remove toxins and waste. “People often forget that,” she said. “Our body’s such a beautiful machine that it self-regulates.”
There also isn’t robust research showing that the main ingredients found in many cleanses, like lemon and apple cider vinegar, can speed up your metabolism or help you process waste faster, Ring said.
Many cleanses take some form of a liquid diet, which consumers often mistakenly think will give their gastrointestinal tracts a reset, Czerwony said, enabling their bodies to absorb nutrients more effectively when they do go back to solid food and thus benefiting their overall health. That’s misinformation, she said, as your body will absorb the nutrients regardless; often, you need the fiber of solid food.
Why might a cleanse make you feel good?
There is a potential placebo effect that comes with being on a cleanse, Ring said. If you’re convinced that a cleanse will make you feel better, you may convince yourself that you really are benefiting from it.
A cleanse may also keep some people’s energy levels more consistent, Czerwony said, because of what they are eliminating from their diets, as opposed to what they’re adding. When people opt for a cleanse, they tend to drink more water and consume less added sugar than they normally do, she said. If they typically eat processed foods and then swap those out for fruit- and vegetable-based smoothies, they might reap the benefits of cutting back on added sugars and fat. Foods with refined carbs, like white bread and pastries, can make our blood sugar spike, and then our energy levels may crash as our glucose levels slide back down.
But while some people may feel more energetic on a cleanse, others might be exhausted and struggle to get through the day because of how few calories they are consuming, Czerwony said. Some people experience headaches and become irritable; they can also develop diarrhea or constipation.
There’s no sciencebacked, individual component of a cleanse that makes you healthier, Czerwony said. A 2014 review of past studies on detoxes found that the research was largely flawed; a separate 2017 review found that juicing and detoxification diets led to weight loss over short periods of time because of how few calories the participants consumed while on them, but they tended to experience weight gain once they resumed eating normally.
If you try a cleanse, choose one that lasts no longer than three days, Czerwony said. The limited time frame is important so you avoid nutrient deficiencies and imbalances in your electrolyte levels. It’s also critical to make sure you’re not consuming dangerous levels of vegetables and fruits, which may seem counterintuitive. A few case reports have found that people on juice cleanses can develop kidney issues, because certain vegetables like spinach are high in oxalate, and high oxalate levels can cause kidney stones, Mullin said.
“They don’t just do one smoothie — they live on it,” he said. “Some people overdo it.”
And any supposed benefits from a temporary juice cleanse won’t counteract the toll of an unhealthy diet, Ring said. To incorporate healthier habits for the long term, eliminate processed, packaged foods as much as possible, and make sure you’re getting the recommended five servings of fruits and vegetables per day, Czerwony said. Opt for complex starches like whole grains instead of processed flour, and stick to foods that are high in fiber, like nuts, beans and apples, which can regulate your GI tract. Exercise and good sleep can also give you more energy. But you don’t need to turn to a detox to feel better. As Mullin said, “the body knows how to take care of itself.”