Influencer food is arguably different to, say, ordinary food. In reality there isn’t much difference in the contents itself, where a sandwich is bread and things ‘sandwiched between the bread. But what’s different is the aura, so to speak, of the food. What kind of plate the food is in, what colour gradient is on the picture of the food, and most importantly, there person eating the food.
What most of us see when it pertains to influencers is what they’ve curated. For chefluencers, food presentation is the crux of the job. Make it look pretty, make it look appetising, but make it look real. We lived through the time on the internet where ads were being exposed for putting additives in the food presented in ads to make it richer, more voluminous, etc.
However the internet, as much as it’s de influenced itself from the clutches of Big Beauty Brands™, is still under the influence of beauty women eating food.
Indonesian scholar Dipo Djungdjungan Summa says that, “the concept of beauty is decided by the ruling elite, and then followed and internalised by the ordinary people.”
Classism is rife in our daily scrollings, and like most people there are so many—perhaps, too many—obscene ways that food is wasted on the internet, more specifically, on instagram.
The restocking my fridge videos, taking one food item out of plastic and putting it in a cuter, more minimalistic style of plastic isn’t the worst sin in the world, but if it’s all of your content, one has to wonder if the aesthetics exist only to create envy in the vacuum of one’s social content.
This gross overconsumption has been rife within the bubbles of the internet that upper class creators push content onto everyone else who looks to them as an aspirational influence. With these influencers their lifestyle revolves around creating a life you want, down to the food. Foodstagram has been popular since people realised that taking photos of their food and posting it was an accessible way to elevate your lifestyle, and it’s evolved into an era of creators that leverage a task like making your lunch as a form of content. The food itself becomes aspirational, like giant metal cups. Whilst not on the same level of celebrities selling vitamins to their child audiences, such content makes it feel as though you might actually achieve the lives of these people, you might be able to eat these lush meals.
Food is inexplicably tied to our ever evolving pathways towards popular culture. We’re eating because food should be consumed intentionally but also it’s beautiful and it’s a testament to the way you live, whether it’s going out to a michelin star restaurant, or buying organic butters and heirloom tomatoes. In the early days of foodstagramming, the symbols of a successful food influencers were large plates of overexposed meals against the back drop of a beautiful shimmering restaurant or an nice, minimalist cafe. Now we’re obscurely shaped pasta and yellow tomatoes that you can only find by knowing the owner of our local farmer’s market.
Despite this spectrum we’ve created to appeal to multiple corners of the internet's tastebuds, there’s one commonality that seems to never disappear. Food and its correlation with beauty. It’s almost inescapable to see content that fuels different eating disorders and it begs the question; why is influencer eating so politicised?
We’ve become so used to scrutinising our bodies through food that it has warped any idea of food content actually being a good think. Pairing this with the nature of the internet, and the hatred of body checking there is always a reason to doubt food content, especially when it isn’t simply for the purpose of making food.
Sitting beside the capitalist procedures of what we consume is the politics of that very same thing. Food is no longer just for consumption, it's for aesthetics, for policing our bodies, for navigating the loss of ourselves and the newness of our multiple online personalities. When we think of beautiful women, we think of the world’s current it girls; Gabriette, who recently filmed a Day In The Life video with Vogue and stated that ‘eating is sexy’, Quenlin Blackwell, CharliXCX, Julia Fox, so on and so forth. All you need to do is watch the 360 music video to understand who’s influencing what.
Some influencers have more popular creators of food than Michelin star chefs are, and most of the time, a collaboration between the two isn’t uncommon. Aptly named ‘Chefluencers’ have the power to dictate how we eat, what we eat, and the food that is idealised.
Aside from the many food inspired beauty products we know and probably care very fleetingly about, the beauty in food content is transcended simply by sponsorships and chocolate flavoured lipsticks.
Like I mentioned before, Gabriette is the prime example of how food is merging with pop culture and its legion of socialites. Gabriette is first and foremost a model. She has the cheekbones for it, and her signature goth girl look has featured on many a trend; your office siren pinterest board will most definitely have a picture of her somewhere.
But her charm is that cooks. Not only does she cook, she eats. We’re in an age where content is clipped and extended to fit the creator’s needs, and this combined with the facets of content that are in love with buying more than using, There’s something undoubtedly charming about Gabriette’s content.
It’s a huge step away from the days of gnawing on lettuce and believing that it was the healthier option to carbs, or demonizing the latter along with fats and oils and the necessary components of a good meal. The food Gabriette makes is full of sugars and fats, which is what shocks most people when they see her figure, going as far as assuming that she’s gotten work done.
It’s not groundbreaking stuff, but when it comes to food content, there can be a strain on the relationship between beauty and food. We’ve seen it in countless scenarios, where beauty—a word commonly interchangeable with skinny— cannot exist with food in the picture. We all remember where we were when Kate Moss said “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.”
We also remember where we were when Instagram and tumblr were breeding grounds for “Not Like The Other Girls”; a subsection of the internet where women made fun of other women for being skinny and not eating what they wanted. Both sides stemmed from learned attitudes, and the result in today’s internet, is the combination of both.
Digi Fairy said it best, that “we’re expecting more of celebrities” and subsequently ditching the ones that fuel the diet-pilled culture that comes in and out of online culture. And it’s entirely fair to consider this as an ‘online culture’ because in the wake of authenticity marketing, we’ve seen the rise of ‘what I eat in a day’ videos with foods that are both beautiful and filling.
Nutrition is no longer a mixed bowl of rabbit food and colourful vegetables, and we’re less inclined to believe that celebrities and their morally questionable actions are the status quo for everyday food consumption.
What does this mean for diet culture? Are we going to end up in a cycle of progressing and regressing every few years, or is the internet going to make more room for the many many types of babes that just like to eat? We think so, and whilst adopting influencer habits has its through line, there's no harm in sharing a recipe or two.
