How TikTok, Home To Goofy Dances & Dubious Health Advice, Has Changed The Way We Cook

The widespread freak-out over the site going dark for good is just another indication of its cultural influence.

TikTok’s future – and even its present – in the United States is as murky as a sleepy girl mocktail, which is, of course, one of hundreds of recipes that have gone viral on the platform.

Newly sworn-in US President Donald Trump on Monday issued an order telling the Justice Department not to enforce a law banning the site. But it isn’t clear whether that’s enough for companies such as Google and Apple to justify ignoring the law, which went into effect on Sunday, and continuing to support TikTok.

Some content creators, including the army of those who make and share cooking and food videos, are shifting their focus to YouTube, and others are just waiting out the legal mess. But one thing is certain: the widespread freak-out over the site going dark for good is just another indication of its cultural influence. TikTok might be the home of goofy dances, dubious health advice and mukbang galore – but it has also changed the way many people cook.

Emily Contois, a professor at the University of Tulsa who studies food media, noted the platform’s popularity surged during the pandemic, when many people were cooking more than ever. It quickly became a destination for people seeking inspiration, community – and novelty.

“Food culture’s saturation and excitement and enthusiasm had reached a particular boiling point on food Instagram,” she said. “That pitched into something even bigger once food TikTok took off within that context of lockdowns and the pandemic.

“The virality of TikTok seems more potent,” she says.

On the platform, food trends accelerate at the speed of light. Before social media, it may have taken months or even years for a dish to become trendy. Think of chicken Marbella from the 1982 Silver Palate Cookbook, which eventually became one of the decade’s “it” dishes. Your mum may have heard about it from a friend or tried it at a dinner party, then purchased the book herself – a process that seems positively glacial these days.

“That was like Paul Revere,” laughs Joanne Molinaro, who began posting in 2020 under the handle the Korean Vegan and now has nearly 3 million followers. “Now multiply that by a billion. Not only is the communication faster, it’s reaching an exponentially larger audience. You have this compounding of reach that is absolutely unimaginable.”

The torrent of “you’ve gotta try this” dishes means some cooks are experimenting more. Even in its earliest mediums, food media was always about entertainment, not just teaching. Plenty of people read cookbooks without making a single dish from them or binged Barefoot Contessa episodes while eating takeaways. Even Instagram can feel like a gallery of beautiful food that we’re simply meant to ogle. But TikTok’s mimetic emphasis – where users riff on each other’s creations, whether it’s a dance or a recipe – means people are actually making many of the dishes that go viral.

“There’s a community aspect, where lots of people are coming on to the platform to not only consume content, but also to act in some way,” says Margot Dukes Eddy, a partner and head of social at digital agency Acadia, which advises clients on TikTok strategy and produces content.

Of course, not everyone is on TikTok to participate. A study last year by the Pew Research Centre found about half of all American adults on the site have never posted a video themselves. Still, TikTok does not prize slick production values or perfect lighting, meaning anyone could, in theory, become a TikTok star – or at least make videos people want to watch.

Food writer Adam Roberts has been on just about every platform: he started his blog, the Amateur Gourmet, in 2004, he’s written cookbooks, and is now on Substack, Instagram and TikTok, and even has a novel coming out this spring. To him, making video content is freeing in a way that writing isn’t.

“It’s pretty liberating. You don’t have to proofread or worry over your sentence structure,” he says. “You just have to make sure the food looks good and that you don’t sound like an idiot.”

Sure, some of the food content on TikTok is of the stunt variety. You’ll find people dumping piles of spaghetti on to their tables or cooking steak in a toilet tank. And there are esoteric subgenres – elaborate cake decorating or sushi making, for example. But some of the most viral food videos have involved simple recipes and basic techniques that users say are helping people learn to cook.

The ultimate example of this phenomenon is the fe-tomato pasta dish that went mega-viral in 2021. It was easy – toss a block of feta, cherry tomatoes and olive oil in a pan and throw it in the oven until softened, then mix with pasta - and delicious. People posted their own versions of riffs and spins, adding other vegetables or swapping in different cheeses.

“It really opened people’s minds to the idea that cooking doesn’t have to be so freaking intimidating,” Joanne says. “You can have a hearty, healthy, delicious, satisfying meal without a lot of work. You don’t need to chop everything up. You don’t need to have knife skills.”

TikTok’s short-form format means recipes have to be streamlined. Many videos feature pared-down instructions and a minimum amount of ingredients – and often, a cook who isn’t taking themselves too seriously.

“I know it’s such a buzzword, but there’s an approachability and fun with food,” Margot says. “When I think about Martha Stewart or a cookbook, everything has to be perfect, and [TikTok] is just taking away those barriers and that pressure and making it fun.”

Some might bemoan how the platform caters to our ever-shortening attention spans and the lack of detailed, precise recipes that can help guide home cooks to success.

But Adam notes that users are learning something, even if it comes in 30-second bites.

“Complex recipes and techniques are simplified for the most distracted of distractible audiences,” he says, “And basic cooking precepts – salt early and well, get things really brown – have become more commonplace.”

TikTok prizes the visual, and so many people are gravitating to prettier food, or those with dramatic transformations (like those “onion boils” from a few months ago that go into the oven as hard, unappealing alliums and emerge tender and melting). Did the world really need pancake cereal? Probably not, but those tiny flapjacks served in a bowl doused with milk were so cute!

Then there’s the spectacle of Logan Moffitt (aka “Cucumber Guy”), whose videos went viral over the northern summer. People went wild for his flavourful salads, though their success was at least in part due to the mesmerising preparation: Moffitt deftly sliced the vegetables, using a mandoline, into a plastic container into which he added other ingredients, then violently shook the whole thing up.

“I’m still trying to understand this myself completely,” he told us in August, of the sudden fame he was enjoying.

At the very least, Adam said, TikTok has “made us more visual in how we plate and serve food. Whether it’s baking feta with cherry tomatoes or flipping a perfectly crisped tahdig out of a pot, any home cook who watches cooking videos on TikTok has a good sense of what makes food look alluring.”

Many also say TikTok’s wide-casting algorithm and rapid scrolling feature have meant people are coming across the cuisines of other cultures. Birria tacos, dalgona coffee and salmon-rice bowls with Kewpie mayo have all had moments on the platform.

“I think it has exposed people to lots of different kinds of cuisines, different kinds of people, lots of different ways of eating,” Emily said.

Joanne notes, too, that the platform’s cultural grab bag and the lack of gatekeeping means culturally significant foods can be misrepresented. Recently, she saw a TikToker use paprika to season kimchi, which horrified her.

“That sort of stuff is really problematic, because you’re passing yourself off as an expert to people who know not a thing about kimchi,” she says.

But she likens the exposure to how online dating broadened her romantic horizons. Before she tried finding a match on apps, she had a very specific type. But she ultimately fell for a guy – an Italian American White guy who’s a professor and a piano player, as she described him – who was nothing like what she thought she was looking for.

“I never would have come across him if I hadn’t opened myself up to online dating, and it’s the same thing with food,” she said. “There are so many different kinds of cuisines that I just would not be exposed to in my daily life had it not been for something like TikTok.”

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