Fast cuts – both on the chopping board and in the video editing program. A cheery voiceover walks you through the steps: now, toast the spices in the pan and then grind them up in your mortar and pestle. A mother of several children hauls buckets of fresh milk from the barn to the kitchen to make mozzarella. A woman in her twenties gives you the finger, then shows you how to sear a steak with stainless steel.
These are just a few of the things you may see in short form cooking content lately. Short-form content – typically an Instagram reel, TikTok video or YouTube “short” is around 30 seconds to one minute long. Social media content creators have realised this is the perfect amount of time for any viewer with a shortened attention span to understand a few things about the creator: who they are; what they do; and if you like them enough to press like or follow. In 2025, food content is rampant as ever: the leading content creators have audiences into the tens of millions, some racking up a nauseating number of views for basic concepts like salmon rice bowls and putting pickle brine in your dirty martini.
So how has social media really changed food and cooking? For the most part, these apps have categorised different foods, cooking and eating rituals and assigned your algorithm to that menu. It has also individualised The Chef. You may ask, why is that a bad thing?
The chef as a “brand” is simply a dichotomous identity. If you are a chef or cook with the desire to share your work with the world – the first thing you should think about is your personal brand. What’s your aesthetic? What kind of category of chef are you? Are you feminine and sentimental or are you blunt and old school? After cementing a “unique” and personable image, your audiences expect a specific product – the dish is that product and you are the salesperson. These practices entirely strip the value of cooking since memory, emotion and human connection are at the heart. And although most food content creators would say their ethos is ‘to share recipes and experiences with others’, how meaningful is it if it gets lost in the sixty other Instagram reels about silken tofu chocolate mousse?
For award-winning chef, cookbook author and columnist Rosheen Kaul, she began questioning the legitimacy of content creators when she switched from full-time kitchen-running to freelance writing and content creating. “The biggest issue I’m having is that people are not realising that I’m an actual chef,” Kaul tells RUSSH. “It was so demoralising for a while because everyone’s like, ‘If I can just go to a restaurant and I can cook that, why am I coming to you?’ and that became this whole I-can-do-what-you’re-doing [thing], which was bullshit because you couldn’t possibly understand the turmoil. It’s not sunshine and daisies and taking photos of lemons and herbs on your chopping board at home.”
Kaul’s frustration with social media “chefs” is that audiences don’t tend to engage with the creators outside the screen – especially since most of them don’t cook for others in real life. “I’m trying to use social media to capture more paying audiences [that would] either come and eat my food and see me in real life or buy one of my books or subscribe to someone that I’m writing for. If you just get everything from me off social media, you may not actually want to turn it into [something] quantifiable for me. But of course, it all feeds itself. The bigger you are on social media, the more brands approach you, the more opportunities you have, the more people want to be you and buy stuff from you. But I’m just like, this is too much, I’d rather just hide in the kitchen,” she says.
Chef, food stylist and recipe developer Sian Redgrave has cooked at many residencies and events in her career. She is passionate about classical cooking and simple, elegant flavours – both of which are rare online where more is more. Redgrave never set out to have a career on social media as she “just liked taking nice photos” but her passion for design and fashion translates well to the presentation of her dishes. Though she has a loyal following and a curated visual archive, she emphasises her gratitude for the proper training she received overseas. “I’m glad I had these years of feeling a little bit insecure or feeling like I had to prove myself, learn and catch up because there's nothing wrong with being the student. I suppose now in our world with Instagram, people just want to be the master immediately,” she says.
For many aspiring chefs, the restaurant industry may be extremely intimidating. With media like The Bear (2024) and Burnt (2015), and Anthony Bourdain’s memoir Kitchen Confidential, there’s a consensus that kitchens are a volatile, dog-eat-dog place, and to be respected, you have to survive the hard yards. No matter how talented or hard working you may be, it can still wear you down. Kaul says, “I was really burnt out because of a lack of boundaries. [They] are not something that are taught in high level kitchens. Like, ‘What's that? Just come to work. What's your problem? Are you tired? No one cares.’ My mental health was suffering. I became a very, very unpleasant version of myself and it was ‘fine’ because we were still [high] achieving and we'd won every single possible award there was to win.”
Now with social media, people can explore their cooking abilities and gain knowledge without the heat stroke and abusive superiors. Some argue that the traditional route, though gruelling, reaps more:
“There is a side [of social media cooking] that's detrimental because you are missing out on collaborating with people and learning together [the] fundamentals of food. [Social media] can be all surface-y – no one knows what someone’s food tastes like through a phone. It’s very difficult if you haven’t got some sort of outside injection of collaboration to be like, ‘Am I even growing as a chef?’” Redgrave says. “I think we just have to remind ourselves that all these situations on Instagram mean nothing if we’re not doing them every day in our actual lives. For anyone that’s doing a food career online – don’t end up only existing on a device, it's the wrong road [to take].” For the starry-eyed, it’s important to remember that social media makes everything look easy and to tread with humility. “How do we learn to communicate that there’s an element of skill here? […] If you can't cut a fish and you can’t slice a proper brunoise and you can’t make a sauce and you can’t do any of these basic skills then you don’t really get the right to speak with such authority,” Kaul says.
One positive impact of social media is that the shift to who is behind the food has birthed a different kind of dining experience: small-scale events, pop-ups, chef residencies and takeovers. It presents opportunities of national and international travel where people can cook with other chefs and with unfamiliar, usually inaccessible ingredients. “Social media is wonderful in terms of the people I’ve met all over the world now that I probably never would have. There is a lot of inspiration that comes from seeing other people’s work and what they are up to,” Redgrave reflects.
For the venues hosting these chefs, they too can benefit from the events – hospitality is after all, a symbiotic ecosystem between the chefs, suppliers, farmers, venue and diners. If social media is used as a tool instead of the end destination, it can be more beneficial than harmful – as long as we remember that cooking as a craft takes a village, many years of training and never just a 20-minute weeknight recipe.
