Are there to many content creators making up recipes?

In recent years, various television broadcasts have contributed to bringing more and more people closer to cooking, with positive repercussions on the sector, while platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube have filled with recipe videos – to the point that perhaps today there are too many content creators on the Internet trying to emerge in this niche. You can see how overcrowded the field is by looking, for example, at how the latest participants of Masterchef are reinventing themselves. Usually, the contestants who have stood out the most during the program accumulate many followers, and once the program is over, they tend to become content creators – also because, being little more than amateur cooks, for many it is an obligatory choice. However, social networks are already full of people who offer video recipes – and who, for the most part, have managed to build their own loyal audience over time. For this reason, newcomers are increasingly forced to focus on something else, rather than on the recipes themselves. This is the case, for example, of Eleonora Riso, the winner of the thirteenth edition of Masterchef Italia, who has based her social media communication more on her personality and the character she has built over time. The same has been done by Niccolò Califano, who, in addition to a series of ironic videos about cooking with Riso, has created a comedy show about Italians' obsession with food.

«How can I tell you about Franco outside the program?» asked one of the semifinalists of MasterChef Italia 14 recently. «I certainly won't be one of those sexy chefs who flirts with the ingredients; and another thing I wouldn't share is those "grand gourmet dishes" that are impossible to replicate», said Franco della Bella, specifying that in his videos he will mainly focus on spreading culinary culture. Simone Grazioso, a finalist in the latest edition of Masterchef, has taken a completely different direction. His video recipes stand out for being highly scenic, with numerous editing cuts, no-looks at the cutting of ingredients, and small acrobatics with products or kitchen utensils. This approach recalls the first wave of cooking-themed clips that appeared on social networks, and are now considered a bit out of date. Claudio Ciraci, a contestant on Masterchef 14, instead seems to be focusing more on authenticity, showing, for example, even the mistakes that can be made in the kitchen. Although still to be perfected, the different strategies highlight the need for individual content creators who have just entered the field to reinvent themselves and propose new ways of presenting recipes or cooking in general.

The problem with recipes on social networks

Ten years ago, the Atlantic, in an article that became famous in food journalism, criticized «the myth of easy cooking»: the erroneous belief that anyone – even without special skills and with little time available – can aspire to cook well simply by following a recipe. The author of the piece denounced the growing online presence of content that seemed to imply a concept that is inherently wrong, namely that cooking well is something potentially within everyone's reach. On closer inspection, this is not quite the case, since it is often necessary to have a minimum of practice, know the ingredients you are working with, and have the appropriate equipment. However, the tendency to present recipes as something quick and simple has continued, so much so that you increasingly see content that includes unusual ingredients – as if finding them were a given. In this context, many recipes neglect a fundamental aspect: the time needed to clean the kitchen and the utensils to be used, some of which are far from common. An emblematic example of this narrative was Benedetta Parodi's television program, Cotto e mangiato, which aired from 2008 onwards. The host began to impose, at the end of each episode, the limit of ten minutes to prepare a recipe. The result was almost always a race against time. And instead of conveying the pleasure of cooking, it ended up generating anxiety, demonstrating – by contrast – that speed rarely goes hand in hand with quality, and that the idea of "simple and immediate" cooking typical of social networks is often far from reality.