the perils (and one singular delight) of food on TikTok
I dallied with #FoodTok, and it was disorienting. But I still watch one account regularly: the JCHS Lunch Bunch, which isn't about cooking or spectacle, but about the simple act of eating lunch.
A few quick thoughts right off the bat:
I read the most charming book this week: Last Night at the Lobster. It’s about the final day of service at a Red Lobster in Connecticut, a few days before Christmas.
I published a story in the Washington Post this week, on creative ways to use up summer berries, especially when you have too many in your fridge and not enough time to cook or bake with them.
Keep reading, and you’ll find another link to another story I wrote recently. Is this newsletter today just a promo vehicle for my other work? Maybe!
There is a soda cup, full to the brim with Raising Cane’s sauce, and a smiling woman submerging a slab of Texas toast.
There is a baked macaroni with a thick crust of browned cheese on the top. A knife scrapes slowly across its surface.
Here is a someone cooking pasta with a sous vide in an empty bag of chips, in a bathroom sink, of all places.
A woman bakes chicken in a hollowed-out watermelon.
A man announces he’s trying Indian food for the first time, off a tray affixed to the steering wheel of his car.
More Cane’s sauce. More food sounds: the sizzle of an egg in a pan, the pornographic squish of someone’s finger poking a raw, sliced chicken breast.
Can you keep a straight face? Can you keep yourself from gagging? I couldn’t.
All of those moments of gustatory grossness, if you haven’t already guessed, were beamed onto my phone screen from TikTok, an app I spent years actively avoiding. But a few months ago, as I looked forward to quitting my job as a sports editor and trying out a career in food writing, I figured I should download it. Food media seemed to exist far more in the world of short-form videos than sports did, and I wanted to make sure I was as plugged-in as possible.
Right off the bat, the app served me makeup tutorials and container ships teetering on the edge of oblivion in the North Sea. I learned how to oil my hair and what the acronym “GRWM” stands for. I swiped and swiped and swiped, and still there was no food. So I resolved that I’d force the app to serve me recipes and inspiration. I searched for all the requisite hashtags and terms,, certain I’d eventually land on a new braising method or a genius way to use vegetable waste. Instead, I got ASMR cheese and unholy quantities of condiments. At one point, I landed on a behemoth crab, plunked down on a countertop, so very alive and so very alarmed. By the end of the minute-long video, his legs adorned a pizza. Panicky, my next swipe led me to that raw chicken breast, which was sliced and then poked in a dead-quiet kitchen, as if anyone at all needed to hear those sounds or reflect upon the indent a finger might make in flaccid chicken flesh.
I had higher hopes when I landed on a young blonde woman with her fat-cheeked baby perched next to her on a gleaming-white countertop. “Let’s make a simple dinner!” she announced to the camera. Here, finally! Something less violent! And then she pulled a sterile, plastic Home Chef bag full of pre-chopped who-knows-what into the frame, and I swiped again.
My TikTok journey mostly ended there. I deleted the app within a week of downloading it, after I realized how little #FoodTok has to do with actual food. It’s even less concerned with anyone actually eating its absurdist creations. (The Washington Post’s Aaron Hutcherson wrote a really smart story back in October about this strange reality.)
I was mostly relieved by the quick, failed experiment. TikTok was one fewer frontier I had to conquer, and I was more than happy to retreat to my cookbooks, washed-up millennial that I am. But I will admit: There’s still one TikTok account I check regularly that lives on the fringe of the #FoodTok world.
It’s the JCHS Lunch Bunch, which chronicles what a group of pleasant, protein-obsessed teachers in Kentucky pack for their midday meals. A friend of mine tipped me off to its wholesome goodness, and now I don’t go a day without watching the Lunch Bunch, which is essentially an aspartame-laden sitcom in six-minute clips. No one cooks on camera — unless you count the Crockpot-brand lunchbox that heats up food, or the lavash chips toasted in a countertop oven — but the Lunch Bunch’s account is more focused on actual food than anything else I’ve seen on TikTok. It’s about eating and the way eating connects people.
Earlier this spring, I convinced the Washington Post to let me write about the Lunch Bunch, and my story came out last week. Here’s a preview — and if you’re inclined to click and read, a few more pageviews certainly wouldn’t hurt my case for getting more assignments.
Since the inception of the TikTok account, the group of colleagues has drawn comparisons to another hit show, “The Office.” They’re a modern workplace sitcom, delivered in snippets. They’re a TikTok account about teachers eating lunch, but the school and the food are secondary. So is their little slice of FoodTok fame. Caudill said the Lunch Bunch has yet to make a cent off the account, and there are no plans to monetize. In fact, many Lunch Bunchers are still confused by the attention, nine months after it began.
“I guess we always thought it was strange that people would like to see what we were eating,” Sturgill said. And maybe “The Office” explains it best, in the final line of the final episode of the show. “There’s a lot of beauty in ordinary things,” Pam Beasley says. “Isn’t that kind of the point?”
Interesting