Social media chefs are putting kids off cooking, says nutrition expert

Social media chefs can put children off cooking, a nutrition expert has suggested.

Academic Dr Fiona Lavelle has warned that the standards of sumptuous dishes shared online can be “intimidating” for the average cook.

The young are increasingly treating cooking as a “spectator sport”, which can be enjoyed on screen, but may be perceived as too difficult to attempt.

Barriers to the culinary arts should be removed so younger generations can enjoy cooking. Credit: Istock

Lavelle, a lecturer at King’s College London, says the barriers to the culinary arts need to be removed in order for younger generations to enjoy being in the kitchen as their grandparents once did.

Her warning comes amid a boom for food influencers, who are serving up what some have branded “food porn” on television, Instagram and TikTok.

British celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay has 40.8 million followers on TikTok, a platform particularly popular among the young.

Lavelle said cooking was becoming a spectator sport, adding: “If you think about it, how much cooking is on TV, how much do we actually then cook from what we’ve seen on the television or across social media?

“Is it just a source of entertainment now?

“Some of the sociological research reports aspects around that, that we are now putting cooking on a pedestal, that people are intimidated.”

Speaking on the BBC’s Food Programme, she warned that people were often embarrassed by their lack of cooking finesse compared with what they saw on social media and on TV.

She added: “We need to remove that kind of thought around cooking; the food doesn’t need to be a Michelin star for you to eat it.”

A recent social media phenomenon has been young people watching grandmothers cooking in videos intended to show the art of traditional recipes. The YouTube channel, Pasta Grannies, revealing the craft of Italian grandmothers, has more than a million followers.

Generational disconnect

The popularity of the homely videos reveals a generational disconnect when it comes to cooking, experts say.

Lavelle warned that cooking skills were no longer being passed down through the generations as they once had been, with grandchildren now far less likely to know the recipes used by their forebears.

She said: “There’s a multitude of factors impacting on that transference of skills, but the mother is reported as the primary source of learning still across the literature.

“So if children are not learning from their mothers now, then there is that necessary gap, and we need to provide some other source of learning as well.”

Instead of learning how to cook and making use of generational knowledge in the kitchen, young people can simply watch the process as a form of entertainment, and are catered to by a multitude of influencers.

Ramsay and Jamie Oliver have sizeable Instagram followings, while popular Instagram nutritionist Emily English has sold tens of thousands of copies of her book, Live to Eat.

Abir El Saghir, a Lebanese celebrity chef, is followed by 27.4 million people on TikTok, and she has garnered hundreds of millions of views.

US influencer Stefan Johnson has more than 8 million followers on TikTok who watch him try out various popular snacks.

Food has a prominent place on social media, and platforms have helped to create a habit of taking pictures of food, which has become problematic.

In 2014, leading French restaurateurs launched a campaign to end the culture of “food porn” and ban smartphone photos from their restaurants.

Alexandre Gauthier, then chef at the Grenouillere restaurant in La Madelaine-sous-Montreuil, introduced a symbol on his menus depicting a camera with a line through it.

The Telegraph, London

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