Cooking Food On The Internet For Fun And Profit

hey let's go make a cooking video hey everyone welcome today we're going to be doing advanced pizza pops first thing we need to stress that these are pillsbury pizza pops not pizza pockets made by the slatterns over at mccain now first thing we're going to do is take the pizza pops out of their wrapper and place them on an already used plate you can use a clean plate if that makes you more comfortable but just know that it's not the same when you put the pops on the plate first make sure that these grill marks on the bottom of the pops are facing up since we want the final plating to be right side up and we'll be flipping them part way through the process we're thinking ahead here once they're ready the first thing to do is put them into the microwave for 80 seconds alright that's done take them out and before you do anything else first flip them over then put them back in the microwave for 40 seconds um here they are we've got a little bit spilling out where all the fillings have burst out of the side let's check out our color oh yeah look at that even cheesy saucy warm all the way through mmm so good that is a great pizza pop so i like watching cooking entertainment which isn't really a deep admission or anything it's an interest i share with millions of other people cooking shows are extremely mainstream and in light of structural and cultural changes at youtube over the last couple years they are increasingly becoming the face of youtube and that makes sense if we break down the incentives that are at play cooking shows have natural synergy with a lot of brands and advertisers they are generally family friendly and well they're not apolitical they are rarely openly partisan being more involved in the inherent politics of food than daily legislative news they are also increasingly being run by comparably large media organizations with a substantial number of employees which allows them to maintain a fairly prolific production schedule these factors combined make them appealing to corporate youtube as the face of the platform because they're professional high quality advertiser friendly strongly personality driven still a little bit scrappy and diy but unlikely to draw negative attention to the platform like the bon appetit test kitchen crew are unlikely to pay a bunch of guys on fiverr to hold up signs saying death to jews or post a video of a dead body they found in the woods that's just not something i see happening now of course you can find exceptions to all these generalities but that's just as much a strength of the genre the subject of food is one that can be approached from a lot of different angles and find a foothold and again it's easy to see why food is one of the few truly universal things everyone needs to eat but it's also highly localized highly cultural and yes highly political what you eat says a lot about where you're from what you believe and how wealthy you are marie antoinette almost certainly didn't actually say let them eat cake when told that the peasants were out of bread and not just because she spoke french but the phrase so often attributed to her has become a shorthand for the disconnect between the wealthy and the working class and it does this through the metaphor of food food is a universal need and yet we live in a world where that need is met very unevenly so while bread and cake are inert objects with no will of their own they represent so much more bannock in canada refers to a style of fry bread that's associated principally with indigenous culture it's a simple recipe that's quick to make tasty is easily enhanced with mix-ins like nuts and berries and goes great with classic country jams and jellies like saskatoon berry on years when i attend the calgary stampede i make sure to stop by the bannick stand because it's a great snack for sitting in the july shade listening to the bustle of the crowd as you watch the ducks paddle around on the bow river with regional variation it is a nearly universal dish among canada's indigenous cultures but that's kind of the hitch isn't it it's universal from the high arctic to the pacific coast over the great plains through the canadian shield to the maritimes on the east because its ingredients reflect the standard government rations packages that were available after tribes were forced off their ranging lands and into the reserve system in the late 1800s this is what i mean when i say the inherent politics of food so of course cooking entertainment can't avoid that any show is going to inherit those meanings and symbols purely by virtue of the kinds of food the show considers normal what it considers exotic and what it assumes the viewer is familiar with or has access to even if a channel is trading on the spectacle of creating something using absurdly expensive ingredients for the vicarious enjoyment of an audience that could never afford them the channel operators themselves do need to be able to afford them you can't for example demonstrate 30 different ways to cook kobe beef steak without having access to 30 kobe beef steaks perfect if you're having i don't know any kind of like glam party or like a girls night at home or for new year's these would be perfect they are made gold with edible gold leaf so these are a little bit expensive to make because gold leaf doesn't really come that cheap there is also a persistent problem in food entertainment where it intersects with travel entertainment and that is the exploitation of other cultures now this is a fine line and it's not as simple as you know folks making curry but rather think more of creators trading in other cultures specifically because those cultures will appear exotic and strange to viewers often framed as the host discovering a dish or destination this is particularly pronounced where food culture transitions to wellness culture where the perceived exotic or exclusive nature of grains or fruits is leveraged to give the veneer of authority to grandiose claims that they are super foods possessing special properties if not nine mystical powers the properties contained in acai berries have also been said to help prevent certain health issues like arthritis inflammation obesity neurological diseases and allergies plus they help to boost our energy and improve our sleep i'm going to show you how to make an activated charcoal detoxifying lemonade this is sacha inchi which is very high in protein here is goji berries here we have camus lucuma powder maca powder here we have moringa powder if you've ever been to whole foods with me then you know i'm the guy that's obsessed with superfoods i'm the weird dude that smells like essential oils and has a cart full of foods that most people have never even heard of so i've got i've gone the herbal root i've got dr morris herbs in my cupboard um 8 to 10 10 high carb low fat i've done high fat i've done whole food plant-based for years i've done junk food vegan i tried it all i drank my urine for two years almost every single day for two years do urine drinking diets count as cooking videos let me know in the comments so what is the state of food entertainment on youtube like let's say that you want to get in on all that what should you know about the biz before you start hey everyone welcome today we're going to be doing the perfect can of soda so first thing you want to do is hook the tab with your middle finger or maybe your index finger then pull that tab up to open the can and that's pretty much it ah well that is one great beverage now you just need to protect it from the cat come on kitty off the table well first of all don't a cooking show is a smaller scale version of opening a restaurant it's a bad idea because everyone thinks they can do it and of course like opening a restaurant everyone already knows it's a bad idea but everyone does it anyway also like a restaurant there's a lot of competition and it can be really really hard to find a niche and audience before you just burn out because there are a lot of hidden hurdles to overcome a bit of personal backstory i actually have a ton of experience shooting food on video for a couple years i worked with a mid-sized north american franchise making literally hundreds of internal training videos for food prep recipes plating instructions the whole deal coming out of that i dabbled with the idea of making either a side show or a new channel focusing on weird mid-century party dishes and tested the idea with two hastily made proof of concept videos why would you make that much blue cheese flavored cream cheese and then mold it into a snowman it didn't go well that mayo does not do it any favor no why one of the things you learn really fast working with food is that well it's not that hard to make it look you know at least good and appetizing it's also really really really easy to make it look awful to end up with a delicious sauce that looks like greasy vomit and this is because your kitchen is probably a terrible place to make videos it's dark it's cluttered you've got dishes piled up because you've been shooting cooking videos for three days the light is all on the wrong side of the room from the stove which is where you're working and the stove itself is lit by just a truly abominable eight watt bulb that just makes everything look like just greasy and ugly every stray bit of grime is going to make you feel so gross the moment you're looking at it on video your fridge is almost certainly extremely loud and is the internet gonna judge you for the kettle that you just leave on the stove because you don't it doesn't fit in any of your cabinets the answer is yes also you're really going to want a second pair of hands because recording yourself is challenging at the best of times and somehow is just that little bit worse when you're trying to make something i i just want to demonstrate how much i needed to move this microwave is just here as a prop and i have to shove the couch basically into the entryway in order to get the camera into the right position in the living room adding to all that the current quality threshold for cooking videos on youtube is pretty high even smaller channels are expected to have the kind of production values that come from having a dedicated recording space with lights audio equipment and background the current aesthetic biases towards crew that have access to production kitchens or studio space not just because that makes things look good but because it just makes the videos easier to make and that's all before you even decide where you're going to position yourself on the three pillars of food entertainment informational value spectacle and personality now the state of youtube being what it is you can do spectacle and value without the personality and you can do spectacle and personality without the value and you can do all three concurrent or consecutive but you can't do value and personality without the spectacle spectacle is compulsory now spectacle isn't a bad thing and for our definition here it encompasses a bunch of different kinds of spectacle from dishes made with absurdly expensive or difficult to obtain ingredients to excessively large or complex constructions to comically unusual methods or ingredients to simply watching a master of their craft do something at an extremely high level of competence these are the gummy snacks known as gushers except we've constructed ours filled with squid ink also while this type of framing like breaking all this down into the three pillars of whatever is really popular with the kind of folks who have brand guru in their twitter profiles and can be quite useful in identifying broad trends or self-evaluating this is not meant to be applied religiously and it does tend to get a lot hazier as you drill deeper into specifics like at what point does personality itself become spectacle but realistically i'm just trapped in this kitchen with all of these people trying to make me fail what i'm saying is that this is a useful way of conceptualizing things but don't go trying to like distribute exact percentages as though you're assigning skill points in a video game to use bon appetit as an example while their most popular videos absolutely utilize the spectacle of a meal making a beef smoothie or claire investing days of effort into producing a single plate of gourmet tater tots that is not the sum total of the brand bon appetit also swings to the extreme opposite ends with videos like how to butcher a pig being intensely informational and honestly pretty dry so here's a breakdown of the shoulder and now what i'm going to do is trim and clean these cuts in a way that you might see them in a butcher shop this video in particular is fascinating to me because while a general audience can follow the subject matter just fine a lot of the video's actual language is business advice for working butchers bellies get turned into bacon bacon is a great value-added product for butchers everybody loves bacon so it's definitely within the butcher's best interest to have as much bacon as possible spectacle is the hook and no it's not strictly necessary you can absolutely create a cooking channel that trades entirely in being strongly informative driven by a big personality but spectacle sells and at the moment it absolutely dominates in fact it does so to the point that it has spilled out of just being the thing that draws attention to a youtube channel and has become the trade of small trendy restaurants who have taken to creating absurd dishes that exist for the sole purpose of being photographically unusual and drawing the attention of social media personalities hell at vidcon 2019 this was the bedrock theme of the entire instagram creator lounge and while we're talking about negative outcomes i suppose now is as good a time as any to discuss the elephant in the room channels like blossom so yummy and 5-minute crafts something about them should be familiar to anyone aware of the frozen elsa spider-man trend of horrifying cg videos that consumed children's entertainment on youtube a couple years back these blanket food slash craft channels utilize a similar format with each video consisting of an anthology of shorter segments that are often recycled across several videos individual segments are churned out by what is effectively a warehouse of video teams so for example this blossom video 12 creative ways to use coca-cola life hacks by blossom only has around five minutes of color related hacks followed by nine minutes of hacks recycled from other videos to pad out the runtime though the cola hacks at least three are just used cola as a marinade and they use cola to get gum out of hair twice and you just put laundry detergent into coke and filled a nail hole with soap what are you that's that's not a hack you didn't i'm sorry i got sucked in there ann reardon the owner and host of how to cook that and her husband dave have done some great investigative reporting into the business structure of these channels i've included the links below in the description as per our model these channels rely heavily on the spectacle of their recipes though rather than attempting to create something comically elaborate they aim for spectacularly simple executions making complex time-consuming or tricky recipes almost unbelievably simple and they do that by just outright lying like using cola as glass cleaner which you know nothing quite cleans glass like sugary amber liquid or using it as a stain remover because coke is famous for not staining clothing and sure why not just stick a pencil lead into your locks now you're just using chalk as stain remover what are you even sorry it happened again it's probably worth mentioning that informational value should really be perceived informational value see it's not about being a recipe that you can follow along with and produce similar results it's about looking like a recipe that you can follow the trick is that most viewers won't try to make the vast majority of what they watch and this goes just as much for a 200 year old wedding cake recipe that takes a week to assemble or a 5 minute omelet this is then doubly true for things that are odd and impractical like the long egg and it turns out that you can crank out a lot of videos extremely fast if you're willing to just lie content farms are able to publish thousands of videos every month and even for well-established creators that's a really really difficult format to compete with this is a tremendous amount of effort because you're taking all of the normal complication of video production and adding in perishables and time limits and there's a lot of mistakes you can make that means starting over it's an expensive type of video to make and to bring this full circle that expense is going to dictate to some degree or another what kinds of videos get made by whom now despite everything i've said despite the way things structurally bias towards rewarding well-funded well-equipped corporate teams despite the fact that making a cooking channel is a bad idea and you shouldn't do it i am glad that so many people ignore that advice and do it anyway because the beauty of youtube is that there is still room for someone who is scrappy and clever to share their own voice with the rest of the world i i love this one and i think everyone should try it i really do hope you give this a try soon so i hope you can give it a try and that's shortbread chocolate chip cookies if you make them let me know what you think in the comments and as always thanks for watching i wanted to make this video as a way of interrogating my own relationship to the media that i consume i enjoy the spectacle of food entertainment and in particular i like seeing the absurd and the indulgent i want to see the world's largest papaya or reasonably authentic 2000 year old recipes or a giant hamburger that is actually made of ice cream cake spectacle sells and make no mistake i am buying but also i am aware that there is a view of the world and an attitude towards food and a philosophy of food that is carried with that it is not inherently good or bad but neither is it value neutral implicit in each is a statement about what is good in the world and what the world should be like and yeah that can be prescriptive and constraining but it can also be enriching expanding our tastes and appreciation of culture and sensation because that's when i like cooking the most when it's not just about food but a celebration of what food represents now if you'll excuse me i got some dishes to do [Music] so [Music] also a pizza pop is just a tiny calzone

Channel: Folding Ideas

Views: 841,500

Keywords: Criticism, food, cooking, delicious

Id: 4EXVrzOACv4

Length: 21min 37sec (1297 seconds)

Published: Fri May 15 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/SamBkamp]

What an obscure reference in the title. I love it.