cheryl
Administrator
Staff member
The Dinner Party Flex: Cooking in the Age of Social Media - Taste Cooking
What motivates the youngest generation of home cooks? A writer of a certain age sets out to decode the dinner party flex.
Once upon a time, I’d fire up Instagram and scroll through to see what my friends were doing. I was broke, but we all were, so most of our doings took place in sweat-stained basement bars and scarcely furnished walkup apartments. We rarely posted pictures of food—most of our disposable income went toward bodega beers, and the stuff we did eat wasn’t worth memorializing anyway.
That was in 2010, the year Instagram launched. I was one year out of college and living in New York. Nearly a decade later, I’m still here, and so is Instagram (and Facebook, and Snapchat, and Twitter, and so on), but what I see when I look at my feed has changed dramatically. As I settle into my 30s, my friends—both older and younger by a decade—aren’t posting about last night’s party, unless it was a dinner one. Or maybe it’s not even a party at all, but a perfectly plated meal of herb-strewn ancient grains and heritage-breed braised chicken for two that wouldn’t look out of place on the communal tables at Ottolenghi.
What motivates the youngest generation of home cooks? A writer of a certain age sets out to decode the dinner party flex.
Once upon a time, I’d fire up Instagram and scroll through to see what my friends were doing. I was broke, but we all were, so most of our doings took place in sweat-stained basement bars and scarcely furnished walkup apartments. We rarely posted pictures of food—most of our disposable income went toward bodega beers, and the stuff we did eat wasn’t worth memorializing anyway.
That was in 2010, the year Instagram launched. I was one year out of college and living in New York. Nearly a decade later, I’m still here, and so is Instagram (and Facebook, and Snapchat, and Twitter, and so on), but what I see when I look at my feed has changed dramatically. As I settle into my 30s, my friends—both older and younger by a decade—aren’t posting about last night’s party, unless it was a dinner one. Or maybe it’s not even a party at all, but a perfectly plated meal of herb-strewn ancient grains and heritage-breed braised chicken for two that wouldn’t look out of place on the communal tables at Ottolenghi.