Probably because my algorithm is demented, I’ve been presented with a number of What I Eat in a Day videos. Because the algorithm makes me, myself, demented, I have begun to click on them and pay attention.
Because I’ve started clicking on those, I’ve realized a little… porthole, per se, that I’d like to explore. Watching and learning about what strangers eat. Forms of media where people tell you, or show you, what they are supposed to be made of.
Hi guys! Welcome to my channel!
Let’s start with where my evil phone led me! This video trend is deeply common on YouTube, and also TikTok—one of the go-tos of the contemporary vlogging style. Here are a some examples of what I’m about to talk about. These videos are exactly what they sound like. They’re mostly produced by lifestyle influencers, and we’re guided through the cooking and eating of breakfast, lunch, maybe snack time, and dinner.
There’s a real poetry to the consistent structure of the videos. Most of the time, we’re brought back to the same language, where we ground through the day in the protagonists’ audio. First: quiet interlude when the person wakes up, performs the meditation of coffee, maybe journals.
Next, we eat our meals. Lunch is usually something like:
Avocado toast.
Dinner is usually for two: the influencer and her boyfriend. Maybe he is also an influencer!
I actually am new to this genre, in most part because I find it deeply boring. These videos have a very specific mundanity to them. I have no doubt that these influencers are individuals with vast inner lives. But because the videos adhere to the same structure, with the same dialogue, one receives the feeling of deep sameness. Maybe this is soothing. Watching these for writing this piece has made the whole thing take forever, as I scour each different video for a hint of profound distinction beneath the self-care quotidian.
I don’t mean to write off this genre as a whole – I’m sure that influencers who model particularly holistic and healthy eating practices do something good for their viewers. It also always helps to see how someone cooks at home.
But through all the boring, I found myself sedated in a way that was lulling and ended up being kind of interesting. I started paying more attention to the aesthetic qualities of the way this food is presented, letting my eyes glaze over, taking in color.
EVERYTHING IS GREEN
It’s important to say: the foods on most of the deeply popular What I Eat in A Days are late millennial ‘clean foods’. Breakfasts are acai bowls, smoothies, oatmeal. Lunch is avocado toast, lettuce wraps, salad, hummus. Dinner is salmon, roasted vegetables, ‘my favorite salad’. Dessert, perhaps, is Halo Top. Aesthetically, the foods are often green, juxtaposed onto a white countertop. Breakfast is taken in athleisure.
Clearly, this is a very specific, potentially restrictive, way to eat. Many influencers have stopped doing these videos because they feel uncomfortable imagining that their decisions are dictating what an impressionable viewer might and might not eat. Additionally, a reactive genre has come about, What I Eat in a Day as a Fat Person and, even more specifically, What I Eat in a Day as a Fat Person Not on a Diet. Zoe Potter, for example, is someone who’s amassed a significant following making videos for anti-restrictive, intuitive eating (and occasionally the paranormal :) ).
If the most typical influencer’s What I Eat in a Day represents a lifestyle of virtuous restraint, the variations that YouTube and TikTok participants have developed operates on the embodiment of some chaos. They also are kind of the types of things you do when you’re really bored. There’s the subgenre of ordering of what the person in front of you at the drive-through orders , the switching of diets between friends, and ultimate taste tests. These tend to feel like comedies of errors, vaguely unhinged theatres, compared to the semi-zen hyper-consistency of the genre they were borne out of. They mostly take place in cars and not kitchens, exhibiting allegiance to the collective hobby of fast-food. The implicit concept of these reactive genres is a question: what happens if, unrestricted, I test out what I am made of?
WTF is this doing to my brain
Is something that I have been asking myself a lot this week as I click and click and click back and forth, looking at different people’s different times of days, hopping from kitchen to kitchen. Why is this genre so wildly popular? Why do we care about this at all?
My first thought
as it always tends to be, is pandemic-related. The pandemic, of course, re-centered the kitchen and eating practices. With the collective isolation and the rise of TikTok, we re-oriented our cultural gaze: both inward, towards our home space, and outward, towards the camera. What was everyone doing? What were they eating? How do I take care of myself? Quickly, ignorant celebrity became a new type of cringe. Normal people doing mundane things (and being good at them) became mesmerizing. This felt deeply and distinctly American: a democratization, and never without the hovering phantom of some strange fame.
Food Diaries
Is a series by Harpers Bizaar on YouTube that features the talking head of a celebrity describing what they eat in a day.
In front of a white background, the celebrity narrates the story of their food day while on the right, video of the objects that they describe appears. This is performative speech in the greatest sense; what the celebrity speaks is born beside them. These videos are edited in a way that splices footage quickly. When Kylie says celery juice, there it is.
What strikes me about these videos is the distance between the person who is supposed to eat the food, and the food itself. Even in Alison Roman’s Food Diaries video, she gets the same editorial treatment—the images of food alongside the narration of the speaker. We don’t actually see these people eat or touch food. The point is, I guess, hearing them talk and imagining the reality that their words create.
Aesthetically, these videos operate on the same minimalist and sanitized background as many of the clean eating What I Eat in a Day videos. Our focal point is the stranger who have clicked on to tell us about their life.
Grub Street Diet
May seem to be a bit of a jump, but I promise it’s relevant. The Grub Street Diet, put out by NYMag’s Grub Street, is usually ‘as told to Chris Crowley’ and follows about between three and six days of what a ‘notable person’ (NYMag’s words!) eats. These people can be chefs, actors, writers, performers, you name it.
These features are words with no pictures. The only image involved is the thumbnail graphic, which is always some colorful, vaguely deifying, caricature of the person we’re hearing from.
This Steak Diane one ^^ is my favorite, along with chef Kia Damon’s.
These pieces are in the subject’s own words and the graphics are fantastical and imaginative. These pieces are also typically for PR, where the speaker tends to plug their friends’ spots (I would do it, too!) as well as their own ventures. There tend to be taglines, oriented towards clicks, designed to set aside the speaker as some kind of distinctive eater. The quotes can get a bit wild. James Whiteside says “instead of veins, I probably have noodles”, and Chloe Wise gets fries with her burger and calls it a “Naughty day.”
This series is less about body and more about style—how does eating make you interesting? Grub Street Diet, in the same way as Food Diaries, gives the subject the opportunity to create a narrative identity around food without putting the pressure on them to prove anything. Food here is personality and cultural allegiance, and – as we can tell from Chloe Wise- virtue isn’t terribly impressive here.
Isn’t that a funny tension… performing restraint in one’s body (What I Eat in A Day) is a recipe for some aspirational goodness, while indicating food eccentricity through words is a recipe for being interesting? Either way, that all of these things are being constantly clicked and consumed in our brains, shows that our gaze is passionately drawn in this strange direction.
The grounding of a celebrity and/or beautiful person
Though the imagination of what fuels them seems to be the allure to all of this. Celebrities are performers, which means that we do not often see them eat. When we do, it is either hyper-presented, or it feels like some peak behind a curtain.
So if we think of all this in that way, the performance of food and food production by at-home celebrities somehow harmonizes what we’ve traditionally had access to in watching a star feed themselves. Food, though with great potential to be glamorous, is also a reminder of the physical body.
The complicated part
And I hate to say it…and I think we all know it… is that all of these forms of media can easily be not real! A meta-video format of What I Eat in a Day has emerged where influencers who did have restrictive eating habits have made videos about taking down their own videos that they now see were unhealthy. They often describe how they would make food to film but not eat, or that they would eat in between the featured meals. Okay!
The Food Diaries and Grub Street examples are both folkloric representations of interactions with food, built to reflect a curated personality onto the speaker themselves. They evade a physical reality.
So why is this form of media so popular when it is presented as real and actually so deeply has the potential not to be?
Abjection
A concept developed by Julia Kristeva and written about in her 1980 work Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, might be useful here. Abjection has something to do with disgust, but isn’t disgust exactly. It is our reaction to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of distinction between subject and object. In other words, (heads up you might get grossed out!) abjection is the feeling that arises when one looks at a scab on one’s own body, smells one’s own sweat, sees sewage, sees a corpse. It’s the reminder of the corporeal human form which, Kristeva would say, is a reminder of one’s own mortality. She writes it is “not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection, but what disturbs identity, system, order”. We create valuable identities for ourselves through cultivation, social performance, controlling our bodies and minds, putting energy into goodness. When we reveal to ourselves the rawness and rankness, the inevitability, of the physical body, she says, we experience the abject.
And we hate it!!!
I imagine that these food performances, written or visual, captivate us not only in their aspiration and entertainment, but because they allow us an influx of physicality without a hint of the abject. Pristine kitchens that belong to regular people, but pulsing with a virtuous vitality, green on white countertop. Breakfast cut to work out cut to lunch cut to snack cut to dinner. Nothing in-between. A celebrity, familiar in our consciousness, imagining a list for us of what fills them up. All we see is their beautiful head and the splicing of items they list. Food that hasn’t been burnt or cooked or eaten, just dreamt up for us. An interesting person talking about interesting food, an artist telling us about how she makes sourdough while she paints in her studio, without us having to reckon with her washing the paint off from her hands before she touches the starter. Actually, not even having to reckon with any starter at all. No starter. No ending.
The Onion, Marina Abramovic, 1996