Tag Archives: Instagram

On Being Influenced: Consuming, Producing, and Performing Recipes on Social Media

By Mark Anthony Arceño

The rise of the Internet and digital media introduced food blogging as a new way of consuming food culture, with recipes available at the click of a button. At the click of another button, they could be saved or printed and filed away. It became easier and more affordable to compare recipes and engage with recipe creators. Chef reputation, star ratings, and responses in comment sections provided a different kind of authority than the more fleeting form of televised cooking shows or the rigidity of published, physical cookbooks.

My own journey into food blogging began after college, shortly after I started working at Denison University in Granville, Ohio. Part of my compensation included housing in a residence hall, and I wanted to prove that it was possible to cook and bake with limited equipment and space, just like when I studied abroad in Paris. I began developing food and culture programming and created a blog to chronicle how and what I was “Learning through Food.”[i] The site served as a personal, public repository of memoir-style accounts of foodie experiences, including restaurant reviews and a space to test, collect, and share others’ recipes as I developed my own variations (e.g., dark chocolate salted caramel bacon brownies and ratatouille, both of which I continue to refine).

@learnthrufood and learning through macarons

Graduate school inevitably redirected my attention from blogging to classwork, papers, and doctoral research in Ohio and France. After graduate school and amid the COVID-19 pandemic, I ventured back into virtual space and into the Instagram baking community. Instead of learning how to work with sourdough, I decided my niche would be finessing the finicky French macaron. I baked my first set of macarons — to be clear, not the French president or macaroons of the coconut kind — for St. Patrick’s Day. Every year since then, I have baked some variation of a shamrock-shaped macaron filled with mint chocolate, in honor of what I call my “macaroniversary.”

Fig. 1. In celebration of my fifth “macaroniversary,” I produced a shamrock-shaped macaron filled with a mint-chocolate ganache, with Rémy and Émile (characters from Disney/Pixar’s Ratatouille) on my shoulders. The Reel I performed (click image to view) included ingredients and recipe instructions embedded in the Reel itself. This was cross-promoted with my secondary account @aventuresavecremy.

 

I initially started @learnthrufood to relaunch my “Learning through Food” persona and record my research and food adventures. With a commitment to learning through macarons (about them and myself in the process), Instagram became my chosen platform for journaling the good and the bad, learning from the successful shells and the “macawrongs” (macaron shells that did not bake properly for any variety of reasons). These early images symbolized processes of tinkering with recipes and photo quality, until I became more consistent in terms of both taste and aesthetic.[ii] Later, they became snapshots waiting for someone to discover them and hopefully Like, Comment, and ideally Follow.

And then, as Raisa Bruner reported in 2020, came the 15-second, short-form approach known as Reels, to counter TikTok videos. This was preceded by Shares, Stories, and Saves as potential pathways for extending reach. Like others, I initially resisted but eventually caved, suddenly entering the vlogging realm, where my early love for TV cooking shows merged with the printed cookbooks and recipes I collected over the years. With the support of fellow macaron bakers, we continue to navigate ways of being and developing content that matters — to ourselves, Followers, and unknown others.

As Kelsi Matwick and Keri Matwick (2025) argue, Instagram Reels have reshaped recipe narratives by making them multisensory and expanding culinary authority. Whether sharing recipes, plated dishes, or behind-the-scenes makings-of, creators turn content into performance. It is not “just” ingredients, hints, or steps being shared via text in the caption or scrolling through the video. Sound invites engagement through elements like ASMR (cracking eggs, pouring sugar, mixing ingredients), while seasonal or thematic music reinforces specific holidays or connections to popular culture. Lyrics or trending audio can perfectly sync to specific steps of a recipe or reflect a timely, collective emotion. What is more, voice recordings—such as my use of French despite having a largely English-speaking audience—demand considerations of pitch, cadence, or speed of speaking. Together, such decisions help create the final production.

Content length may also matter for the moving target of “maximum reach.” Indeed, there is an art to editing actual time in the kitchen into consumable, bite-sized content. Less frenetic is an approach of showing clips in real time, though viewers may have no interest in seeing me macaronage (incorporating almond flour and powdered sugar into whipped egg whites and granulated sugar) for 5 minutes or stare at macaron shells baking for 22 minutes. Options include not showing those steps, though they are still part of the recipe; speeding things up and showing processes in “Reel time” (e.g., a #MAClapse or my portmanteau for a macaron time lapse); or, in a similar way to “TV magic,” swapping bowls or cookware to show the end product. One way to do this in an Instagram context is to tap ingredients and cut to the result (e.g., egg whites to perfectly whipped meringue), though doing so masks or ignores both time and technique.

Lessons learned through working on and with recipes in digital space

Especially among those of us who spend any time collecting or creating digital content, I wonder if you share the following observations. 

Fig. 2. Highlights (the circles categorized above the Grid) and pinned Posts help draw attention to a range of previously posted content.

First, as much as Instagram archives content, how accessible is it as it gets buried by subsequent posts? Linked Reels, Highlights, and Collections are certainly helpful tools to curate a personal or even collective recipe archive, since hashtags are becoming more irrelevant with advancements in AI. The Linked Reels feature allows content creators to link individual Reels over time (e.g., a series of steps in a recipe), while a Highlight contains a collection of up to 100 related, previously shared Stories. If a User deems a recipe is worth saving—even if they do not end up returning to it, as in my case with tabbed cookbook pages or DVR’ed cooking shows—they can Save content to a Collection (e.g., “Recipes to try”), download it if possible, or write down ingredients and steps. It is possible to even limit shared content to a Close Friends list, or to add other accounts to a single Collection so that recipes are shared among select members. In these ways, recipes live in a liminal space as ephemeral objects that materialize once consumed or archived outside of the platform.

Second, given time and effort in producing content, how “instant” is Instagram? Existing in a communal, “third place” (see Elyse Bouvier’s 2018 chapter) are not only shared recipes but also, in the best of cases, communication, collaboration, and community-building that are anything but instant. Here, emphasis is placed on growth through constant and consistent sharing over shared interests, including (in my case) macarons; baking and cooking more generally; restaurants, wineries, or brands to support; wine as something to cook, drink, and research; and even the “rats” I now bake with. Concurrently, a reframing may be needed for what “instant” means. Maybe Instagram is not a permanent repository, but rather a representation of the current recette du jour (or however long it takes before the next viral recipe comes along). Due to the inherent difficulties of accessing past content, unsaved recipes essentially dissipate, as they are replaced by the next Post or Reel seeking attention on the Instagram Feed. What is saved, however, captures something (a food, event, or trend) considered important in that space of time.

Third, what is the “it” that we as content creators are creating? Is it still about (re)creating recipes and sharing results or about creating a performance for Followers, others, or ourselves to consume and engage with? Reflecting on my multimodal relationships with food media, I see that I have not only collected and developed recipes to prepare and share,but also ways (read: performances) of sharing food knowledge. New media tools and trends become new ingredients to work with and, for better or worse, adapt to. With this in mind, and in my ongoing quest to understand the Algorithm, I have come to realize that I am looking for a kind of Holy Grail: *the* recipe for the right ingredients and techniques for baking up not just a successful macaron, but a successful Reel as well.

Out with the new, in with the old? Potential futures and lives of digital recipes and recipe collections

Since I began my macaron journey, repeated platform crashes have made me question my ongoing use of Instagram to archive my food content. Widespread outages, locking users out of their accounts, occurred in March and December of 2024 across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. Similar disruptions followed in March and August of 2025, impacting features like Reels, Chats, and Stories. An Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) outage in October further exposed the risks of widespread reliance on a single system, while alleged AI-caused AWS outages earlier this year bring into question the use of artificial intelligence for the sake of efficiency.

Research reflects similar concerns. In their analysis of #facebookdown during the October 2021 outage, Mengqi Liao and S. Shyam Sundar (2022) found that, beyond complaints and mockery of the situation, users identified a need to detox from social media. Meanwhile, Mike Isaac and Sheera Frenkel (2021) emphasized both the social and economic reliance on social media, particularly for small businesses. Although not all users rely on social media for income, many professional and home bakers use Instagram and other platforms to promote and sustain their business.

I now consider outages as inevitable and worry about losing my work, which is why I have started downloading each posted Reel. This has also made me realize that recipe creation and sharing depend not only on producers and consumers, but on third-party systems: servers, platforms, and websites that host and mediate content.

So, what happens if I cannot access Instagram? Without logging in, I cannot post; during outages, I lose access to saved recipes. These risks are not so different from corrupted files or even physical losses like a handwritten recipe or cookbook destroyed in a fire or flood. Perhaps recipes should be stored across multiple platforms, with multimodal content requiring multisaving modes. But this raises another issue: should I also preserve the raw data? My phone, which I use to record and edit Reels, is already strained by storage limits, as videos take up far more space than photos.

I end this growing cacophony of questions by returning to the idea of the instant. Before written recipes, knowledge was passed down through oral tradition, and perhaps oral collective memory will be what truly “saves” recipes if physical and digital archives disappear. Much like reconstructing an endangered language, the more viral a Post or Reel becomes in a given instant, the more people could contribute to the reconstruction of the “lost” recipe.

But even more importantly, what I think remains is the legacy of the content creator and community who produced, consumed, and potentially reproduced the corpus of recipes performed for other people. And it is especially clear in this way that recipes as media are incredibly social and take on a life of their own.

 

[i] For me, the concept of “learning through food” includes learning about people and cultures through the foods they prepare and consume; the recipes which have been passed down, shared and adapted over time; and the meaning behind the meal.

[ii] See, for example, these linked Instagram Reels featuring my dark chocolate salted caramel bacon brownies in macaron form and my more recent takes on ratatouille and confit byaldi.


Mark Anthony Arceño received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from The Ohio State University, having completed comparative winegrowing research in central Ohio and Alsace, France. He is currently the Senior Academic Program Coordinator in OSU’s Department of Comparative Studies, where, in addition to the Department of French and Italian, he also teaches courses on food culture and sustainability. Outside of his social media work on Instagram @learnthrufood and @aventuresavecremy, and Facebook @Learning through Food and @Learning through Wine, he serves as the Chapter Leader of Slow Food Columbus.