Tag Archives: social media

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.

tsp to smbc: Culinary Vernacular and the Evolution of Language in Personal Recipes

By KC Hysmith

Brillat-Savarin might be able to tell you about yourself based on the food you eat, but I bet I can tell you even more by how you abbreviate the word “teaspoon” when writing out a recipe. No matter how you learned to shorten it, the way you write “teaspoon” reveals ample information about your culinary influences. Looking at a larger body of work, such as someone’s personal recipe collection, provides even more details.  

Personal recipe collections contain countless semiotic clues about their authors, but they also hold linguistic tells of shared experiences and community, revealing historical, social, and economical insights about all the people and places that made each recipe possible. Through the lens of measurement abbreviations, this post considers the importance of a shared culinary vernacular and how it passes between recipe collections (from one generation to the next; from one demographic to another) in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century American world, and analyzes the evolution of language, especially in regards to transcription and the shift from analog to digital.

Food scholars Amy L. Tigner and Allison Carruth argue that recipe writing serves as a kind of literary vernacular practice with “quotidian modes of writing that develop within specific historical contexts and that intermix rhetorical and aesthetic craft with the dissemination of applied knowledge that is variously empirical, sensory, instructive, interactive, and intergenerational.”[i] The deliberate use of the concept of vernacular versus “jargon,” “dialect,” or “code” highlights the particularity of recipe language and its functional design (which Tigner and Carruth align with the word’s “Latin root vernaculus, meaning domestic”).

There’s no official abbreviation, as each major publication from published cookbooks to legacy media outlets has their own preference, but common versions include: “tsp.” (with period), “tsp” (sans period), a lowercase “t,” “ts,” and “tspn”. It’s never a capital “T,” because that is typically saved for denoting tablespoons (unless you’re German or Dutch, then you’ll likely use a capital “TL” for Teelöffel or Theelepel, which translates to “teaspoon,” respectively). All of these variations came about thanks to numerous colliding forces including culinary literacy, generational trends, cooking methods, and technologies ranging from writing implements to autocorrect (and now, AI).

While personal recipes might start as strictly private, ephemeral texts, they sometimes become shared semi-public artefacts. Countless personal recipes have been shared in community and church cookbooks (often with myriad culinary vernacular stylings)). My departed mother’s recipe for pan de campo (she also uses “tsp,” but funnily does not abbreviate “cup”) sits framed on my office wall. And my personal recipe for cornbread (I use the little “t” notation, when I’m not dealing in metric), has been passed through many hands, in both written and digital forms. Even celebrity chefs with professionally published cookbooks sometimes find their personal recipes in the public eye; consider Julia Child’s handwritten recipe for pain de mie (she uses “tsp” and “c.”) which was pulled from her personal collection and is now on display at the National Museum of American History.

Sharing culinary information is part of our society’s cultural tradition, a custom that blurs the relationship between private recipe text and public artefact.

A scanned image of a page with cake recipes from The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, 1896.
Fig. 1. Recipes for cake, The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, Fannie Farmer, 1896, Feeding America: The Historic American Cookbook Project.

 

The ubiquitous use of standardized measurements—using a “tsp” versus the more obscure “spoonful”—transformed the world of recipe writing. Until the early twentieth century, recipes were incredibly imprecise, according to food historian Helen Zoe Veit, owing to the lack of oven thermometers, timepieces, and “scant tools available to ordinary people to tell exactly how much of an ingredient they were adding.”[ii] Though many contributed to this shift, domestic scientist and culinary lead of the famous nineteenth-century Boston Cooking School, Fannie Farmer, is widely considered the “mother of level measurements” in the United States. Farmer’s methods—along with several other recipe writing “best practices” such as ingredient lists and ordinal instructions—were quickly adopted along with a nationwide trend towards the scientific standardization of all spaces in the age of industrialization.

But recipes are more than their measured ingredients. How we name recipes (or don’t) plays a part in this vernacular, too, with longer titles losing adjectives along the way. When we write recipes for ourselves, we often write instructions as truncated actions, generously detailed instructions, or some combination. And then there are the recipes that are mere lists of ingredient ratios that expect the reader to know how to combine them, a shift from early historical recipes that were mostly instructions with a few non-standard measurements sprinkled in (if you were lucky).

A folded over lined notebook, messy with ingredient smudges and drips, lists ingredients in metric measurements for a banana and tahini baked good.
Fig. 2. Recipe for Banana Tahini Muffins by Oona O’Toole, baker at While You’re Up Bakery in Carrboro, NC, texted to the author without instructions.
A scanned image of a manuscript page full of sprawling handwriting explaining a 17th century gingerbread recipe.
Fig. 3. A recipe for gingerbread, “A collection of medical receipts and prescriptions,” MS502, 1650, Royal College of Physicians catalogue

 

The advent and exponential use of the Internet in the aughts and 2010s created additional influences on the recipe vernacular, for as the amount of information available grew, our attention spans shrunk even as recipe titles grew longer (ex: Briny, Garlicky, Lemony Green Beans with Quick-Pickled Red Onions). The acronyms and abbreviated words of Internetspeak (LOL) were already well worn linguistic territory of recipe writing. Linguist Gretchen McCulloch argues that “Internet acronyms are a perfect example of the intersection between writing and informality.”[iii] Then came social media. At first there were character limits, 140 characters for X (formerly Twitter) and 2200 for Instagram. Early Twitter users relied on code-like workarounds—slashes, no spaces, symbols—to fit full recipes into the character container.

A screenshot of a Twitter (X) post by Maureen Evans (@cookbook) featuring a recipe for Pumpkin Pie.
Fig. 4. A screenshot of a Twitter (X) post by Maureen Evans (@cookbook) featuring a recipe for Pumpkin Pie.

 

A screenshot of the results of a query in the Instagram app for the hashtag #smbc. Results include nine preview square images of various cakes, upclose frosting shots, and a woman holding a massive bowl of buttercream.
Fig. 5. A screenshot of the results of a query in the Instagram app for the hashtag #smbc. Results include nine preview square images of various cakes, upclose frosting shots, and a woman holding a massive bowl of buttercream.

 

On Instagram, where hashtags once helped drive more traffic to your post, bakers would use the tag #smbc to share a recipe for Swiss Meringue Buttercream Frosting. With far more characters to work with but even shorter user attention spans, Instagram recipes take on many abbreviated forms using bullet points, articleless phrases, and the ample use of symbolic emoji.

A screenshot of an Instagram post by @natashas_baking featuring a recipe for Funfetti sourdough. An image of a jar of sprinkled, rising dough is on the left and a caption with the emoji-sprinkled recipe is on the right.
Fig. 6. A screenshot of an Instagram post by @natashas_baking.

 

A screenshot of an Instagram post by @philkhoury featuring a recipe for SMBC. The recipe is listed in detail in the caption and as an ingredient list in the image.
Fig. 7. A screenshot of an Instagram post by @philkhoury.

 

Even with more technology than ever before, the way we share recipes still tends to rely on a shared culinary vernacular. And while McCulloch argues that “writing systems are greatly affected by the tools available to make them,”[iv] our collective understanding of “tsp” (or “TL” for German speakers) remains. However we abbreviate or piece together our instructions, recipe writers both professional and personal recognize one another by our shared understanding and appreciation of the small—but important—details of recipe writing.

 

[i] Amy Tigner and Allison Carruth, Literature and Food Studies (London: Routledge, 2017), 3.

[ii] Helen Zoe Veit, “The Making of the Modern American Recipe,Smithsonian Magazine, 19 September 2017.

[iii] Gretchen McCulloch, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language (New York: Penguin, 2019), 11.

[iv] McCulloch, Because Internet, 13.


KC Hysmith, PhD, is a food scholar and writer who focuses on the intersections of food history, gender, and digital media. She is the co-author and co-editor of several books on food culture including When Southern Women Cook (America’s Test Kitchen) and An American Girl Anthology. She holds a PhD in food studies from the University of North Carolina and an MLA in Gastronomy. See more of her work at kchysmith.com.

A Handheld Cabinet of Curiosities: Kitchenalia, Social Media, and the Cultural History of Collecting

By Esther Martin

People love Stuff. They’ve always loved Stuff. For hundreds of years, humanity has made a practice of collecting the Stuff they love. These collections carry alternative implications, showcased and flaunted to establish both the status and identity of the owner. The act of collecting is easy to dismiss as a type of overconsumption, but it is deeply tied to a person’s need to establish their sense of self, and to identify where they fit into the social spectrum. Collectors become taste-makers, establishing what is worth collecting and showcasing. In the age of the internet, taste-making is done through content-making.

Britannica defines the term “collect” as “to get (similar things) and bring them together as a hobby.”Russell Belk, a Distinguished Research Professor and the Kraft Foods Canada Chair in Marketing at Schulich School of Business, York University, defines collecting as “the process of actively, selectively, and passionately acquiring and possessing things removed from ordinary use and perceived as part of a set of non-identical objects or experiences.” Collecting is more than the act of acquiring, but rather gathering items together with a specific and intended purpose.

Collecting became more defined during the Renaissance when the wealthy began establishing cabinets of curiosities in their homes. Dating back to the 1500s, early incarnations of cabinets of curiosities involved a full-size room containing a collection of artifacts and specimens acquired by a wealthy family or individual. Practically, the room was a way of storing an often exhaustive accumulation of artifacts and specimens, usually containing wonders of the natural world–such as animal skulls, “exotic” textiles, and preserved flora from all over the globe–making cabinets a kind of pre-modern museum, though highly personalized and private.

Göttweig Musaei Contignatio, between 1743-1745. Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

However, the immediate intention of a cabinet of curiosities was to establish the elevated status of the owner and identify them as a person of intellect and good taste. A collection displayed in a cabinet of curiosities acted as a form of conspicuous consumption, informing visitors to the home of their host’s superiority. After all, not everyone could afford an entire room in their home dedicated to expensive objects, let alone the funds and means necessary to gather those objects.

Ferrante Imperato, Dell’Historia Naturale (1599), the earliest illustration of a natural history cabinet. Image Credit: Wellcome Library, London

The construction of cabinets of curiosities continued to change over time as the delineation between classes diminished. The cabinets became just that – actual cabinets accessible to the less wealthy but growing middle-class. Still, a cabinet of curiosities in one’s home was an indication of good taste and a reasonably stocked bank account.

Today in the twenty-first century, cabinets of curiosity have now reached their next phase of evolution: social media. Visual-based social media platforms, chiefly Instagram and TikTok, serve as modern day cabinets of curiosities where anyone can become a content maker and set up their own virtual cabinet to share their real-life treasures. The images and videos establish their good taste, trend-awareness, and clued-in identity. The types of collections showcased have expanded from curiosities of the natural world to include all manner of interests including curiosities of the past, the grotesque, and the accoutrement of everyday life, past and present. For example, someone may fill their instagram grid with aesthetically pleasing photos of their collection of mid-century typewriters, hand-embroidered 20th century handkerchiefs, or artfully displayed primitive pickling jars. These pickling jars, stuffed with old wooden spoons and whisks that will never be used, fall under the category of kitchenalia.

Collecting kitchenalia (a catch-all term for kitchen objects) has become more prominent especially among women content creators on visual social media platforms. Accounts may highlight collections of a specific brand, such as @Vampyrex on Instagram, who collects and shares her extensive Pyrex collection; specific types of objects, like @nancysdailydish on Instagram, which features English transferware from the 19th and 20th centuries; and a general array of objects, like theinfluencedmillenial on TikTok, whose kitchen is full of thrifted items imbued with nostalgic stories. There is even a hashtag dedicated to collected and thrifted-style vintage kitchens–#grandmakitchen, honoring the aesthetic aspects of women and kitchens of our past.

A selection of the Instagram grid of @Vampyrex. Image Credit: Instagram.

The hashtag #grandmaskitchen evokes the nostalgia and emotional connection involved with  kitchenalia collecting. Content creators see themselves in their collections of kitchenalia and establish identities and expertise that are fabricated from trips to the thrift store. Since food, cooking, and the kitchen are evocative of personal history, content makers establish kitchenalia as an integral part of their personality and status. Kitchen objects, which may be considered traditionally mundane, gendered objects advertised primarily to women as part of their unseen labor as homemakers and providers, suddenly become elevated in value through their incorporation into content makers identities. By elevating kitchenalia to be worthy of collecting and redefining it as “of value,” the women showcasing their virtual cabinet of curiosities are also showcasing identities they’ve invented and advertise online.

Collections tell the story about the collector and what they value–pristine objects, name brands, and the status quo; or they have deep-held beliefs that they will one day make money off these objects and secure their future. Women content-makers and taste-makers who collect kitchenalia demonstrate that what is valuable is identities rooted in the appearance of a history and connection to the kitchen. Their Instagram and TikTok pages serve as a guide for future kitchenalia collectors to determine what material culture of the kitchen holds no value, and what items are worth the money and effort to acquire, enhancing their existing identity.


Esther Martin, MLA, is a food folklorist and writer who specializes in foodways, material culture, and online education. Her work has appeared in The Oxford Companion to Cheese, We Eat What? A Cultural Encyclopedia of Regional Food, and An American Girl Anthology, with upcoming work in The Recipes Project. She has presented at The Museum of Food and Drink, the Association for Food and Society Conference, and the Rutgers Online Learning Conference. She holds an MLA In Gastronomy from Boston University. Find her at esthermartin.substack.com.

Gaza “War Recipes”: Cooking as Survival and Resistance in Displacement

By Noha Atef

In Gaza’s displacement camps, cooking has taken on a new meaning. It is no longer just a routine task; it has become a form of survival, storytelling, and resistance.

Since October 2023, thousands of Palestinians in Gaza strip have been forced from their homes, taking refuge in makeshift tents, often with little more than flour, canned goods, and the clay ovens they crafted. Amid this devastation, a form of digital documentation emerged: Instagram reels of people cooking with what little they have. These are not typical food videos. They are war recipes, or wasfat harb, shared in the middle of crisis.

A steaming pot sits over an open flame.
Fig. 1. The recipe for ‘Tuna Pot,’ described by the content creator as “one of the war recipes,” is designed to maximize the use of canned tuna provided in food aid to help overcome food scarcity. Image courtesy of the author.

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Between March and July 2024, I analyzed 100 of these Instagram reels, all produced by displaced Palestinians in southern Gaza. Using a mixed-method approach that combined content analysis with close discourse analysis, I explored how food becomes a medium through which people express resilience, preserve cultural identity, and push back against the flattening gaze of humanitarian imagery.

Much of the content comes from mothers improvising traditional stews without their essential ingredients. In each video, the act of cooking transcends the immediate need to eat and becomes a demonstration of resilience. The American Psychology Association research describes resilience as the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, or significant stress. It is not the absence of suffering, but the ability to persist despite it. In these reels, resilience is visible in the determination to recreate a dish, to feed a child something warm, to maintain rituals amid ruin.

The impact of war on the naming of dishes is particularly striking. Traditional meals, adapted with whatever substitutes are available, are often labeled as “false” or “orphan” versions. For example, maqluba, a beloved Palestinian dish typically made with chicken or lamb, is referred to as false maqluba in the camps due to the absence of meat. New dishes have also been invented based on aid parcels, often called “resilwar inventions” or “war recipes.” One such example is luncheon meat shawarma, a substitute for beef shawarma, where the canned meat is colloquially known as “war meat.”

Two dishes of eggplant fattah sit on a white board. A hand holding a spoon hovers above.
Fig. 2. An adaptation of Eggplant Fattah, a vegan traditional dish. Titled by the creator as “The Amazing Eggplant Fattah, Best Salads in the War.” The dish is elegantly plated, with a carefully chosen cooking spot to enhance its visual appeal. Image courtesy of author.

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Some recipes carry names that reflect the emotional landscape of displacement. Displacement Molokhia marks the first meal prepared by a family after fleeing their home. Tent pies refer to the first baked goods made by a woman in a tent for her family. These names do more than describe what’s on the plate. They document a collective experience and underscore the adaptability of displaced Palestinians navigating extreme hardship.

These recipes are about far more than nutrition. They serve as psychological and emotional coping mechanisms. Resilience, in this context, is not just about enduring. It is about adapting creatively under pressure and maintaining a sense of purpose and identity in the face of chaos. Additionally, the traditional dishes were emphasized as a symbol of home, which explains the garnishing of these meals despite the scarcity of food, likely done with the intention of showcasing Palestine to the world in the best possible light. Every traditional Palestinian dish was carefully garnished and neatly presented.

In contrast to mainstream media coverage that often portrays displaced people solely as recipients of aid, these reels offer a counternarrative. They present Palestinians not as passive victims but as agents of creativity and resistance. Cooking, normally coded as a domestic act, becomes political. It offers an alternative narrative to one of victimhood. It says: we are still here, we still cook, we still care. Through these everyday acts, people reassert identity, continuity, and connection in conditions designed to erase them.

The message of resilience through food was powerfully underscored by the chosen settings in many videos. While displaced Gazans often selected what appeared to be a ‘nice’ place to cook, this typically meant a spot near a surviving tree, a powerful symbol of Palestine, or one decorated with a keffiyeh. Some framed their shots tightly to avoid capturing the surrounding devastation. In many instances, people returned to the rubble of their destroyed homes (these videos and research were published prior to the brief ceasefire in January 2025), retrieved what dishes they could, and baked sweets directly among the ruins. They shared coffee and pastries in the remnants of their kitchens. Sweets, often associated with comfort, celebration, and happiness, carried a deeper message when prepared among the ruins: we love being at home, even if it’s been destroyed.

Two hands mix brioche ingredients in a small white bowl. Destroyed buildings and rubble can be seen just behind the bowl and in the background.
Fig. 3. A Palestinian woman baking brioche in her demolished home, after retrieving her kitchenware from beneath the rubble. Image courtesy of author.

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Palestinian food has always been tightly woven with questions of land, belonging, and resistance. But these war recipes reveal a new dimension: food as protest, as witness, as archive. In the absence of proper kitchens or ingredients, displaced Gazans are creating a digital record of survival, one that blends taste, memory, and defiance.

References

American Psychological Association. Building your resilience. https://www.apa.org/topics/resilience.

Heldke, Lisa. Exotic Appetites: Ruminations of a Food Adventurer. New York: Routledge, 2003.

Holtzman, Jon D. Uncertain Tastes: Memory, Ambivalence, and the Politics of Eating in Samburu, Northern Kenya. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.

Masten, Ann S. “Ordinary Magic: Resilience Processes in Development.” American Psychologist 56, no. 3 (2001): 227–238.

Scott, James C. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.


Noha Atef is an Egyptian media scholar, educator, and consultant. She is an Assistant Professor of Journalism at the University of Galway. With a background in journalism, she transitioned into academia, focusing on digital humanities and media studies. Atef has held positions at universities and think tanks in the UK and Canada. As a consultant, she advises journalists and researchers in the Arab and Euro-Mediterranean regions on producing impactful social science research, including policy papers and industry-focused studies. Her work, published in both English and Arabic, has reached audiences across the Arab world, Europe, and Asia. She is also a recognized media commentator, providing analysis on various platforms.