A year ago, Paris Starn was creating, testing and posting pictures of ornate and complicated pastries as an extension of her brand, Paris 99—a line of hand-sewn, scalloped silhouettes conjuring a bygone femininity, that of a (slightly more risque) 16th century picnic. Her baking was an added bonus for followers of her account: a praline paris-brest, its tan surface matching her perfectly manicured nails; soft and airy cotton candy cupcakes with cloud-like frosting; home-made croissant cake hybrids shot against a checkerboard background. The textures of the flaky pastry, the sounds (crunchy, chewy, ASMR-friendly) and environments of these desserts were just one aspect of her Paris 99 universe. But a year ago, when the world traded pants for sweatsuits, her clothing sales plummeted, and so her cooking practice took center stage.
Before COVID hit, fetishized food, the kind that decorated Paris’ grid, was hitting a saturation point. Brightly colored gelatin and monochromatic charcuterie had become the expected fodder of many an Explore page. More than just sustenance, food had been widely accepted as a medium—a place to play and to inspire. But this movement evolved because of a pandemic that kept us away from food in the physical realm. No longer were we satisfied to scroll as mere voyeurs, seeking out visually stimulating entertainment. Instead, we became more like active students, eager (or forced) to learn, to watch and to replicate as a means to provide for ourselves when dining out became less of an option.
“Who knew that sourdough was going to be the big thing at the start of COVID? I didn’t. But I was ready,” Starn says of her starter that she began to foster in February of 2020. Because of the outpouring of enthusiasm for bread—a far cry from the gianduja-cream filled viennoiserie she was accustomed to posting—she began to simplify her recipes, focusing more on approachable how-tos. “I still wanted to hold onto the curated and ASMR aspect of these desserts, I just also realized that people weren’t going to want to spend three days making a cake.” For those followers who want to bake along—but don’t want to spend three days baking a cake—Starn began posting slightly simpler recipes, too: apfelstrudel, anything sourdough, and molten lava cakes that spilled out decadently in an Instagram-friendly way. Her followers began to open up to her in her DMs—thanking her for providing a new perspective on food and cooking, even confiding in her about their own complicated relationships to food. “I have people reaching out to tell me how comforting my content is, how it helps them go to sleep at night. ” Starn says. “That’s honestly the best part of all.”
Jen Monroe, on the other hand, was wary to pivot from aspirational to inspirational. But like Starn, she quickly realized at the start of the pandemic that teaching people how to actually cook might be the only way she’d make it through. “It’s definitely brought up a lot of confusing questions in terms of what I want to be doing and what it is I feel I have to offer,” says Monroe, whose art had been embedded exclusively in physical experience before COVID. “I never woke up and said I want to make weird food for a living,” she says. And yet, from pioneering the monochromatic dinner (and later ticketing the evenings as events), to unofficially trademarking the cruditable, experiential food naturally became her bread and butter over time. Her grid is a playful space filled with food that hovers at the intersection of edible and not so edible, fantasy and reality: frog pond soup with coconut herbs and nasturtium sits in a bowl made out of half of a hollowed honey-dew melon, synthesized corn pudding features cartoonish kernels that float in a scientific petri-dish. Monroe’s primary concern for her audience has always been to show how food can inspire awe, wonder and interaction, not to show how these things are made.
So when COVID hit, and Monroe took to Patreon, she wasn’t sure what she should be teaching her followers, per se. “I was asking myself questions like, how much do people actually want to do what I do? Because a lot of what I do, no home cook should ever attempt,” she says. “It’s truly a stupid way to flush hours of your life down the toilet if it’s not your job.” She has found however, to her surprise, that she’s enjoyed sharing simpler recipes, and the simpler the recipe, the more engagement she gets. Her tutorial on how to make edible candles out of butter, a process she promises is easy, performed really well. “People were sending me wild interpretations, like a butter menorah!” she says. But even simpler than that, videos about how to make cabbage pancakes or kimchi fried rice have been a surprisingly gratifying way to impart some of what, at the end of the day, she loves most in the world: cooking. “I’m no Alison Roman—I’m not going to teach you how to make a pasta salad,” Monroe says. “But it’s interesting because all of a sudden people who had never cooked before are expected to provide for themselves, so I had this ah ha moment of like, oh, there is something useful I can provide. Because everyone should feel comfortable cooking for themselves.”
And then there’s Alexis Nelson, aka @blackforager. Her specialty is sourcing food in unusual places (she tends to “grocery shop” through her neighborhood by pulling herbs like mustard grass from her neighbor’s yard) and making instructional videos out of it, certainly an art in our age. Like Starn and Monroe, Nelson has been surprised to find that her audience is actually eager to learn—not just watch. During COVID, she began putting a special emphasis on learning so that her followers could easily follow along when she, say, demonstrated how to properly eat an acorn. “TikTok is a quick cut game,” says Nelson, which is important when detailing, for example, how to make a seaweed panna cotta in sixty seconds (a video that’s garnered 500,000 views). Breaking things down in a way that’s accessible has never been an issue for Nelson: “I was a summer camp counselor throughout college, which, in a way, is what I channel on TikTok.” Nelson equates talking about wild food on TikTok to teaching a five-year old arts and crafts. And this formula has been working considering that this time last year, she had no followers on TikTok. Today, she has reached 1 million.
Coming in shortly after “How to eat acorns” as Nelson’s best performing post is “how to tell the difference between Queen Ann’s Lace and poison hemlock,” followed by “Black History meets Black Joy (meets more Black History).” Nelson feared that in creating a niche for herself she’d “overniche-ify” herself. “So it’s nice when you realize people are still here for me when I talk about things that aren’t plant-related.” This includes the complicated legalese around foraging and why it’s “a little bit racist!” Nelson says. And sometimes, she just wants to play the auto-harp. “I lost 25 followers after I did that but that’s fine. The autoharp is a part of the deal.”
If you’re wondering how these digital-food-artist-educators find time to eat when they’re spending all of their time teaching the rest of us how to cook, the answer is, well, they don’t. “It’s usually the weird odds and ends of what I’m not using for larger projects,” says Monroe. “Right now in my fridge I have a couple quarts of broth, sliced cabbage and another couple quarts of cucumbers that have been sitting in liquid for a while—oh, and a huge bag of thai basil that I have no idea what I’m going to do with.” For Nelson, it’s a bit more involved: “I make a huge batch of jagaveda, which is a Cape Verdean dish.” Impressive, you might think. “But it’s essentially just rice and beans,” she notes. Starn insists that risotto counts as lazy cooking as “it takes 18 and a half minutes, flat!” When pressed, she adjusts the timeline: “okay, more like 25 all in.” Following another pause she gives an alternate response: “I guess nine times out of ten it’s green curry with chicken with eggplants.” But don’t expect a how-to for that dish anytime soon.