Is the internet choosing your food?
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is Ira Glass. On This American Life, we tell stories about when things change. Like for this guy, David, whose entire life took a sharp, unexpected, and very unpleasant turn. And it did take me a while to realize it's basically because the monkey pressed the button. That's right. Because the monkey pressed the button. Surprising stories every week, wherever you get your podcasts.
Okay, I want to know if you've seen this tweet before.
Oh, I certainly know this tweet.
Ha ha ha!
this uh would i have written a book if not for this tweet it is so
so obviously the people listening can't see this post so we're going to do a dramatic reading it's already written in a script format as a short conversation between the writer of the tweet and the new york times cooking section you be the writer of the tweet and i will be the new york times cooking section okay Okay. Okay, you start. What should I do? Beanie leaky greens with Greeky rampy beans. Shout out to comedian Carly Marulli, who posted this in 2024, because this post has stayed in my brain for years. Seems like yours as well. I think what it speaks to, what a lot of people have noticed, is that recipes online seem to have converged on a kind of sameness that's hard to escape. They're described in lots of words that end in Y. Creamy.
jammy, lemony. They tend to use lots of globally sourced pastes like miso, gochujang, and harissa. And the luscious photos and videos that accompany them border on erotic. And I wanted to know, how did we get here? What has the internet done to our palates? And what do today's tastes say about us? To find out, I'm joined by Ruby Tando, cookbook writer and the author of All Consuming, Why We Eat The Way We Eat Now. Welcome, Ruby.
Hey, I'm delighted to be here and to revisit that tweet.
I'm happy to have you and revisit that tweet. Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luce and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident.
Okay, so you open your book, All Consuming, by talking about how all taste is prescribed socially, beyond milk when we're babies. Of course, people have their innate tastes, you know, like their likes and dislikes, but these also change over time. How does what we see around us change what we're hungry for?
I mean, I think on a really obvious level, this just starts when you're young. If you are kind of learning to eat from a fussy eater, there's every chance you'll pick that up. Or even in the negative, if you're having some kind of rebellious streak and you see your whole family is like happily eating one dinner and you're like, actually, I'm going to be a spanner in the works. This is my role. That too is a kind of responsive position. You are deciding what you like, what you don't like in reaction to the people around you. And It's really, really hard to get to any kind of like biological hardwired origins for our tastes. Like there are some things, you know, famously, some people don't like cilantro.
That's kind of like that goes around a lot. It tastes like soap for some people if they've got some kind of genetic profile or other, but... Really, most things are social. It's a transaction. It's to do with which groups you want to be included in and which you definitely don't want to be a part of. I know that my contrarian streak shapes the way I eat even now, and I am definitely not a toddler anymore learning how to eat. So yeah, it's hugely social how we decide what we want to be eating.
What we were talking about earlier, these like very algorithmically optimized recipes of the leaky, beany, greeny variety. Like what do they say about our food culture now? And what are people hungry for?
So I think the creamy, beany, leaky, cheesy whole thing, it has such a clear provenance, at least the way I see it. Traditionally, we learned to cook using cookbooks. You would have a cookbook that has, let's say, 100 recipes in it. Each of those recipes is allowed to stand on its own and doesn't really have to do a huge amount to market itself.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–6:19
2
Why do online recipes all sound the same and use the same adjectives?
6:19–14:22
3
How does the internet shape our taste preferences from childhood onward?
14:22–22:04
4
What changed when recipes moved from cookbooks to the internet?
22:04–31:34