The food blogger aesthetic has given way to something more realistic and DIY: Laissez-faire Instagram food is here.
by Bettina Makalintal Eater.com
For a long time, food looked one way on Instagram. It was the look of crisp, pristinely lit plates seen from above, with sprigs of herbs strewn to appear haphazard, despite the tedious work of styling tweezers; stacks of pancakes and cookies shot at exactly the correct angle to show a blur of eggs, old-timey glass bottles of milk, and an “accidental” dusting of flour in the background.
This aesthetic has worked. With its softboxes, fake prop walls, and marble surfaces, it established a generation of bloggers and Instagrammers as professional recipe developers, content creators, and best-selling cookbook authors.
This type of content isn’t doing as well as it used to. Big Instagrammers are turning off Like counts and grumbling about their lack of growth. Creators with five-figure followings are struggling to crack a thousand Likes on a photo. People blame Instagram’s pivot to video: The algorithm isn’t showing their posts, so naturally engagement is down, they argue, and in July, head of Instagram Adam Mosseri confirmed the platform’s increased focus on videos. But then, what to make of the plenty of cooks on my feeds who are doing just fine, resisting Reels and raking in tens of thousands of likes on pictures of bowls of pasta or oily bubbles of focaccia dough? With their follower counts ballooning, their work proves that photos can still perform — those photos just don’t look like what food on Instagram used to look like.