“What’s for dinner?”
It is a question that echoes through my house, sometimes as early as noon. Especially during the past year as we have been spending more time at home, dinner has become the day’s focal point. I’ve run through my standard repertoire of meals several dozen times. I’ve looked for new ideas – asking friends for their family’s favorite recipes, combing through cooking websites, and even browsing through cookbooks that before 2020 had collected dust on our kitchen shelves.
I never thought to check TikTok for cooking inspiration. That was until the app was credited with starting several viral food trends, including feta cheese pasta, baked oats and cloud bread.
Why has TikTok become such a popular resource for home chefs?
“It’s the combination of people having more time to cook and a shorter attention span,” says My Nguyen, content creator @myhealthydish. “They want to learn quickly, and they don’t want cooking to be complicated. In a TikTok video, you learn how to make something new in less than a minute.”
While some TikTok cooking personalities have professional culinary training, many are self-taught, with no formal training. Nguyen, who describes herself as a “food entertainer,” taught herself how to cook. She says, “Several of my family members own restaurants, so I grew up in the food industry. My background is in nutrition, so I like teaching people how to prepare simple, healthy foods. Like many TikTok chefs, I’m not focused on creating new recipes as much as putting my own spin on a dish and presenting it in a catchy, entertaining way. I’m telling a story, and food is the subject.”
Vivian Aronson (@cookingbomb) — a contestant on MasterChef, Season 10 — learned how to cook from her grandmother. “Growing up in China, no one went out to restaurants,” she says. “We ate home-cooked meals every day.”
In 2005, Aronson moved to the United States with her husband and found herself with a lot of free time. She started experimenting in the kitchen and posting dishes on social media. Aronson joined TikTok in 2019, but it wasn’t until the pandemic in 2020 that she saw her audience grow exponentially. She says, “People were staying home more and getting tired of frozen food. They craved take-out Chinese food, and I showed them how easy and how much healthier it was to make it themselves.”