Why can’t we stop watching cooking reels on Instagram and TikTok?

It’s officially cozy season in Baltimore. Each night, while my son is pumping his 9-year-old brain full of loud videos of YouTube bros and my teen is busy responding to thousands of notifications on her phone—I’m on my phone watching recipe reel, after recipe reel, after recipe reel. After all, what else do I have to do in the evenings when it’s below 60 degrees?

I scroll through soups with ingredients I’ve never heard of. Instant Pot meals with pantry staples. Air fryer ideas for my newly purchased air fryer. Frozen chocolate-banana snacks (my current go-to mid-morning need). In fact, it doesn’t matter what the recipe artists are making—I’m probably watching. And who am I kidding—this has absolutely nothing to do with cozy season. I have been watching recipes on Instagram for months (because I’m a millennial), and sometimes TikTok (because I’m not a regular mom . . . I’m a cool mom).

Recipe reel-watching might be a massive time-suck. In fact, it definitely is—and my watch-to-cook ratio is heavily weighted in the watching department. But what I’ve started to notice is that you can only absorb so much content before it starts to seep into your real life—and unlike so much of today’s doomscrolling, it might be for the better.

For one, it can be practical. I watch food influencers like Kalena in The Kitchen make 20-minute meals with ingredients from Trader Joe’s. My favorite recipes are the ones that look delicious and are veggie-heavy and healthy—and when they look really good, I share them so I don’t lose them. (My Insta chat with my daughter is almost entirely made up of recipe reels I can refer back to when I have to start thinking about dinner.)

I’m not going to lie: I’m not cooking up fresh new meals every weekday evening, and my kids are still eating the same five-ingredient fajitas I’ve been making for more than a decade. But, I am starting to make new healthy dishes. I’m using ingredients I had never experimented with and never would’ve thought to pick up. This spring and summer, I got deep into salads—with warm peaches, or watermelon and feta—and watched videos about easy chicken marinades and how to make broccoli delectable. More to the point, perhaps, I’m excited to cook for the first time in forever.

A healthier addiction

I know I’m not alone in this modern obsession: Friends send me recipes, too. We chat about dishes we can make for get-togethers. And, even if it’s not habitual, most people I know have made at least one meal they saw on social media.

Food content has always been wildly popular. For one, it’s highly visual. It can even make you salivate. (Hello #foodporn!) Even if you don’t actually make the recipe, it’s still an enjoyable binge—especially when you don’t have to watch an hour-long cooking show to see the results. It’s no wonder some popular food influencers like Danielle Brown, who runs Healthy Girl Kitchen, have millions of followers.

But recipe-watching also has a goal in mind. There’s a hashtag for any kind of diet you’re hoping to try, whether it’s slimmed-down meals, dairy-free dishes, or epic desserts. And in an era when we learn pretty much everything from quick reels, cooking is definitely no different.

It’s quicker than reading food blogs, too, because I don’t have to read about someone’s grandmother’s childhood (sorry, grandmas!)—I just want to know what’s in the sauce. Recipe reels break it down in a minute or two. It feels like the answer to my ADHD-brain’s inability to get through any of the other content required to become a decent cook: Thanks to the quick and digestible content of the modern world, I now stand a chance.

Changing your daily routine is hard and typically requires substantial effort. But thanks to Instagram, I’m cooking more than I ever have, even though I wasn’t trying to change anything at all. Last night, I made an InstaPot chicken chili that took 10 minutes to prep, 20 to cook, and had a boatload of protein and four different veggies. Both my kids had seconds (I had thirds).

Immersing myself in cooking videos has changed the way my family eats for the better. Plus, I’d rather look at food than most of what’s on the internet on any given day (except for, maybe, talking-dog videos). In a wasteland of doomscrolling, cooking videos are a positive new obsession that might actually rub off in the kitchen. They certainly have in mine.

We already knew that you are what you eat. These days, it seems like you are what you watch, too.