The Great Food Instagram Vibe Shift

ForFor 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.

I’ve been noticing something, though: 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.

Instagram food is entering what we’ll call — by the suggestion of my colleague Dayna Evans — its laissez-faire era, a shift in both vibe and aesthetic that’s underpinned by generational changes, a diversification of food creators, and a long-simmering frustration with the platform’s entrenched culture of curation. This developing sensibility is best represented by creators like @eatnunchi, @cuhnja, @paris.starn, @suea, @tenderherbs, and @yungkombucha420, all of whom embody an approach to food that feels curated yet lived-in; but it extends to all manner of home cooks who’ve started sharing what they make online.

In place of the previous era’s perfection is food and food photography that feels weirder, messier, and more comfortable. It implies messing around at home with a phone and the midday sun, not setting up a fancy camera and a lighting rig. It is, more often than not, food that appears in a real setting — a dinner party, a weekday lunch — as opposed to food that looks studio-composed into a product. The London-based magazine AnOther has called this shift “lo-fi food,” emphasizing its focus on “minimal presentation and big flavour.” It is food that looks like it will be eaten — and enjoyed.

Maggie, a 30-year-old creator who started @coffeewithmaggie in 2016, came up during the height of Instagram curation. (She chooses not to use her last name in association with her content creation.) “You’re at a restaurant and they bring out the food and everybody takes pictures for 15, 20 minutes and it has to be perfectly staged and no one can bite it,” she says of those early days. Recently, she’s noticed the shift to the laissez-faire aesthetic. “The things that I see in photos now are really more of that photo dump style,” says Maggie. “It’s less of the perfectly curated marble studio and more interest in my actual kitchen that I actually cooked in.” That “photo dump” style Maggie describes is one piloted by Gen Z, who have — more than other generations — given up on the curated feed in favor of going weird, ugly, and unfiltered.

The more casual visuals are meant to convey a greater sense of authenticity. “What you’re hitting on is the shift in Instagram and social as a whole,” says Zoe Cohen, formerly the senior director of brand marketing at the underwear company Parade. “[The industry] started out super perfect and very DSLR, and now it’s shifted to iPhone and real and gritty and BTS and people wanting to see behind the veil.”

Parade has been — however surprisingly — one of the leading brands to seize onto the laissez-faire food look. Food posts on its Instagram, which Cohen ran until March of this year, exemplify the more art-school side of the laissez-faire aesthetic, including a shrimp cocktail stamped with the brand’s logo and a dripping, messy banana split announcing a summer sale. “The whole platform is moving away from perfection into the weird, the unusual, the authentic,” Cohen says.

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