As I’m writing this article, I’m about to post only my 13th cooking Instagram reel in the past 15 months, which is the same amount of reels I posted in the four months prior to that (update: here it is). My posting has slowed down quite substantially. Why this slowdown happened has been knocking around inside my head for a while now, so I’ve organised my thoughts, and wanted to share some reflections on the process of cooking for the camera, and the psychology of how the Instagram app is involved.
I’m a small-time Instagram account, with only about 1,500 followers (mostly getting views in the 2,000-3,000 range with the occasional 10K+ or 20K+), so I have the benefit that a lot of my audience is people I know personally. Naturally, the topic comes up pretty often. I’m glad people enjoy the videos, and it gives me great joy when the posts become a launchpad for a conversation about food and cooking in general. If the question of posting less has come up, people have been kind enough to proffer such explanations as “you got busy” or “you got married”, and I’m grateful, but I can’t honestly accept those reasons, because I've figured out what the real reason is.
The slowdown started in April 2025, which is exactly the time that I made having the Instagram app deleted as the default position. Why not just say “the time I deleted the Instagram app”? Because I still re-download it here or there (as I’ll mention later), and I’m not trying to evangelise deleting the app or eschewing all social media. There’s a fine line between commentating on your channel’s (lack of) activity and becoming one of those ultra-minimalist, off-the-grid types whose entire business model is posting on a given platform about why everyone should get off that exact platform.
Regardless, I decided to have the app deleted most of the time because I, like many others, found myself scrolling for far too long, watching videos from accounts I did not follow, and getting into the braindead habit of closing the app only to suddenly reopen it as if I had not just spent 30 minutes watching reels.
The Instagram app
Say what you want about Meta and what social media has done for (or to) the world, but the Instagram app is a feat of engineering. The smoothness of the scrolling, the small bounce animations when you navigate to different tabs… they’ve done a great job of making it feel good to use. Contrast that with other social media apps like X, TikTok, LinkedIn, and Facebook, and I don’t think they reach the same heights of clean user interface design.
Having the app as a mainstay on my phone was, I believe, a strong factor in increasing how often I posted videos. Seeing other, much larger accounts inspired me to keep improving my filming and editing (as I have no background in either), and gave me endless ideas of things to cook. Close proximity to the app just made it happen.
This is true even though I don’t have and never have had any financial goals with posting cooking videos, because seeing other reels get millions of views still made me think “what if?”, and at the very least, posting a reel exposed me to positive Black Swans. I strongly believe in doing things that — besides for the main purpose I am doing them — also increase my chances of random, disproportionate, and unknown opportunities, and however unlikely it is, posting a cooking video could result in such untold prospects. It wasn’t the reason I posted; indeed, posting only for the small likelihood of outsized virality would be a meagre existence riddled with disappointment. But it was nice to know that once the video was out there, anything could happen.
And thus, besides for the main enjoyment of sharing cooking with my friends and seeing what a small corner of the world thought of my videos, having the Instagram app helped me to post more.
In general, some of the difficulties that exist in cooking for the camera are:
- Rearranging things to fit the camera and tripod in a small space
- Continual counter and cutting board cleanup so the shots aren’t messy
- Not being able to cook with music playing
- Not being able to cook while on the phone
- Getting food on the table takes around 50% longer (my guesstimate), and I’m just doing it to feed myself dinner after working full-time during the day
But seeing other cooking reels, and getting inspired by what they were making and how much reach cooking videos could have, got me over those humps so that I could whip out the camera and film. And this extra push I apparently needed was eliminated — unbeknownst to me at the time — when I deleted the Instagram app.
What about YouTube?
YouTube is one of the most used apps on my phone, and that’s not even counting TV usage. So why doesn’t the cooking content I see on YouTube have the same effect as Instagram reels in pushing me that extra mile to film my cooking?
I’ve thought of three reasons for this, although they’re just the explanations I’ve come to after the fact:
- I mostly watch long-form cooking videos on YouTube, so the inspiration is a little different, as it’s a different category of media
- I don’t post on YouTube, so even for the short-form cooking videos that I do see there, the connection between watching and posting is missing
- There’s just something less social about YouTube. I’m one of the only people I know in my circles who ever comments on YouTube videos (confirmed nerd), and the Instagram stories feature adds a lot of personal-ness
Cooking without the camera
Am I still cooking, even if I’m not posting as many reels? Absolutely! Besides for continuing to try new dishes from all kinds of cuisines, I’ve finally gotten into bread making in the last year, and have experimented with everything from artisanal loaves to bagels to focaccia to sandwich rolls to baguettes, and yes, to sourdough. It’s been an amazing learning process (shoutout to my childhood friend Mendel Engel, and Alisha Fuller, both of Simply Bread, for sharing their expertise).
On New Year’s Day 2024 I started a note on my phone called “Cooking wishlist” where I keep a checklist of dishes I want to make, and I’ve definitely been checking things off.
And in between the reels that I do post, here and there I also download the Instagram app to post a couple stories of something I cooked, which is really easy because it just requires a couple snaps once the food is ready; I don’t have anywhere near the quality threshold to post a story as I would a reel. Of course, this has the counterbalancing effect of not being that enjoyable for my audience, and stories also only reach my followers, not the wider Instagram feed.
What’s the plan from here?
Like I said, I’ve never really had a plan with posting reels. It’s always been about fun, and keeping as much pressure out of it as possible (but my analytical brain still couldn’t help writing an article). I don’t have a content calendar, and whatever you see me make is something I actually ate for dinner that week. Still, I do hear the comments asking where the reels are, and it means a lot to me. It’s definitely something I want to keep doing, and maybe the wheel will turn and I’ll be posting a lot again before long. Who knows. Once I get past the initial two minutes of committing to filming and actually getting the camera out, it really is a fun process, thinking up the different angles, getting lighting right, and trying to get nice, clean shots. And I love editing (I use iMovie because it’s mostly just cuts, nothing too flashy).
I moved to a new apartment in March, and the kitchen is a big upgrade over my last two. There’s a big island, so I’m able to get angles of me facing the camera, I don’t need to rearrange things as often, and having my wife motivate me and help me film has been a big plus. I also recently started a recipe website using the Recipe.Site builder from Alex Hollender. This allows me to combine my passions for cooking and writing, and gives people a much better way of learning how to re-create the dish and look up all my recipes in one place. I have no plans of monetising or paywalling the recipe content (as most big accounts do), so if you see my Instagram captions directing you to use the “link in bio”, that’s because I can’t put links in an Instagram caption and I genuinely want to share the recipe with you for free.
It’s pretty interesting how the Instagram app is a double-edged sword which, on one hand, gave me endless inspiration and had me in a zone where I was posting cooking reels one or two times a week, but on the other hand, was an addictive force strong enough to prompt its own deletion. I suppose many things in life are about balance, and I'm in the middle of finding mine.