Your grandmother would have been all the rage on Instagram

I owe them the mashed potatoes, the cheese and kimchi ramen, the quick pickles. I owe the majority of my culinary explorations to them, in fact. However, they are not leaders. Just lovers of good food and active on Instagram …

I like to cook. The problem is that the task comes up often – especially with yet another sad closure of restaurants – and that my creativity has its limits. Running out of ideas, I could obviously leaf through one of the recipe books lying on my counter… But the truth is, I rather open Instagram to look at what Theo and Virginie have cooked.

The first works in the world of beauty, the second in management. Their profession does not lead them to cook at all, but their passion pushes them to share their meals on the social platform. On a daily basis, they influence me more than any chef or any advertisement.

To their astonishment!

“My intention is not really to inspire people…”, Virginie Gascon Lauzon tells me, laughing. It’s the first time that we’re talking to each other, her and me. I’ve been following Virginie on Instagram for years. I know where she works (she is a customer experience trainer for Pizzeria 900) and what she likes to eat, but I’ve never met her. We are living in a great time!

So, if not to inspire others, why share spaghetti shots? aglio e olio, gravlax and broccoli breakfast casserole?

True. And if I want to imitate this girl, it’s not because I feel the slightest pressure or guilt (I’m very comfortable eating a grilled cheese for dinner), but because her enthusiasm is contagious.

“When I see ‘normal people’ cooking, I realize that you don’t need special training to succeed in this recipe,” Théo Dupuis-Carbonneau told me. Even if it seemed intimidating to me at first, I will be motivated to do it! ”

Théo is Head of Beauty Content at Elle Quebec and Elle Canada. She is also my number 1 source of inspiration when it comes time to try a new dish. And I’m far from being alone in her fan club … “I get talked about a lot about my posts on Instagram, I feel they are appreciated. “

A curator, that’s it! Basically, it’s not chefs that I need on a daily basis. It is a sorting out of the immense offer. Moreover, Virginie Gascon Lauzon goes there for a very good comparison: “I love music, but I’m bad at discovering new ones! I like someone to do the research for me. I think the same thing happens with food on Instagram. “

I am curious with a background of laziness. The Instagrammers who clear the gastronomic terrain are my precious landmarks. They are also very powerful …

“Some foodie-type personalities have more subscribers than chefs,” Catherine Binette, account manager at Clark Influence agency, points out to me. Now, is the number of subscribers a guarantee of success?

“It is certainly a question that can be asked, continues the one who specializes in food marketing. Some foodies have succeeded in breaking through thanks to the notoriety they have acquired on their social platforms. And by ‘break through’, I mean create a cookbook and sell a pretty impressive number of copies of it. “

Which obviously reminds me of the Cassandra Loignon phenomenon. The influencer and entrepreneur from Quebec is very successful with her three cookbooks. She is currently followed by more than 136,000 people, on Instagram …

In fact, where amateurs stand out from professionals is in their “human” approach. Those who simply popot on social networks are in the authenticity. Their cuisine resembles ours, we can guess the daily mess, trial and error, clumsiness. And at the end, we discover a dish that we still really want to eat …

“There is a bit of a pornographic side to all this, according to food sociologist Nathalie Lachance. We have fun watching and we will come back to it because we want to relive this moment of exaltation there. “

For Nathalie Lachance, the COVID-19 pandemic marked a turning point in our relationship with these content creators. With confinement, it has become more difficult to meet our need for discovery and food pleasures. At the same time, the Quebec government encouraged us to consume locally, going so far as to launch a certain Blue Basket …

We looked for small challenges to meet, on social networks (hello, homemade bread!). Through the gang, we got attached to certain personalities. People like us who document different recipes, a bit like those grandmothers who wrote down their great hits in a notebook. Notebook passed down from generation to generation …

Basically, there is nothing very new in this transmission between amateurs.

Moreover, Nathalie Lachance reminds me that an American blogger was all the rage, in 2002, by trying to make a Julia Child recipe per day, for a year. By tackling the illustrious chef’s classics, Julie Powell drew the sympathy of a horde of readers, which spawned a bestseller and the hit film. Julie and Julia.

In short, food unites us, even virtually.

On this subject, I would like to leave the last word to Théo Dupuis-Carbonneau: “Food is so unifying! Food has not always been positive for me; it has long been linked to the notion of control. Today, cooking is a way of bringing together those I love. It’s a pretext to show people that they mean to me. “

Maybe it’s because love is reflected in all his publications that I really want to copy his recipes.