A Paean to Shitty Food Blogs

I can't make carbonara. Every time I try, I look to the Jamie Olivers and Nigella Lawsons of this world for guidance, but all I end up with is an eggy mess congealed to my frying pan. I don't get it: I follow their recipes to the letter, but when it's done it looks like the lovechild of Gordon Ramsay and a Komondor and tastes pretty much as bad as that sounds.

Ever the self-flagellator, last time I tried to make this hallowed dish I scrolled through Instagram under the #carbonara hashtag for a perfect iteration of how it should be and was presented with a selection of images so sexy that I began to cry. Through the perfect amalgam of good lighting and artful twirling, plates of spaghetti, egg, and bacon had been sculpted into glistening edifices that were like gooey versions of the Elgin Marbles. If I had had someone to hold me at the time, I'd have begged them.

I closed my laptop, looked down at my pan of brain-like nonsense, and was consumed by a growing fear that food porn—on Instagram, Twitter, blogs, or wherever the fuck people post pictures of beautiful, flawless food—isn't intended for me, but rather for the esoteric pleasure of a select few who have lost touch with reality: that food, while most certainly capable of being art, is primarily something we burn as fuel and then crap out.

Everything we eat cannot—unless you're Donald Trump—come out of a fantastic professional kitchen and everything we cook at home won't resemble something Anthony Bourdain might have turned his dextrous hands to in his heyday. To think this way drops you into a maze of unreachable zeniths. In fact, to me, it feels like a fucking conspiracy. It's why I've found myself becoming a disciple of a new church, the church of the shitty food blogger.

There are a growing number of blogs out there that are a backlash against all that is unobtainable and perfect in society, that fight our new culture of Photoshopped plates and enhanced tomato cleavages and break the assumption that food has to be sexy to be celebrated. It doesn't. When was the last time you looked into the bottom of a delicious bowl of Frosties and thought, "Yeah, I'd fuck you?" Exactly.

There's something childlike in the way cookingforbae, for example, presents photos of the worst-looking meals on Instagram. Yes, we might laugh at pitiful plates of over-boiled frozen vegetables and microwave mac 'n' cheese that some poor asshole was going to eat after taking the picture, but in presenting meals that people have eaten for pure function, they expose how absurd our lack of humor surrounding food has become.

There are gems outside of social media, too. YouTube is full of channels that brim with three minute-long cooking "shows", but I really think we should be looking to people like Masaokis as a welcome foil to the meat thermometer-probing, butter-basting army of online experts.

Masokis invites us into his kitchen on a regular basis to watch him cook and it's an absolute joy—even though he might set something on fire in every video (his surprise every time it happens is breathtaking). He may well use his bathroom as a natural extension of his kitchen—the moldy bathtub is filled with pans, the toilet bowl is a thawing platform, and the sink? Well, that's for water, dumbass—but there is honesty in his approach to food that cannot be mocked.

My personal favorite is the omelette he made for Obama's inauguration in 2009. I doubt the man owns a plate, because who needs one when you cook sausage with a fucking lighter and then clean it up with a bar of soap? And like all good artists, he improvises, shifting the camera wildly toward a candle in a vase as he realizes that it too can be used to cook sausages.

There are subtle hints, however, that Masaokis is not all he seems. Firstly, he's disappeared, his YouTube presence now maintained by a handful of dedicated acolytes and a defunct "new" channel. Then there's the widely held belief that he is fabulously wealthy—a claim supported by Masaokis's references to "my home" (at around the 8:30 mark) and that his basement kitchen is a modern day playpen set up entirely for sake of being a dick with a frying pan. Finally, the revelation (at about the ten minute mark) that he's got a law degree, and his quasi-Bateman confession that he's always pretending.

Real or not, the veracity of the man's passion for culinary investigation cannot be questioned. Masokis is us. He's me. He's the person that cannot make food look pornographic no matter how hard he tries and I feel a lot closer to him than I do to any "real" chef. He's weird, familiar, and innocent. Because that's what food loses when it's tarted up and hashtagged as 'food porn' on Instagram: Its innocence.