I went to culinary school, worked as a line cook, then became a mother. Sadly, the upshot of that trajectory is not that my children eat three-course homemade meals every night, but that my Instagram feed is filled almost entirely with videos of people – mostly mothers – chopping salads into tiny dice. Microchopping, in social media parlance.
That big algorithm in the sky has rightly intuited that after most days of work and childcare, and a tripartite bedtime that takes two and a half hours at its most efficient, the only content the shards in my brain can handle consuming are these types of videos – not the novel taunting me from my bedside table, not that longform magazine article everyone is talking about, not even the new movie released on a streaming service. Small, manageable, they are often quick cut, with the camera right next to the chopping board or mixing bowl. And the satisfaction of seeing large, unruly vegetables transform into perfect cubes, or leafy greens evolve into confetti ribbons, everything then piled into an oversized mixing bowl full of good-for-you crunchy veggies, is on par, for me, with a perfectly organized closet.
In other words, my Valhalla. But I’ve come to realize that it’s not just my Valhalla. Friends of mine also unwind after long days by watching other people chop vegetables, and social media accounts largely devoted to the content have millions of subscribers.
For a particular subset of the world, it checks all the boxes to reac.