The Unnerving Meaning of the Two Kinds of Instagram Kitchens

Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Getty Images Plus.

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There are two types of kitchens.

Well, there are many types of kitchens—but in the world of influencer kitchens, of the kind you might see on your For You page, there are two polarities. On one side, the crunchy or trad or zero-waste kitchen, with its mason jars full of sourdough starter and unpasteurized milk. At the other end of the spectrum is the containerized kitchen, with its dozens of plastic storage vessels and “Refill my snack drawer” single-serving approach. In both kitchens, we see a panoply of clear jars, an attention to display, and an affection for decanting.

The people who run these kitchens seem to have very little in common. The crunchy creator lives in a world of linen aprons and label-less bottles. The container influencer hasn’t handled a raw ingredient since Obama was in office. And neither of them has very much in common with us, the noninfluencer class, who cook and eat in serviceable but generally less aesthetic ways. You could argue that these kitchens aren’t even real—they’re stage sets where creators perform stories about food and style and health for vociferous audiences.

However, what I see in both these kitchens is a bone-deep anxiety around the ways we currently relate to food: how we buy, store, cook, and eat it. The crunchy kitchen and the container kitchen present two equally mythic visions of domestic care and nourishment. Each one offers an identity that can be adopted and, with that, a set of rituals and stylistic tropes intended to protect the family from contaminants, scarcity, or both.

The founding myth that underlies the crunchy kitchen is the vision of the peasant kitchen, where food is as natural as can be and is fully embedded in the great flow of life. “The peasant meal is in the middle of the day, surrounded by work,” writes John Berger in his 1976 essay “The Eaters and the Eaten,” a comparison of bourgeois and peasant modes of consumption. What is vital about the peasant kitchen is its sense of contiguity. The main meal takes place in the center of the day, eating happens in the same room where the food has been cooked, and food passes from hand to hand, from field to basket to kitchen table, with each person slicing off a chunk from the communal loaf. “The relationship between implements, food and eaters is intimate,” writes Berger. The peasant sees where their food came from—they or a neighbor likely grew or raised it—and receives it as kin.

The preindustrial cadence of rural life, a time before the invention of Dusen Dusen pepper grinders and frozen lasagna, is what the tradwives of Instagram are channeling, though they can muster only a shallow simulacrum of it. Still, in crunchy kitchens as diverse as the zero-waste haven of Alessandro Vitale and the God-and-guns suburbia of Gwen the Milkmaid, the valorization of unadulterated ingredients and “from scratch” production all hark back to an era when mealtime sprang directly from land and labor—the crunchy kitchen spans the political spectrum. In the notably rustic-lux Ballerina Farm kitchen, children scamper underfoot as Hannah Neeleman curdles whole milk into a fresh cheese, the ingredients and the children alike contributing to the sense of a room attuned to nature’s wholesome rhythms. Never mind that the dreamy kitchen is a product more of industrial family wealth than of rural toil; the production of simplicity that takes place on-screen is enough.

The mythic image of the peasant kitchen also shows up in other parts of the food world, especially in recent years, as “slow food” and farm-to-table cooking have exploded into the mainstream. Chad Robertson’s sourdough bible, Tartine Bread, begins its heartfelt preface with a painting that calls back to Berger’s bread-loving peasant. “My strongest inspiration came not from real bread but from images—images of a time and place when bread was the foundation of a meal and at the center of daily life,” writes Robertson. He describes a large rustic loaf “held close to the heart,” sliced toward the body in a communal sacrament, representing an elemental and ancient loaf unsullied by ultra-processing or bleached flour.

Centrally, the fantasy driving the elemental loaf and the Ballerina Farm mozzarella is that it’s a raw product that has never touched packaging or industrial processing. Carried hand to hand from one person to another, poured from vessel to vessel, the ingredients’ essence is maintained and protected, avoiding the contamination and abstraction of the super-processed supermarket product. In the crunchy kitchen, food has aura. This aura is enhanced through the aesthetic of the kitchens themselves: raw wood, ceramic, metal. Unadorned implements and ingredients visible in glass containers. Nothing that would diminish the purity of the milk or leach BPAs into the rising poolish. Some version of this has manifested in the content of protein-obsessive, macro-counting creators, with their unsettling repasts of ground beef and banana presented on a wooden cutting board as though something as conventional as a plate would disturb the integrity of the meal.

Many of these tropes strike me as a series of fretful rituals to ensure (and demonstrate) that the food being consumed is safe and pure. Fretting is understandable. The modern supermarket is full of perils that threaten the crunchy home, from listeria outbreaks to emulsifiers with multisyllabic names and additives that are illegal in Europe. It is the contiguity at the heart of the modern-day peasant kitchen that promises safety: If you watch the ingredients carefully as they pass from field to casserole dish, if they are free of “interference” from Big Ag or unfamiliar processes, if you understand your relation to the food and cut the loaf toward your heart, then no harm will come from what you eat.

Where the peasant kitchen has glass jars full of raw ingredients, the containerized kitchen is stocked with single-serve pouches. It is a kitchen of clicks and clacks, of ASMR, of packets ripped open and weekly restock hauls. This is not a landscape in which someone strains curds with a square of cheesecloth—we are far from the ingredient kitchen. In Khloé Kardashian’s infamous kitchen pantry, every product can be found in multiples, arranged across the huge expanse like strange found-object sculptures. TikTokers like Julie Kay and Catherine Benson make hay from the visual splendor of the well-apportioned kitchen, stocking their refrigerators like a particularly fancy hotel minibar and doing things with Tupperware you could never imagine. This is a space where consistent units are moved and sorted, the food itself playing second fiddle to the process of organization.

Unlike the natural and holistic appearance of the crunchy kitchen, the container kitchen is akin to a retail logistics space, with stocking instead of harvesting. Here, ingredients and foodstuffs have no aura in themselves—in fact, the unpackaged ingredient represents disorder and unpredictability, something to be managed rather than revered. Modern life is stressful and chaotic. The clear vessels of the container kitchen (its main aesthetic connection to the crunchy kitchen) and the omnipresent single-serving packets represent organization, visibility, and predictability.

In these containerized kitchens, we see the bourgeois meal updated for a new century. In the 19^th-century bourgeois household of Berger’s description, “everything that can be is kept untouched and separate. Every dish has its own cutlery and plate. … The meal is a series of discrete, untouched gifts.” Clearly, patterns of commerce and consumption have changed beyond recognition from the kitchens Berger describes. What remains consistent is that in these kitchens, food is abstracted from its source and re-presented as something new. It is packaged and commodified, wrested from its continuity with the world and from its intimate relation to the body.

Not everyone who maintains a containerized kitchen is bourgeois, of course. For many, the individualism and accumulation of the container kitchen is aspirational, a way of demonstrating plenitude and sufficiency regardless of your actual class position or relation to labor and ownership. Despite the room’s appearance as a kind of mini-warehouse, the container creator in these videos is not playing the role of the warehouse worker. They are the warehouse owner, overseeing the inputs and outputs and running the household as an efficient enterprise.

The anxious decanting of the container influencer points to a fear of scarcity or disorder. This seems reasonable: Have you tried to buy eggs lately? Have you heard the news at all? Grocery shopping is more of a trial than ever, as the retail spaces that once offered customer-focused pleasure increasingly resemble just another logistics space, while online ordering adds another layer of anhedonic abstraction. In this fragmented landscape, the way to cope is by becoming a manager, embracing industrial processes and the logic of logistics to ensure that the food supply reflects the cleanliness and order of the distribution center.

Beneath the rusticity of the crunchy kitchen and the plasticity of the container kitchen lies a dysfunctional relationship to our contemporary American food landscape. Crunchiness and containerization offer a retreat into aesthetics, as well as a rubric for manifesting safety and security in an insecure time. These myths can have malign consequences, as is clear to anyone tracking the MAHA movement or worried about the environmental scourge of single-use plastics. The container kitchen glosses over the violence and harms enacted by the logistical frameworks it apes—the labor of gig workers and warehouse workers alike is purposely kept from view, and the consequences of the weekly pallets of bottled water are less important than the visual thrill of the fridge restock. The peasant kitchen is inclined toward nativism and xenophobia; Berger describes the peasant’s aversion to “foreign” provisions, which are not part of the intimate local foodway and are thus unknowable and untrustworthy. This plays out today as a fixation on tradition (which can be a dog whistle for whiteness and patriarchal family structures) and a suspicion of technological intervention, even if it means forgoing the vital public health benefits of pasteurization or vaccination.

Ultimately, the pageantry of these kitchen archetypes is disconnected from the real lives of the people playing them out. The home kitchen is not a distribution center, and most container influencers lack the resources to absorb endless price increases without the whole edifice falling apart. The supposedly unalienated family hearth of the peasant is long gone, and the emphasis on “family” of today’s trad influencer tends to be deployed to enforce conservative values or to discipline the labor force they rely on by claiming there is no need to delineate between owners and workers (as Robertson did when the Tartine bakery staff attempted to unionize). In the crunchy kitchen, we’re all family. Except we’re not.

At a time when stricter government control on food seems increasingly unlikely, and global supply chains grow more fragile due to climate change and economic turmoil, it makes sense to seek comfort and certainty where we can. For some of us, that self-soothing means playing out a version of rustic life or managerial life in our own kitchen. For others, watching professional tradwives or fridge restockers on a screen in 15-, 30-, or 60-second clips provides the reassurance and repetition missing from our uncertain culinary lives. It may be thin consolation, but during the brief moments we’re there in the mythic kitchen, we get to be part of the illusion too.