I see the avatars of people I like and respect, people I think of as very smart, among the “likes” on posts where someone is making a bigger check than most people will ever see in their lives promoting commodity grain cereal. I see their avatars in the “likes” on a skinny woman’s bare torso, her head nowhere to be found in the image. I see their avatars in the “likes” on all sorts of posts that suggest an acceptance of a status quo regarding what is important in life: securing the bag, being thin, acquiring luxury items. I can blame corporately steered algorithms, or I can blame people’s own attention. Own desires. Own inability to define what is good and beautiful based on anything beyond money and status. It’s both.

You’ll find my avatar in the likes of things I probably would prefer not be publicly associated with—my affinities for high-end soaps, a fashion influencer based in Paris who gets around by bicycle and makes me think I fucked up by not getting the Simone Rocha Crocs, and Dries Van Noten, though, probably shock no one. I love beauty; I care about how I smell and what my “look” conveys to other people about me, though of course the context of a “look” depends on who’s perceiving it. Beauty is why I love food, why I take pictures of it, why I stage my tomatoes. I love people who create beauty. I appreciate people most who can see beauty even when it hasn’t been packaged and sold to them. Yet it’s difficult to discern a difference, and I’m being arrogant in thinking I can do so.

Corporate algorithmic power (the one where Instagram tells me good job! because it decided to show my selfie to more of my followers than it ever shows anything to do with my work, any still-life that I’ve let emerge from active-life) is some amalgamation of soft power and mind control. Totally Recommend wrote about how they stopped taking photos of people to instead curate in the way the app suggested, coming to regret how they’ve chosen to document their life for the sake of perception. “People buy certain goods, make pilgrimages to Marfa’s desert Prada store, and arrange their lives in certain ways to feel close to something,” writes Kieran McLean. The “something” is ephemeral—it’s the being perceived as feeling close to something, not the actual being, that’s the key.

Easier said than done to divorce ourselves from the imminence of corporate soft power, of course, its demand that we replicate rather than create: Rather than build a world in which to flex its soft power and cultural influence, social media companies build an algorithm that has the creators doing it for them. Chasing their own tail and someone else’s taste. We’re served something uncannily like what we do like but often not quite all the way there. In this tension, there’s buying power.

I’m critical of my own instincts toward beauty because of this. I find stainless steel coupes repugnant, but I can’t figure out a better reason for why than their ubiquity, the way they seemed to multiply across images and continents. But would I like them had I not known? Would I like them if I’d just been served some ice cream in one for dessert, never having encountered a fashionably grainy iPhone shot zoomed in on them filled with cream or affogato? I think under those circumstances, I would find them fun—delightful. But I never got to experience those circumstances. The coupes have no meaning outside my Explore page.

The whimsy of Gohar World has grown on me over time, though I find food “installations” wasteful. What are you doing with that chair made of bread, with that sculpture of butter, with the Gildas stuck into a baguette? I loved when I interviewed Allie Gelles of Cakes4Sport for T, who talked about making her sculptural cakes because they would be eaten: There was an impermanence to them; they wouldn’t be garbage. When does food-as-art simply become food waste? Are you making this for the people in the room or for the documentation of the people in the room?

“As the Information Revolution proceeds the myths, assumptions, and folklores of business become the common language of humanity; business culture becomes human culture. Working and consuming from our houses, wired happily into what Harper’s magazine has called the ‘electronic hive,’ we will each be corporate subjects—consumers and providers of ‘content’—as surely as were the hapless industrial proletarians of the last century,” wrote Thomas Frank in the essay “Dark Age” in The Baffler. It was published in 1994. Here we are! (And as Rene Ricard wrote in “The Radiant Child” in 1981: “We are no longer collecting art we are buying individuals.” The train left the station long ago, with a steam engine.)

“Business culture becomes human culture”—this is what I was thinking about when everyone was suddenly referring to the change of seasons by financial quarters. My Q1 photo dump… It’s what I’m always thinking about when people are told to continue to “slay” by promoting terrible vegan cheeses or pans that are going to end up in the garbage. At least they’re getting their bag! It’s what I’m thinking about when people thank a brand for inviting them to dinner. Corporations are people in this land, after all.

Do we have to buy into all of this to survive? I ask myself. The answer is a clear yes. I don’t know why I pretend otherwise when I know the going rate for not doing so. What I’m asking right now is: When you’re hitting the “heart,” are you tacitly endorsing a world in which nothing matters but money?

I used to think I was making my taste by reading lots of magazines and watching lots of movies and obsessing over music videos. I was absorbing in many ways an anti–mainstream taste that was nonetheless commodified and codified for me, no less a stooge for a corporate algorithm than young people now: I loved Jancee Dunn on M2 and Janeane Garofalo and Margaret Cho—my girlhood icons. I often feel like a vessel of a distinctly ’90s false promise. My whole way of being in the world, a time capsule. Lately I’ve been leaning into this by listening to the album I thought was the coolest ever when I got it for Christmas 1997: …The Dandy Warhols Come Down

Which is to say, we’ve always been influenced in what we find beautiful or valuable or important, of course, but what’s new is the speed at which one is inundated with things to desire, to value, to find beautiful. The difference is in the time it took to wait for a new magazine to show up at the newsstand versus the next scroll on the toilet. It alters the pace of brains, as well as consumption. Even ten years ago, even five years ago, did anyone think they needed entirely new wardrobes to go on vacation? Ten years ago, five years ago, was it “normal” to participate in mass tourism that alters the character of destinations and reduces residents’ quality of life? Who created these standards? Who benefits from these standards?

There is a lack of clarity. (I always skipped the pages in magazines that said “advertisement” just like I scroll past “paid partnership” now.) It’s not teams at magazines curating; it’s individuals competing for eyes and clicks and dollars. People aren’t making a living off of the “content” they’re creating; they’re making a living off of how appealing said content is to the corporate algorithms, which reward sameness, and thus to brands with marketing budgets. There is great stuff everywhere, too, but what’s the cost? Business culture is human culture. And it makes a lot of people in the culture industry feel like they’re losing their minds.

I’ve said this before, a few different ways, and I think it bears repeating and re-interrogating. I have this newsletter, but I’m not really better off materially than I was years ago as a regular contributor to papers and magazines, even if I have more freedom and am doing better work. This is the creator economy tradeoff: predictable instability for unpredictable instability. I criticize corporate soft power and the fracturing of the media landscape because I’m in the strange position of being both its beneficiary and its victim. Because I watch so many people, day after day, seem to accept that this is it—this is just how we do things now.

I think it’s important to be endlessly aware and self-critical when scrolling takes up inevitable time in our lives—time that is well spent if we are using it well: to understand other people and culture better, to understand our tastes and desires, to just have a laugh or relate to someone. It’s hard to know what we really like in this world, what we’re really responding to when we see someone’s outfit and it looks like it jumped straight off of TikTok. It’s why food is so good for bringing us back to ourselves, to real life: we either like it or we don’t. You can’t pretend. It doesn’t matter how good it looked on social media or who got cut a check to sell it to you. On the palate, true taste. 

Tonight will be the first paid subscriber writing chat, at 7 p.m. EST. I will be answering questions about writing and idea generation, and we’ll be sharing resources and reading with each other. I’m going to kick it off by talking about what I love and learn from in Adrienne Rich’s 1984 speech “Notes Toward a Politics of Location.”

This Friday, paid subscribers receive the monthly Recommends… post with a roundup of links, podcasts, audiobooks, and TV shows and movies I’ve enjoyed in the last few weeks. It also includes a playlist and a book giveaway—this week, it’ll be signed copies of my own No Meat Required, which just came out in paperback.

A reminder that it’s just $30 per year — or $2.50 per month — to support this newsletter. If you open it every week, please consider supporting my work.

If you’re looking for cooking inspiration, remember to scroll through The Desk Cookbook. I’ll be adding methods for how I make potato salad and home fries.

I have an essay in the sixth and final issue of MOLD titled “Conditional Consumption,” written in 2022 in anticipation of my book’s publication but coming out after!

Kevin Koczwara interviewed me about No Meat Required at his newsletter.

My book No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating is now out in paperback.

Real Estate by Deborah Levy — it’s almost too on the nose for current crises in my life