The perils of TikTok cooking

An iron is not your traditional cooking appliance. But then again nothing about TikTok cookery is traditional.

TikTok users have grilled chicken with an iron, boiled meatballs in a percolator, and cooked steak in a toaster. And not only do they do these things, but they earn internet fame and sometimes create new livelihoods for themselves as ‘influencers’ for doing so.

Dance and comedic sketches used to be the mainstay of TikTok’s content but they now compete alongside cookery videos. Lockdown, which has turned all of us into home cooks, has caused a boom in cookery tutorials on social media: from amateurs looking for dinner ideas to professional chefs suddenly without restaurants to run. The impact has been felt on all social media platforms, and indeed spawned new ones: Feasty, a platform designed especially for chefs and their followers, launched in the UK in March. But TikTok’s entrance into the culinary world has been the most explosive.