Courtesy Carolyn Gratzer Cope
By Elizabeth Wulfhorst
Sourdough bread. Ube cupcakes. Bubble tea. Pizza, pizza, pizza. If you spend any time perusing social media, you know food is a popular subject for photos and videos, from the wacky to the wonderful to the sublime.
Next time you are in a restaurant, clock how many people reach for their phone when the meal is delivered to the table, just to share it with a wider online audience.
According to Omnicore, a health care digital advertising and marketing agency, pizza and sushi are the most Instagrammed foods globally and about 1.3 billion photos are shared on Instagram every day. Searching the hashtag #food brings up 527 million posts; #foodie has 256 million. Whether it is a highly stylized photo from a food influencer or a dim picture of your neighbor’s latest takeout order, food equals likes on social media.
Just ask Carolyn Gratzer Cope, aka Umami Girl, a Fair Haven-based food blogger. Her recent Instagram Reel of Esquites (Mexican street corn) went viral, garnering 14 million views, nearly 170,000 likes, over 18,000 comments and 41,000 shares. A carrot cake Reel has likes and comments in the tens of thousands as well.
Before Instagram and TikTok, and even before food bloggers, there was a proliferation of food-related shows on television, including a whole channel devoted to the production, marketing, making and eating of every type of food imaginable. We’ve been obsessed with watching food for decades.
Many credit PBS station WGBH in Boston with launching America’s food TV obsession in the early 1960s. Producers there took a leap of faith in Julia Child to air her cooking demonstration show “The French Chef.” (If you haven’t watched the MAX series “Julia,” which fictionalizes Child’s rise in the industry she almost single-handedly created, go watch it now.)
Cope has been a food blogger and recipe creator for 16 years. “It’s hard to remember exactly what the origin story was,” she joked recently, but noted she has always loved food.
“I have the classic story of having grown up in an Italian American family where food was kind of one of the major love languages,” Cope said.
“It always felt very natural to me, in our family, at our dinner table we would kind of talk about the food while eating the food,” she said. She didn’t realize until she ate dinner at friends’ houses that it wasn’t “normal.”
When Cope started the Umami Girl blog in 2008, she had retired from a short career as a corporate lawyer. The blog became a personal project that combined her love for food and writing.
While living in Hoboken, she volunteered as a coordinator for a community-supported farm which allowed her to engage with the community about food, providing valuable content for the blog. “I understood early on what people actually needed from my posts because I was connecting with them in person,” Cope said.
Her foray into social media began with Facebook, then Twitter. She wrote a few columns for Serious Eats. But as the platforms evolved, Instagram became her primary platform. Cope faults Meta (Facebook and Instagram’s parent company) for restrictive measures that hinder content creators, especially on Facebook.
“If a food blogger posts a recipe and a link to their blog on their Facebook page, Facebook makes it almost impossible for people to actually even click on the link,” Cope explained, as AI creates multiple suggestions to keep the user on the platform. This practice drives Cope’s current preference for Instagram, where she can engage with followers more effectively.
The @umamigirl account on Instagram currently has nearly 31,000 followers.
When asked why she thinks snapping pictures of food has become so ubiquitous, Cope said she might not be the best person to answer the question as she is a self-labeled “alpha food sharer.”
But Cope noted that food and eating are inherently social activities, which might explain the widespread fascination with documenting meals. “Food and eating are kind of all about sharing in some ways,” Cope said, emphasizing the communal aspect of eating and the universal human connection it fosters. “There’s something inherently social about eating and about foods.”
She also noted that social media can be a challenging space for anyone; posting pictures of food is a relatively low-stakes venture. To continue the food metaphor, Cope called posts of meals and cocktails “low-hanging fruit,” less likely to bring out the trolls than posts of selfies or other subjects can and often do.
To combat negative or nasty comments, she uses filters to hide certain words and blocks problematic users, which helps maintain a positive atmosphere on her account and her website. “This is my space, and it’s a privilege for you to be here. And if I don’t like the way you’re acting, I will block you,” she said.
Cope recently finished a long-term project to retest, rephotograph and modernize the 750 recipes on her website, which she is now ready to promote. Looking ahead, she expressed interest in writing a book but noted that a robust social media presence is crucial for traditional publishing, so she will continue to focus on Instagram for its potential to drive traffic and build a recognizable brand.
The recipe for Esquites (and all of Cope’s other delicious meals and drinks) can be found on umamigirl.com.
The article originally appeared in the June 27 – July 3, 2024 print edition of The Two River Times.
