Thursday Trifle: Model Cooking Vids
The curveless waif's pursuit of well-roundedness, reporting live from jury duty!!!
Okay, close your eyes and imagine I’m a famous blogger from the near-past and I have a weekly series where I talk about the societal “trifle” that I see everyday. Now imagine the near-past was just hours ago, as I was writing these very words. Open your eyes. Guess what? Imagination has become reality… I am a famous blogger and also you owe me $30,000 dollars! You forgot about that during the trance. LOL
Here is Thursday Trifle…strictly bullshit and pop culture and sweet bites of bitching, or just a little something that has caught my eye. Come on this journey with me… indulge in some trifle…
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ALERT THE PRESSES!!!! There are now TWO models (influencer-models, I guess) who are making identical “cook with me” recipe videos on Instagram!!!!
I had already been familiar with the very hot and kind of cool gabriette’s videos. Gabbriette Bechtel is a trendy it-girl (whatever that means in the age of micro-trends) who appeared in Netflix/Charlie XCX’s alt-girl revamp of The Monkees. She’s recently rebranded as a foodie and amateur chef of healthy and indulgent food. Like, Broiled Stone Fruit Radicchio Cups type shit. She’s very beautiful, so sometimes I watch her videos. Also, they make me feel like I could make whatever she’s making, and then the thirteen year old in my brain is like, “And then I will look like her”, and then I sit in my bed. Also, the food genuinely looks good!
She’s super hot, and her trip to Mexico recently made me really jealous. That’s the very interesting background of this post.
Now introducing Exhibit B: Sydney Carlson, younger sister of Devon Lee Carlson and co-heir to the Wildflower case fortune (lord forgive me). When I clicked on her page recently, I saw this:
Watch the videos. Aren’t they exactly the same? I really wouldn’t be making this if the video series weren’t so similar. The angle, the tone, the skinny brows. Like, there’s something there, surely…
Some of my girlfriends and I were discussing this trend as an uptick in functional beauty, an extension of the "Sexy Activist" trope... these women have something to say! And cook! And teach! I was thinking about this is as some sort of indicator of the pressure that hot, rich, influencers feel to be more than just hot and sexy online. In post-MeToo, post-2020, post-woke, post-whatever, sexiness is not enough. You have to be talented and nurturing, domestic and entrepreneurial. Also, as social media extends further and further into the plane of the soul, it cannot just show hot pics of you having fun with rich friends, it’s got to capture you, holistically.
Because the social media profile is the branding of one’s identity (as opposed to the branding of a single idea or piece of art/product), it feels aspirational to be able to present a more well-rounded version of oneself to the world/your followers. I post, therefore I am. If you don’t show yourself volunteering/hiking/cooking, did you really do it?
I can understand that. It feels good to tell people I’m into movies and ceramics, not only because it makes people know me better, but also because it’s cool. It’s cool to have hobbies and like things and exist in the world outside a phone. Like, "see, I have a life and have picked up skills outside of the internet. And don’t call me Shirley!"1
So, what is the deal with hobbies?
I had jury duty on Monday (I’m dead serious…). It was very boring. I tried to sleep, as many others were, but got nervous my mouth would fall open and everyone would laugh and take pictures. Then, one of the sleeping people started snoring very loudly and everyone around started laughing, including me.
After I got called to the impaneling room, I had to fill in my extracurricular activities on this special jury questionnaire. I was sitting in a windowless room with nineteen other potential Brooklyn-based jurors and I was chewing on my pen and wondering what the deal was with hobbies.
What qualifies as a hobby? Maybe martial arts? Volunteering? Pick-up basketball? I had written “writing” and “reading” so far, but that felt like writing down “sleeping” or “talking to people”. Like I was an alien trying to imagine what humans do for fun. So then I wrote down “pottery” which gets double points because it’s expensive. I wanted another so I wrote down “film”, but that didn’t feel complete so I added “watching” after it. Reading, Writing, Pottery, Film Watching.
I looked at my list and thought, “oh, that’s me.” Not as in, “oh yeahhhh baby that’s all me!” but more like, “that’s me? This is who I am?”.
The wikipedia page for hobbies is really cool because it just lists every hobby, and you can look at them and picture each action, and you can even picture yourself doing them.
I already found a lot more hobbies I could have listed on my questionnaire. I blog, I entertain, I give advice, I plan (is that really a hobby?), I bake, I chat, I share proverbs, I shit-post. But there were lots more that I hadn’t thought of, and a few I had never even seen before!
I liked picturing myself baton twirling, bell ringing, butchering, candy making, lock picking, doing macramé, and whittling. Read that list back and picture yourself doing those things: it’s a wonderful thought exercise. Interestingly, cuckolding was also listed as a hobby. It’s up to you if you want to picture yourself engaging in that particular one.
Weirdly, celebrities are people, too, so they have passions outside their primary, public job, and celebrities venturing out of their formal purview is as old as the concept of celebrity itself. Elizabeth I "...possessed nine languages so thoroughly that each appeared to be her native tongue; five of these were the languages of peoples governed by her... Besides this, she spoke perfectly Latin, French, and Italian extremely well."2 One of the reasons we know about the Virgin Queen’s passion for languages is because she published many books of translations, including early translations of Cicero and Plutarch. In a way, that’s kind of like “posting”….?
And so on… Napoleon loved chess, Ben Franklin loved electrocuting himself, Marie Antoinette loved living it up, Casanova loved having sex with many different women. Is this model-cooking thing any different? One difference is the social media of it all. Would Ben Franklin have had an invention youtube? Marie Antoinette, a fashion haul tiktok? Casanova, an Onlyfans? (I’m gonna kill myself).
We’ll never know, which is very sad. What we do know, is that Gabriette and Sydney Carlson are posting identical shit, today, and the fact that they are reflects SOMETHING about SOMETHING (I think).
Celebrities have been doing public hobbies as a form of advertising also, since forever.
But the model-cooking videos are seemingly not-monetized. Although it must be said that growing one’s brand through striving for personality worship is definitely lucrative.
There’s also the whole food aspect of it, because they are very thin influencers whose work revolves around their physical presentation. Sydney has detailed struggling with body dysmorphia in the past, and I imagine jumping into a whole “watch me make waffles with whipped cream”, is complicated. A more analogous comparison from antiquity is with Jane Fonda’s jazzercise videos. Fonda has been open about her long battle with bulimia throughout her early 20’s. Healthy movement can be a great path forward for those with disordered eating, but producing a whole line of exercise instructional tapes is also a great way to continue centering one’s body in your psyche, and encourage others to do the same. Kinda same with cooking videos? The enjoyment of food, and the knowledge of how to prepare it, is a great pleasure in life, but sometimes the focus on TOTALLY HAVING HEALTHY RELATIONSHIPS WITH FOOD feels like mocking. Roll’em! :
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There’s also this whole fourth wave feminist thing going on. Gone are the days of models telling the press (both dangerously and honestly) their only meal that day was a cigarette because nothing tastes as good as skinny feels. Now, nothing tastes as good as homemade fried chicken feels, as you take a big greasy bite and say “MMM!” to the camera.
Am I saying that only people of a certain size can talk about enjoying food? Show themselves eating? Definitely not. I don’t know what I want. But something’s weird, and Gabriette and Sydney’s videos are more nuanced than those harrowing “What I Eat in a Day”3 videos that assault all corners of a woman’s algorithm (aka, this woman, me). It's the cooking, the demonstrating, the mastery and teaching of these videos which is a little more interesting to me.
When celebrities venture out of their lanes, one is watching a very intentional choice with the backing of multiple entities. All these people have some sort of manager or agency or team behind them, and if not that, they at least have data analytics. Even if the public hobby is (hopefully) some reflection of an actual passion of said celebrity’s, or the venture started organically, there has got to be an incentive to continue to present it to the world. Because that’s what social media is about, curation, an audience, and feedback. The publicity which beckons it into the lay person’s feed is what is worth noting. There are two points of valid focus here that make this not just about me being a hater: the money behind public celebrity hobbies (which allows a budget for production and publicity), and the money which will come from public celebrity hobbies (money from cookbooks, television shows, sponsorships, etc).
Emily Ratajkowski comes to mind. Her feminist rebrand has been a total boner-killer (of the mind). It’s awesome and Francesca-approved that models can now be more than just faces and bodies, and they have thoughts and expressible politics, and can join or host debates, and ask tough questions, but [REDACTED]. I really loved this BBC Woman’s Hour interview from with her from 2021, while Emily was going on an international tour to discuss her book, My Body. Listen to 1:30-21:30.
This isn’t a woman thing (per se….) and I’m not a misogynist (per se…). In fact, one of my favorite celebrity hobbyists is Brooklyn Beckham. He puts a name to “Jack of all trades”, and a face to “master of none”. His (extremely public) hopping from hobby to hobby, propelled by the money/connections of his parents and in-laws, and his pure, unequivocal shamelessness in promoting it (on TV shows, high-production youtube videos, campaigns)4, is honestly a lesson in chasing one’s dreams. And boy, does Brooklyn have dreams! Fashion, cooking, cocktails, photography, soccer, professional wife-guy. Just please, watch this video.
Brooklyn Beckham’s Book is Laughably BAD
Brooklyn Beckham Cooks Lunch for Nicola Peltz
Brooklyn Beckham’s cooking show has a problem: He doesn’t know how
Again, trying different hobbies and learning about yourself and the world is totally awesome. The publicity, though, is the part of it worth thinking about.
This whole spiel is glossing over the fact that these women may just love cooking and want to share their passion with the world. (But in that case, how about just cook? Why post? And you may reply, “Why do you have to post your writing? Why don’t you just write?” I have no response to that.)
“You’re just jealous!”
Maybe, yeah. But I don’t know. It’s amazing for anyone, anywhere, to engage in anything that brings joy and peace to their minds, or challenges them or speaks to them. Hobbies for all! But once someone has a platform of like… hundreds of thousands of followers, if not millions, and there’s money involved, I think we should be like… what does this mean about what’s respectable right now? Lucrative? Empowering? What’s considered cool?
“No one cares! Get a life!”
Yeah, well, I have a life. It’s rich and vibrant and multi-faceted and holistic. After all, it’s full of ceramics and reading and writing, chatting and entertaining and planning…
“Don’t you have better things to focus on?”
No, I literally do not. It’s a medical issue. Plus, this is Thursday Trifle, sweetie. And you just had a big ol’ bowl!
Tata x
Logo alert…
Thank you for reading,
Francesca
BTW: I’m team Gabriette, if there’s a Selena/Hailey style conflict brewing! Just getting ahead of that here. Selena and Hailey actually also have a cooking video proxy battle as part of their ongoing war. Check it out: Selena/Hailey.
https://blogs.bl.uk/european/2021/11/elizabeth-i-and-languages.html
For the unaware, these videos consist of either ice cream, pizza, cupcakes, croissants, etc (GET REAL!) or like, a literal guide to how to maintain an eating disorder (bone broth for breakfast and lunch!).
By the way, what the fuck do the Beckham-Peltz’ have on Anna Wintour? Was she on the Lol*ta Express and the only witness was Nelson (of House of Horrors fame)? Why is Vogue under contract to produce monthly videos of Brooklyn and his billionaire wife, Nicola, having boring conversations with each other over peanut butter and jelly sandwiches?
I found your text by searching Gabriette and Sydney Carlson cooking videos - who started first? I knew Gabriette’s videos and couldn’t fully understand the interest of publishing them, it somehow didn’t make sense, but ok, and then I accidentally saw Sydney’s videos (whom I haven’t heard of before), and I was really surprised, for a moment I thought that she was trolling Gabriette. Anyway, weird stuff, will study it further 🤓.