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Saturday, April 11, 2026

Good morning,

There is a very particular way we cook now: half watching, half scrolling, saving recipes we never quite make. The internet is full of food that looks brilliant and rarely survives contact with a real kitchen. John Gregory-Smith, who has built much of his career on that same ecosystem, is unusually frank about it. The problem is not inspiration, but translation. A dish engineered to perform on TikTok is not always designed to be cooked. His answer is pleasingly unflashy: traybakes, one-pots, the sort of midweek meals that are written properly, tested properly and actually taste good. Not viral, necessarily, but repeatable. Which, if you think about it, is the whole point.

That gap between what we’re told to eat and what actually holds up under scrutiny runs through the fish question, too. For years, it has been positioned as the easy moral swap – lighter, healthier, more sustainable than meat. The reality is harder to pin down. Beneath the health benefits sits a system under strain: overfishing, destructive trawling, patchy regulation and welfare standards that would be unthinkable on land. None of this cancels out the nutritional case for fish, but it does make it much harder to treat it as a simple, virtuous choice.

Back on dry land, Greggs is doing what Greggs does best: quietly expanding its empire, one sausage roll at a time. The arrival of a chicken version, alongside the pork original and the vegan iteration, feels both inevitable and oddly revealing. It speaks to a high street that prizes consistency and price above all else, and to a national palate that does not always demand to be challenged. There is something comforting in that – and something a little flattening, too.

Food, of course, is never just about what’s on the plate. It is also the running commentary around it, and few people hear more of that than children. Talk of “good” and “bad” foods, treats, guilt, diets, rewards – it all adds up. The result is what experts call “food noise”: a low-level hum of anxiety and messaging that shapes how children eat before they even realise it. The advice here is not about perfection, but about tone. Less labelling, more listening. Less pressure, more routine. A reminder that habits are built in the background, often without us noticing.

Then, a change of gear. Barbecue season tends to arrive with modest expectations – a few sausages, maybe a burger if you’re feeling ambitious – but it does not have to be that way. Jim Moore’s approach is more expansive: prawns scented with coconut and lime, crisp-edged potatoes, slow-cooked pork that rewards patience. Cooking over fire, he argues, is less about showing off and more about leaning in – getting comfortable with heat, timing and a bit of unpredictability.

If that still feels like too much effort, there is always the shortcut of flavour. The idea of “flavour tourism” is simple enough: take familiar ingredients and push them further. Kale and cavolo nero become carriers for Korean heat, Japanese sweet spice, Mexican smoke. It is the sort of cooking that makes staying in feel less like a compromise and more like a choice – a way of travelling, loosely speaking, without leaving the hob.

And then there are the dishes that have already done the travelling for you. The Barbary turns 10 this year, and remains one of those rare London restaurants that feels as alive now as it did at the start – all smoke, noise and counter-seat theatre. The recipes it has released to mark the anniversary carry that same energy: big flavours, little fuss, food designed to be shared rather than fussed over. The kind you cook not for the spectacle, but because you know it will be good.

Written by Hannah Twiggs

Is social media ruining the way we cook?

TikTok and Instagram have changed how we cook – and not always for the better, says John Gregory-Smith. He talks to Hannah Twiggs about what actually works in real kitchens, from traybakes to simple midweek meals

There is a very particular kind of cooking video that now dominates the internet. You’ll know it when you see it: a camera hovering overhead, hands moving fast, ingredients piled high, cheese stretching into oblivion.

It might promise dinner in minutes. It might look irresistible. You save it, perhaps send it to a friend. And then, when you come to cook it, something quietly falls apart – often just as you’re frantically pausing and rewinding because there aren’t actually written instructions to follow. “Comment ‘LUSH!’ for the recipe!” Instead, you swipe up.

That disconnect between what we watch and what actually works is what increasingly troubles John Gregory-Smith, a best-selling cookbook author, BBC Morning Live regular and, by his own admission, “90 per cent” a content creator. “They look really cool, especially on camera,” he says of viral recipes. “But they often don’t really work and don’t taste very nice.”

Gregory-Smith is not speaking as a cynic on the sidelines. Social media has built his career; he has more than a million followers, considers himself “a dinosaur in this industry” and develops recipes daily. But from inside the system, he has watched the shift in what gets rewarded – and what gets lost.

“What I’ve noticed in the last couple of years is [Instagram] pushing the same stuff over and over and over,” he says. “If that one went viral, just copy it again and again and again.” The result is a feed dominated not by good cooking, but by repeatable spectacle – recipes engineered to perform rather than to be cooked...

Read the full article here

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