These cooking videos are feasts for the eyes. Just don’t eat the food

Samantha Chery

Egg shortages have left people scrambling for alternatives or eating the cost of expensive cartons. Avocados and tomatoes could get pricier as tariffs on Mexico and Canada fluctuate.

But rising food costs are no problem for content creators who craft recipe videos without actual food. Some TikTokers have built followings by cracking brown Lego eggs, prying open balloon avocados and stacking burgers with crocheted sliced tomatoes.

In one video, Kiyana Phillips, 21, shows off her homemade Chipotle bag, complete with a hand-drawn version of the fast-casual restaurant’s logo. Using a two-dimensional fork and some video-editing magic, she pretends to dig into a burrito bowl, pouring queso over the entrée and dipping chips into a container of guacamole - all of which are made out of paper. “Chipotle Mukbang: Broke Edition,” she titled the video, which has racked up 2.5 million views.

Food historians and trend experts say that while the fake-food phenomenon - using construction paper, Legos, crocheted yarn, wood or balloon scraps - has found a fan base on social media in the past year, people have been making imitation food for centuries. Still, the most recent videos also serve a distinct purpose in today’s society, providing entertainment and comfort in distressing times.

Phillips, an aspiring art teacher in Greenville, North Carolina, said she drew inspiration for her PaperEats TikTok page last year from ASMR and mukbang videos.

In one of her most popular TikToks, of a seafood boil, she starts the video by giving a new meaning to imitation crab: Phillips snaps open a paper king crab leg, revealing a dangling piece of its “meat.” She spends the rest of the video “cooking” colored paper in a hand-drawn pot and skillet, including small, cut-up squares of white, red, yellow and green paper to represent her seasonings and sticks of butter (yellow rectangular tubes) that morph into pools of curvy pieces of paper when “melted.”

She has heard from viewers that her recipes, which she gets from her favorite restaurants, fan suggestions, her mom and TikTok, instill a sense of childlike wonder and nostalgia for her nearly 1 million followers. Some kids have tried their hand at making paper food after watching her content.

“I like that it unlocks some people’s childhood. They get a sense of joy,” she said. “I also want people to understand you can make something out of nothing. … Just use your imagination and be creative, and whatever you want to make, put it to the test.”

The videos have also been a way to joke about how expensive real food has gotten. “Only seafood boil I can afford,” one commenter wrote with a sobbing emoji under her video, which racked up 55.7 million views.

Kate Festeryga, founder of the agricultural technology start-up Edie Farming and an avid food trend analyst, says that, on top of the satisfaction the artsy tutorials bring, society might also be embracing fake food because of its affordability, reinforcing how pricier food and the skill to prepare it well can sometimes be deemed a luxury.

In recent years, Festeryga has noticed how celebrities and influencers have flexed large amounts of food on social media as luxury items: vast tablescapes of fresh food, carrot sticks placed at the bottom of flower vases and Hailey Bieber dropping groceries in an ad campaign. Fake-food creators, on the other hand, are satiating the appetites of cooking video fanatics without the steep grocery costs and food waste.

Andrew Lukomski, a 32-year-old artist based in Warsaw, says he focuses on the visual appeal and the ease of replicating the look of ingredients when choosing his next Lego dish for his popular Hypno Motion animation videos on TikTok. As Lukomski’s page name suggests, the sensory wonderland of his stop-motion videos is mesmerizing.

In a Lego lemonade video, he juices a fake lemon, and its beads of juice accumulate at the base of a squeezer as he rotates the citrus fruit. He then pours the freshly squeezed Lego lemon juice into a glass of clear blue Lego water, gradually turning the liquid a bright yellow.

In another clip of fried chicken and fries, he drops coated Lego drumsticks into a sizzling, bubbling vat of Lego oil. As he fishes out the chicken with a spider skimmer, they look perfectly crispy - a rich brown color.

What’s surprised Lukomski is how deeply invested his audience is in the details.

“Many viewers focus more on the food itself than on the artistic side of the animation. They analyze the ingredients, the cooking steps and even the colors of the dish,” he said. “What seems like a completely normal cooking process to me might be unusual or even surprising to someone else. Viewers often point out details I wouldn’t have thought twice about - whether a dish matches their own culinary traditions or if the preparation aligns with what they’re familiar with.”

After he posted a pancake recipe video in April 2023, commenters were quick to point out that he forgot to top the hotcakes with syrup. A commenter on his burger tutorial from August was shocked that he didn’t toast his Lego burger buns, while others inquired about his burger toppings.

Martin Hablesreiter, an expert who studies the cultural factors affecting how our food is made and shaped, says the popularity of these videos isn’t shocking when considering centuries of food facsimiles throughout history.

“Since the beginning of humanity, we’ve played with food. … Actually, we need to do this. This is one of the foundations of human civilization, that we transform food in a way to make it better, to make it transportable, to conserve it,” he said.

There are deeper cultural messages behind why our food is designed the way it is, Hablesreiter said. For example, bread slices come in a square shape to make them easier to transport. When Oreos started being made without pork fat, the cookies could be enjoyed by Muslims and Jews - a symbol of America’s inclusivity.

Hablesreiter, who’s half of the Austrian performance art duo Honey and Bunny, added that people play with food because of their deep admiration for it. Example: the genre of making cakes so hyperrealistic in their imitation of everyday objects that a Netflix show has judges try to tell the real from the cake.

Julia Skinner, a food writer, historian and founder of the Culinary Curiosity School, says the fake-food videos serve as an antidote, a corner of coziness on the internet amid a world of information overload.

“We’re in a moment where finding joy and pleasure in your everyday life feels like a really radical act. There’s just so much stuff hitting so many fans all the time that being like, ‘No, I’m going to sit and watch this Lego guacamole video, and I’m going to have a great time about it.’ I mean, we take our joy where we can get it,” Skinner said. “Anything that’s bringing us joy, that’s a really powerful thing right now.”