don't feed the algorithm

food has become one of the most visible commodities. every meal is a potential post, every recipe a potential reel. platforms demand constant documentation, aestheticisation, and consumption — not just of food, but of the care and labour embedded in it. the act of cooking, of nourishing others, has been folded into a cycle of capitalist surveillance where visibility is currency, and care is performance.

as a culinary artist whose work centres intentional nourishment and hospitality as radical care, i find this digital imperative deeply fraught. it asks us to constantly translate intimacy into content, presence into proof. to narrate every gesture, annotate every flavour, package every moment in ways optimised for engagement, likes, and shares. it is an invitation, or rather a demand, to commodify care.

there is a growing and urgent need to resist this demand. to reclaim spaces of food and care that are offline, unrecorded, uncurated. to refuse the constant meaning-making machine that digital culture has become, where nothing is just felt or experienced; everything must be interpreted, framed, and monetised.

at the heart of this dynamic is a system of capitalist surveillance — a mode of power that monitors, measures, and monetises human interaction. food content online rarely exists outside these logics. it must be perfectly styled, timed, and captioned. it must tell a story that is palatable not just in flavour, but in narrative. care is no longer just care; it is a spectacle. 

this performance is exhausting, particularly for those whose identities and labour are already politicised. the pressure to perform care online is also a pressure to perform safety, belonging, and excellence in ways that erase complexity and exhaustion.

yet, the very act of caregiving — cooking a meal, sharing food, holding space — can be deeply un-shareable. it thrives in the unmediated moment. the smell of spices in a kitchen, the warmth of a hand passing a plate, the quiet understanding in a shared glance — these are forms of knowledge and connection that cannot be digitised without loss.

digital culture demands that every action has meaning — that every gesture is documented, analysed, and made legible. but what if care and nourishment exist in their refusal to be fully known or explained? what if some acts of care are valuable precisely because they are opaque, fluid, and provisional?

in my own practice, i have learned the power of invisibility. some meals are not for sharing beyond the table. some recipes are oral, whispered, or improvised without measurement or documentation. this refusal to produce content is a political act — a boundary-setting against the endless demand for meaning-making and commodification.

caring without explanation resists the logics of extraction that underpin much of contemporary digital life. it centres the embodied, the sensory, and the relational over the representational. it insists that nourishment is a process lived in time and space, not a product to be captured and consumed.

not everything is meant to be public, or scalable, or viral. cooking offline is a way to hold care close — in kitchens, in homes, in gatherings — where the relational aspects of food can be honoured without mediation.

to cook offline is to claim a form of political refusal. it is to reject the extraction of care and intimacy for digital capital. it is to recognise that some acts of resistance are quiet, embodied, and relational rather than loud or performative.

in a world where meaning is often imposed from above through algorithms, platforms, and visibility economies, food made and shared offline allows for multiplicity of form and language. it opens possibilities for care that are not constrained by the need to be seen or validated.

this refusal also aligns with broader abolitionist and decolonial practices that seek to dismantle systems of control and surveillance. it reclaims the body, the table, and the kitchen as sites of autonomy and sovereignty.

cooking offline is not nostalgia for a pre-digital era, but a deliberate, urgent cultural defense. it is a refusal to feed the algorithm with our labour, our love, and our nourishment. it is an insistence that care can exist beyond performance and commodification. and it is an invitation to reclaim intimacy, secrecy, and relationality as radical forms of resistance.

in a world that demands constant visibility, sometimes the most revolutionary act is to exist quietly, away from the gaze, and let the meal, and the moment, be enough.