Mmmm, brown food

Nigella Lawson loves to kick up a fuss with her curvy behind. Like that time she argued in favor of exotic fruit grown in greenhouses in the dead of winter, completely against all the local seasonal preachers. This year, in the British newspaper The Guardian, she came out in favor of so-called brown food. Will #brownfood become a Thing?

In the Instagram era, you might quickly start to think that all the food the average Instagrammer eats is brightly colored, styled by a professional and captured by a top photographer.

Instagrammable

Chefs, too, are now all too aware that their food needs to look Instagrammable. In fact, they let highly paid coaches drill that message into them.

Intimidating, according to Nigella Lawson. It could give you cooking anxiety. Well, not her. But the average home cook—her regular audience, whom she also addresses in her latest cookbook At My Table: A Celebration of Home Cooking.

Instagram: it could give you cooking anxiety, according to Nigella.

According to Nigella, certain dishes or ingredients owe their status solely to their Instagrammability. And the avocado is probably the most striking example. But also all the bowl food that currently fills our timelines. Nigella: ‘Would smoothie bowls ever have been a Thing without Instagram? Are they even a Thing outside that app? I’ve never met anyone who actually ate one.’

Stews & co.

Nigella finds that explosion of color not only intimidating; she is also afraid it puts home cooks off making supposedly un-Instagrammable brown food. Stews & co. Food that doesn’t look like much, but is oh so delicious. And comforting. Nigella dares to say that brown food simply tastes the very best. And she is not alone in that. Think of David ‘Momofuku’ Chang with his #uglydelicious.

It is striking, then, that Nigella herself shows little brown food in her latest cookbook. There are some stews, but the stylist and photographer have gone the extra mile with those to add depth and color, two prerequisites for a ‘tasty’ photo. And her Instagram account also shows little #brownfood.

#brownfood

Still, others have already used the hashtag #brownfood more than 4,500 times on Instagram. And Nigella received plenty of support both in the press and on the much-criticized app.

Just as chefs are seeking costly advice on Instagrammable dishes, a counter-movement is getting underway—one that, together with Nigella, recognizes that brown food is timeless and unbeatable.