Your cooking looks disgusting. Please, never stop posting it on Instagram
To the untrained eye, the plate was a mess of slop. On closer inspection, it must've been food of some description. Potatoes, maybe? Peas too. There was definitely a meat element, but it had been cooked for so long that it didn't matter what it was, or at least what it had once been. A thin sauce, presumably gravy, pooled in the middle of the plate. Remarkably, everything on the dish appeared a different shade of grey. A photo was taken, slightly out of focus, and posted online, accompanied by a simple caption: Cheeky Sunday roast.
The person responsible for this situation was someone I barely knew, a friend of a friend of a friend, added to my Instagram account after a chance meeting years ago. We maintain almost no online relationship, but his cooking exploits are the highlight of my week.
Every Sunday, without fail, he tackles something refreshingly regular – spaghetti bolognese, homemade tacos, a particularly raw-looking baked salmon – and he painstakingly documents the process. The results are unspectacular and occasionally alarming, but that's beside the point. In a world ruined by social media pressure, where everyone must always put their best foot forward, here is an average man unafraid to celebrate an average coq au vin.
The glorification of everyday meals has long been stitched into the Australian national identity. We are the country of laid-back larrikins, a melting pot of cultures who refuse to take themselves (or their food) too seriously.
That's why we laughed along in shared acknowledgment when Dale Kerrigan's mind was blown by his wife's rissoles in The Castle ('Yeah, but it's what you do with them!') and it's why we decided that the only fitting symbol for our democracy was a Coles sausage, covered in tomato sauce, served on white bread.
Sure, we have a thriving food scene, complete with talented chefs serving world-class cuisine, but that represents the best of us, not the rest of us.
At first, the rise of social media supercharged our ability to embrace our ordinariness. Twitter feeds like Rate My Plate, created in 2013, and the much-loved Instagram page Cook Suck (created by the late, great Darrell Beveridge in 2011) encouraged users to submit their horrific-looking home cooking for our collective enjoyment. The aim wasn't to shame (most of the time) but rather to celebrate how mediocre we can all be and how bad something might look, even if it tastes good.
Then the inevitable happened: social media became less about slices of real life and more about curation and competition. Amateur home cooks became obsessed with viral recipes, abandoning their sloppy homemade pizzas (featuring packet cheese!) in favour of endless recreations of Alison Roman's caramelised shallot pasta or insane TikTok trends.
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