Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. How many of us, when served a meal at a restaurant, whip out our phones and take a picture before we even eat? Welcome to the Phone Eats First Club. It started in Hong Kong around 2014, when people took pristine images of the food at their tables. People in dining called at the camera Eats First. Some chefs, they balked at it. Now, 10 plus years later, social media and food images have influenced the way we cook at home, especially through viral recipes. There was the pandemic sourdough craze, overnight oats, marry me chicken, the Jennifer Aniston salad, and so on and so on.

Allyson Reedy is a food writer and restaurant critic in Colorado. She's written a new cookbook compiling some of her favorite viral recipes that she has come across. The book is called, The Phone Eats First Cookbook: 50 of Social Media's Best Recipes to Feed Your Feed . . . and Then Yourself. Allyson is here, and we will be taking your calls. Hi, Allyson.

Allyson Reedy: Hi.

Alison: This book is a love letter to food and recipes on social media. I read that initially, as a food writer, you were a bit of a skeptic about joining social platforms. What were you concerned about?

Allyson: I'm just not a social media person. I think way back when with Facebook, a friend had to make my account for me. Then it was my editor at the Denver Post who was like, "You need to join Instagram. People want to see where you're eating around town. You got to take pictures of what you're eating, post on Instagram." I was very reluctant to do that because I'm like, "Do people really want to see what I'm eating?"

Alison: What changed your mind?

Allyson: I was forced to do it by my editor over there. I quickly learned that, "Wow, this is a really amazing world." I think it helped me do my job better, too.

Alison: How has food content on social media changed the way you think about your job?

Allyson: There's so many things out there. As you probably know, traditional media, we're not exactly growing right now. There's not a lot of us to cover all the amazing stories that are out there. Having these influencers, or recipe creators, or content creators, whatever you want to call them, having them help alert us to what's out there and what's good, I think it's really helpful for us in traditional media too, to find out about these new spots and new trends to the recipe.

Alison: Listeners, are you someone out there who the phone eats first? Do you find yourself taking photos of your meals whenever you're at a restaurant, or when you've made a great dish at home? Why do you think you like taking pictures of the food? Call us and text us, 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. Are you someone who loves engaging with food content on social media? What is your favorite recipe that you have found online? Did it go viral or show up in your feed?

Or how do you think social media has changed your diet? Or how you cook or discover new restaurants or the kind of foods you like? Call us 212-433-96922, 212-433-WNYC. You can join us on air, or you can text to us at those numbers, 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. Allyson, you have 50 recipes in this book citing the creators who posted the recipe, how did you possibly narrow it down to 50 recipes?

Allyson: I made a lot of bad things. I think that's part of why maybe people are a little skeptical of social media, is some of the recipes that go viral, they're not really that great. I actually enlisted my daughter. I let her sign up for TikTok just to help me with this book because she's obviously much younger than I am, much cooler than I am. She helped me find a lot of these food creators and recipe creators on TikTok. Then we just started cooking.

Alison: How old is your daughter?

Allyson: She is now 13.

Alison: Right on. You put her to work early. Let me ask you--

Allyson: It's funny because actually, after the book, she is done with TikTok. I'm relieved about that.

Alison: Even better. I shouldn't say that. Some people like TikTok a lot. What were some of the bad things you cooked?

Allyson: Probably the most viral recipe is that baked feta pasta. It just was not my thing. I like feta, but I don't love feta. My entire family, none of us could eat that. There's no baked feta, there is no doing unthinkable things to peeps in this book. There's no using a jar to cook a steak or a tampon to absorb excess liquid. None of that weird stuff.

Alison: Listeners, are you someone who says the phone eats first? Do you find yourselves taking photos of meals at a restaurant, or have you tried a recipe that you saw online and it turned out to be great? We want to know, 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. Our guest is Allyson Reedy.

She's been speaking about her new cookbook, The Phone Eats First Cookbook: 50 of Social Media's Best Recipes to Feed Your Feed . . . and Then Yourself. What did you or your daughter, I should say, both of you, what did you observe about which recipes caught your interest the most?

Allyson: I think it's a combination of three different things that can really make a recipe take off and go viral. The first is obvious. We are a looks first culture. We want those aesthetics. It has to be pretty. The pretty things are going to do really, really well. The other thing is if it's clever. There are so many clever hacks that make cooking easier on TikTok that I was just so blown away by, like for example, lasagna, but make it soup.

It takes this dish, we like the flavors, we love lasagna, but it's a pain, it takes a while to make. It's much quicker and easier in soup form. There's something called ice cube tray sushi. It helps you make sushi at home perfectly formed because you use the ice cube tray as the mold, for your rice and everything. It's so clever, it's so easy. I think those things really take off.

Then the third thing is, with a lot of social media users being millennials, Gen Z, it's like tapping into that nostalgia of maybe the '90s or depending on how old you are, maybe the early 2000s, where we're seeing things like, I have a recipe for cosmic brownies, which are like that Little Debbie treat that everybody wanted to have in their lunchbox in the '90s. It's tapping into that, where we're looking at, oh, the '90s, such a better time.

Alison: I wanted to ask you about that lasagna soup. It has received hundreds of millions of views. First of all, could you explain lasagna soup exactly?

Allyson: It's all those flavors that you would get in lasagna. You can use pork or beef or sausage, you have the Italian seasoning, you have the tomato, the paste, the sauce, you have the noodles, you have the ricotta that you're going to put on top, some basil, but it's in soup. It's really the same thing, it's just instead of baking it forever and ever, you're just throwing everything into a giant pot or Dutch oven and cooking it all together in that one pot.

Alison: It's so interesting because part of it is it took so long to make lasagna, we'll just make soup out of it.

Allyson: That's one of the things is, that's so clever. It's like we're going to take French onion soup, but we're going to make it French onion pasta, or we're going to make it French onion crostini bites. There's a lot of that where they're just taking flavors we already like and just presenting them in new and different ways.

Alison: This is a great text we got. It's from Kyle from Stratford. "I love taking photos of nearly everything in my life, but especially food because I like to post it in my TikTok or Instagram as a photo journal of my experiences. I'm a designer and recognize the artistry that goes into plating a lot of good meals." That is really interesting to a point in your book where you have photo tips next to each recipe.

Allyson: We do have some photo tips. Honestly those are probably more as reminders for me, because I am a terrible photographer, or they're things that I've learned along the way from having to post what I eat so much. Are you interested in some of those?

Alison: Sure.

Allyson: I would say, when in doubt, overhead it out. That's the easiest way to get a good shot of what you're eating, is just take your phone, put it over what you're eating and overhead shot.

Alison: You mean over the top?

Allyson: Yes, over the top, so it's facing down. That's just the easiest way to get a no-brainer shot. If you can get some cheese pull, the internet loves a cheese pull. Some kind of action. If somebody's grabbing something, if you can get a drip like you're dipping that birria taco into the consummate and you'd get a nice drip going. We like action shots, or throw some garnish on it so you have some different colors, and the colors popping against maybe a lighter background and then you throw a little bit of parsley or something on top.

Alison: Do the algorithms like these examples you've given us, like a cheese pull and they push it forward?

Allyson: I have no idea the mysteries of the Instagram and TikTok algorithm, but it seems that way. Based on what it gives me, that's what they've figured out for me at least.

Alison: Let's talk to, I think it's Jeanette on line 1 calling in from Murray Hill. Hi, Jeanette, thanks for making the time to call us today.

Jeanette: Oh, thank you so much. I love food pictures. My sisters and I do food pictures all the time. My sister Justine lives in Indiana. My other sister Joanne lives in California. Last night I forwarded a picture of my corned beef and cabbage with carrots and caramelized onions, and it was great. It was just that moment that I shared with them.

We didn't have a chance to talk really at dinner time. The time difference is different. My sister forwarded a picture of her corned beef and cabbage, which in California she got in the morning and she decided to have it for breakfast, which was really funny. It's great sharing that moment of food with family. We talk all the time, but it's just that instantaneous.

This is what I'm having for dinner or something special. We don't do it every day. I didn't send the picture of my ham sandwich right now, but if we go out to a restaurant and the food looks beautiful, we take a picture. I love that. I think it's a great connection with family. I don't do it really with friends, but it's a connection with my sister. I really love doing that. I love your show too.

Alison: Thank you, Jeanette. We appreciate that. A text says, "My husband and his sisters connected during the pandemic texting photos of each other's home cooked dinners. It was great fun. I saw them become much closer through sharing meals and recipes virtually." Allyson, what are your thoughts about that?

Allyson: On the pandemic specifically?

Alison: Or just about families using it as a sharing tool?

Allyson: I use it with my friends and family who I know are interested in food, which I think a lot of us, we need a distraction. We need some sort of joy right now. Food, at least for me, is one of the loves of my life. I love looking at what other people are eating. Besides the ideas it gives me, it's just like, "Oh, cool, that's what you're doing over there," like what the caller said.

It connects you with people across the country and across the world too, which is actually one of my favorite parts of this, is I've discovered so many new dishes that I wouldn't hear about here in Colorado, but so many dishes from people around the world because your iPhone and social media, it's the great equalizer. Anyone can just go take this great picture, post a recipe and it can go viral and you can share your family recipe or something from your culture with anyone around the world.

Alison: We got a cranky text here that says, "Shame on all these people. Phones don't belong at the table. People need to think less about what other people think and what they're eating, and more about spending time with the people that are there. After 27 years in the hospitality industry, I've seen people whole meal get cold while they staged photographs for social media. I find it all really very sad." Did you talk to chefs, various people who worked in the industry who don't like this trend at all?

Allyson: This book, it both celebrates and pokes fun at our social media obsessed culture. I totally understand that. When I was researching this book, I came across a statistic. One out of three people orders food with no intention of eating it but posting the photo on their TikTok or on their Instagram.

I do find that funny. As somebody who just loves to eat, I can't ever imagine not eating the food I'm photographing. I think he has a point. There are a lot of people who, they're just using this as an image building type tool, and that's fine. Who are we to judge what people are using social media for their relationship with food. I think this book both celebrates and makes fun of that aspect of eating.

Alison: We're talking to Allyson Reedy, a food writer and restaurant critic. We're talking about her new cookbook, The Phone Eats First Cookbook: 50 of Social Media's Best Recipes to Feed Your Feed . . . and Then Yourself. We want to know, are you someone whose phone eats first? What have you taken a picture of? Do you take a picture of your meals at home, send them to friends? Let us know. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. If you tried any of the viral recipes, we want to know about those too, 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. Right after the break, we'll get into some recipes.

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This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest is Allyson Reedy. She wrote a new cook called, The Phone Eats First Cookbook: 50 of Social Media's Best Recipes to Feed Your Feed . . . and Then Yourself. She's a food writer and a restaurant critic. Let's get into some recipes, Allyson. You write the internet loves a good salad. There's no other creator online who does it better than @thesaladlab on TikTok. Her name is Darlene. What is her story?

Allyson: The Salad Lab is-- If you're into salad, you probably already know her. She has a take on every viral salad she did. You might have heard of the Jennifer Aniston Salad, that it was rumored that Jennifer Aniston ate this every day on the set of friends for lunch.

Of course who doesn't want to be Jennifer Aniston? Everybody rushed out to try to remake that salad. There was the Green Goddess Salad. The recipe in this book is from Darlene, The Salad Lab. It's a teriyaki salmon salad with crispy rice croutons. I think it's better than both of those other ones.

Alison: It's interesting, she started it because her family lost their house in the California fires, and she lost all of the recipes, and she just wanted to start to make them for her daughter.

Allyson: I talked to her a few years ago, so I didn't know that.

Alison: Oh, yes. It was really interesting. It was the way that she taught her daughter to think about the food and the family that they had lost some of the recipes for. That's very interesting. Let's talk to Christine on line 1. Hey, Christine.

Christine: Hi. Thanks for taking my call. I'm 52 now, but I will never forget my 25th birthday party. It was my first time ever making a big old table of food. I was taking all these photos of the table, and my friend Bill said, "If you take one more photo of the food, I'm leaving." Now we're friends on Facebook, and every time we post a photo of food, we tag each other. It's our personal joke.

Alison: That's a good story. Let's talk to Isaac from Brooklyn. Hi, Isaac. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Isaac: Oh, yes. Hi. Let me see. I identified with one of your callers who didn't like the photos of food because I used to be like that. It used to drive me nuts. A Friend got cancer, was far away. They beat it, but they wanted us to send pictures of food because it's the one thing that they couldn't enjoy while they were going through treatment. We all started sending photos of food and it became a daily check-in of sorts. I still take pictures of food, and that's that.

Alison: Like it, Isaac. Let's talk to Ramey calling in from Astoria. Thanks for calling All Of It. You're on the air.

Ramey: Hi. Thanks. I just wanted to share, we built a whole community around photos of food during the pandemic. I found my way to a Facebook group of Yale alums, I'm a Yale alum. It was called Yale Food plus Drink. Initially it was just everyone sharing photos of their sourdough bread and their meal, and meals even in the past when we could all travel.

Then eventually as the world opened up, we continued to share recipes, but also restaurant recommendations. Then eventually, actually a lot of people who had only met online met in-person in different cities for meals. That's still going on really strong. It's the one happy place on the internet right now with all the turmoil. Food photos and food sharing has been really a way to build community.

Alison: Thanks for calling in. Allyson, let's talk about some more recipes in your book. By the way, I want to let you know that you actually identify them with the site that you got them from. We should say that, that you do share all the credit. Birria tacos. What's interesting about Birria tacos? Why are they so popular?

Allyson: That one, whenever people ask me about these viral recipes and how the internet has actually changed how we eat, that's my go-to example. I think it was in 2018 when there was an LA influencer. He took a picture of these Birria tacos he got at a taco truck. They're gorgeous, they're red and glistening. They're cheesy and oozing out, and you're dipping it into the consummate.

Birria tacos, if you think about it before that post, a lot of people in America, we had never heard of them. Now seven years later, they're on almost every menu of every Mexican restaurant. That's just a really great example of how Instagram took this dish that in Mexico is probably pretty well known, but not in America, and made it just ubiquitous everywhere.

Alison: What recipe in the book do you think takes us somewhere else? Someplace in the world that we haven't been before?

Allyson: Oh. There are a few that take us all over the place. The Birria tacos, that's going to be Mexico. There's a creator, and I actually had to talk with him through his publisher because he's Italian. His name is Ruben Bondi. It's Cucina Con Rubin. He has his own cookbook in Italian in Italy. He's an amazing Italian chef.

We have his cacio e pepe pasta recipe in the book, which is the legit Italian cacio e pepe. No cream, nothing like that. Reuben would die if you put that in yours. Then a lot of Asian recipes. We have a bubble tea recipe. We have rice paper dumplings, which is one of those genius hacks where you can make dumplings, but just so much easier than the perfectly pleated, intricate, folded. Instead of using the actual dumpling wrapper, you just use rice paper and you fold it. It's just a way easier way of making dumplings.

Alison: This is a good text. "I don't usually take pictures of food, but I am making a family cookbook for Christmas gift this year. I've been photographing family recipes and adding photos of my family at the table, at picnics, eating while traveling. It's a lot of fun." This says, "Talking about pictures of food for social media, I have a friend who teaches at an Ivy. Most of our texts are pictures of beer we're drinking. Intelligent conversation among highly educated friends."

My guest is Allyson Reedy. We're talking about her book, The Phone Eats First Cookbook: 50 of Social Media's Best Recipes to Feed Your Feed . . . and Then Yourself. Hot chicken. Hot chicken is popping up on New York City corners nowadays everywhere. The origins, in this book anyway, say they come from Nashville. Tell us a little bit about Nashville hot chicken.

Allyson: Nashville hot chicken is delicious. I think it's the red glistening that made it so popular on social media. It gets that from, you dip it, you take the oil that you fry the chicken in, and then you mix in some seasoning, some spices in there, you get the cayenne and the paprika.

That's where you're getting the red coloring, but also you're getting, of course, the spice from the cayenne. It turns out Nashville totally knew what they were doing. I think that the hot chicken, for me, because I like spice, I'll pick that over regular fried chicken any day. It also just looks so pretty because it's like, "Let's take brown fried chicken and let's make it red."

Alison: Somebody sent us a text about that. Hang on. It's about, brown food doesn't necessarily good for pictures, but it's good for how-- Here it goes. "Food is just as much of a visual medium as it is a taste medium. If something is a vibrant color and beautiful to look at, it makes the flavor that much more satisfying when it tastes good. I have had a delicious all brown food, but it isn't nearly as satisfying." Did you find that as you were putting together your cookbook, that some recipes might have been great, but they didn't take a good looking picture?

Allyson: You definitely want something photogenic, especially if your medium is your Instagram grid or a TikTok video. You're definitely thinking about those colors. I do feel like, the hot chicken, the toast, just that can be a totally boring food that you can make prettier, and the internet has done it. These people who make toasts into these work. It's stunning. It's amazing.

Alison: Listeners, are you someone who says the phone eats first? What did you recently take a picture of something that came to the table? We also want to know, have you tried any of the viral videos out there for recipes? How did it turn out? Our number is 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. My guest is Allyson Reedy. She's a food writer and restaurant critic.

She wrote a new cookbook called, The Phone Eats First Cookbook: 50 of Social Media's Best Recipes to Feed Your Feed . . . and Then Yourself. I'm noticing from a lot of the texts that have come in and what people have been describing, a lot of people said this image of taking pictures, their own taking pictures, happened during COVID That's also when TikTok really took off. What did you observe, I should say, about how our relationship with food and social media really evolved during COVID?

Allyson: I think it became the norm that you could-- Before it was maybe a little strange unless you were in certain circles that were food obsessed. Maybe it was weird to take pictures of your food and share it, but during COVID it was a couple of things. One, it was like people who've called in or texted have said, it's a way to connect with people that you're not immediately with.

It's a way to show them like, "Hey, look what I made today. Look what I did during COVID." And then another part of that, that COVID piece, I think it was the best possible free advertisement for TikTok, which was just getting started then, is you're at home, you don't have a lot of in-person connection, but you have your phone, you have social media, you might have time depending on do you have kids at home that you're trying to figure out the online schooling or whatnot, but you might have some extra time.

You might be doing the sourdough thing, and you're going to scroll through and get some ideas. Everybody seemed to get on at least Instagram at that point in time. In my circle, for I'm a millennial, so my generation is more Instagram than TikTok, but I'm sure for younger people, they were all signing up for TikTok to feel that connection.

Alison: You have one recipe that recalls a COVID era food trend. It is for a coffee chocolate cake. Tell us more about it.

Allyson: Oh my gosh, that one's so good.

Alison: Tell us more.

Allyson: I was one of those parents, I was a single mom with a six and a seven-year-old who were home from school during COVID. I didn't have a whole lot of extra time, I wasn't baking the sour dough, but I definitely made the Dalgona coffee because that's easy. You just whip it up. This recipe combines two of my favorite things because I go hard on the sugar. I'm very into dessert. This is from, I don't know if I can say her name on the air.

Alison: No, no, no. We'll just say [inaudible 00:27:14] [crosstalk]

Allyson: We'll call it Kick Butt Baker. She made a Dalgona coffee chocolate cake. Oh my gosh, it's the best chocolate cake that I have ever had. You use that coffee to add moisture to the cake, but then also you're whipping it up for the frosting, so you get that frothiness and that slightly coffee flavor in the frosting that plays so well with the cake.

Alison: They can figure out what her name is. They got it. Our listeners, thanks so much for calling in and sharing your thoughts. Thanks to Allyson Reedy, the book is called, The Phone Eats First Cookbook: 50 of Social Media's Best Recipes to Feed Your Feed . . . and Then Yourself. Thanks.

Allyson: Thank you.