The goal of Tasty Video is to get as many likes, shares, and views as possible. This is unique within the rhetoric of food in that the goal is not necessarily to make the food. The second goal is to present the food in a way that makes viewers want to cook it along with demystify cooking for a younger generation. Tasty Videos serve as a quick break from the Facebook newsfeed to showcase food content. The videos are short 30 sec-60 sec, easy to follow, and take away all of the hard work that goes into preparing any dish.

The formal elements of the Video is time, pre done food preparation, combining foods, music, and editing. The timing is part of the appeal; it is edited to be no longer than a minute which lets the autoplay go one without really bothering the viewer. It is short enough that it’s worth it to watch the full video and not just scroll past. The next element is the food being pre prepared. Most of the work in any dish goes into preparing the food; washing, dicing, and measuring it but in a Tasty Video all the work is done off screen. The video is edited to cut out the work and only show when ingredients are added in. They speed up the time and artfully zoom into shots of the mixture being made. Tasty Videos are always short and beautify the cooking process. They are relatable to all as they only feature hands; no face is ever shown which unconsciously make the watcher imagine their own hands doing the action.

These videos and this genre is geared towards the quick and mindless market. Within food this is new as typically it’s hard to mindlessly cook. This changed how we understand recipes; where it was telling us how to cook and a little about the recipe it is now showing us a glamorized version of ourselves (the hands) cooking. This glamorized version of cooking is a good introduction into preparing your own food.These videos are supposed to help people become more comfortable around the topic of food preparation and it does just that.

It’s important to remember a good chunk of millennials grew up without knowing much about food preparation. With easy delivery food options and pre made meals being the norm in many families growing up there is a slew of young people who don’t know how to cook or prepare food for themselves outside of a few basic recipes. While the Tasty Videos to some are easy and mindless (to those who have cooking experience) they can be a great introduction for the novice cook.

I tried to include videos from Tasty the brand and the channels with similar content. Within the recipes I included diversity in where they were from and the experience leveled needed to cook the dish.

• Israeli Malabi Recipe – Rosewater Pudding With Pomegranate Syrup | Jewlish
• Shakshuka – North African Style Poached Eggs in Tomato Sauce| Tasty
• Traveling Noodles | Delish
• Mixed Berry Smoothie Bowl | Tasty

What makes a restaurant good?

What makes a restaurant good is so much more than the quality of the food. Don’t get me wrong, the food should cause a party in your tummy, but the atmosphere of the restaurant is also very important. The articles that I chose to analyze all look at the atmosphere as a key factor to the enjoyability of a restaurant experience. Through creative writing, the authors are able to convey their experience of the restaurant (complete with their feelings and concerns) to you through their diction.

Formal elements:

• description of atmosphere
• what type of food the restaurant serves
• price range
• recommended dishes
• location of restaurant
• rating
• provides pictures of restaurant and food

Who is reading these reviews? People who like good food and want to try new things, people who want to recommend tasty places when their friends ask them where they want to eat, people who don’t want to waste time or money, people who want to pick the right restaurant the first time.

Functional Purposes:

• help the reader decide if it is a place they would enjoy
• tells a story, provides a snapshot of their experience through the imagery they use in their writing (not all reviews tell a story, but the articles that I chose to emulate provide clear pictures or analogies to help you understand the environment)

 

Texts:

As Not Seen on TV Restaurant Review: Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar in Times Square by Pete Wells (New York Times)

REVIEW:Hillside Farmacy by Chelsea Bucklew (The Infatuation – Austin)

Slurping Solo, in Sweet Isolation, at Ichiran in Brooklyn by Pete Wells (New York Times)

Review: Hart’s by Bryan Kim (The Infatuation – New York)

I am exploring the genre of restaurant reviews. After conducting research, I have gathered that reviews come in all shapes and forms. Some reviews are extremely biased while others try to remain more open-minded; certain reviews critique a particular food at various locations while other authors take the route of reviewing all aspects of a single restaurant. When assessing this genre, I tried to take all of these variations into account, so my sources have a wide assortment of style preference. However, while all of these reviews are somewhat different, they still fall under the same genre of a ‘restaurant review’, therefore they all have formal and functional similarities.

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What should it contain?

Always: 

• A critique of the food
• The atmosphere in which the food is consumed
• Brief description of the restaurants location
• Directly or implicitly provide the author’s credibility

Sometimes:

• Include the restaurant’s chef
• Provide comparisons of similar restaurants
• Include photos
• Address how pricey the restaurant is
• Inject a biased opinion

The functional elements include giving the reader the ability to make an informed decision about whether or not they would enjoy a dining experience at the particular restaurant. The author provides a detailed summary about what a typical meal at this restaurant would be like and through the use of strong imagery, the reader is able to envision the event being described.

Sources:

• Restaurant Review: Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar in Times Square
• Jonathon Gold goes on a holiday crawl across L.A
• Austin Chronicle Restaurant Review
• Restaurant Review: Uchiko
• Fed Man Walking: A Month of Sunday’s Brunch

Questions:

• What makes me qualified as an author to write a food review?
• Which type of review do you think is more interesting: a singular restaurant or a”best of” list with a particular food
• As a reader, are you more interested in food reviews or beverage reviews?
• Any suggestions for which restaurant you’d be interested in reading about?

The genre I am currently studying is the “video recipe” sub-genre of food rhetoric.  I have been fascinated by recipes and cooking since I can remember, and video recipes are just a simpler yet more visually appealing way to view recipes.  There are a few key characteristics of video recipes that differentiate them from normal, primarily text-based recipes.  For example, video recipes are always in picture format.  They can be viewed as videos, with sound, or GIF images (which are essentially looping videos without sound, in an easily transferable format).  Video recipes also usually include supplementary text throughout the video, usually containing more detail than the video itself, such as specific directions, ingredient identification, or special techniques.  It is difficult to categorize video recipes by factors such as gender, politics, or race, but one way that an identity can be established is through the type of food made.  If a video recipe for saag paneer is made, one could test for authenticity.  It is more likely that a culturally knowledgeable Indian chef could create a more authentic saag paneer than a Caucasian home-cook who is interested in Indian cuisine.  Because of this, checking the comments of the video or other forms of feedback is necessary to gauge whether a recipe is truly authentic, and, thus, acceptable.

 

Here are a few texts that I think do a good job of showcasing the archetypes of the video recipe sub-genre:

 

Steak with Garlic Butter – This video was also my mentor text.  I felt that it did a great job of simplifying a recipe usually seen as daunting to many aspiring chefs.  It also contains a relatively unique feature in this sub-genre: a special technique is shown to test the doneness of a steak.

Easy Butter Chicken – I felt that this video did a good job of the controversial “ethnic recipe.”  There is a noticeable amount of comments criticizing the authenticity of the recipe.  Some claim “that is no way near the real [recipe]” and others give tips like “just add ginger and garlic paste while marinating chicken and few table spoon of yogurt.”

PB&J Doughnut Holes – I chose to include this recipe because it is in a GIF format.  This is a good demonstration of the accessibility of video recipes.  There is also a video version of this recipe, which is the original, on Tasty’s YouTube channel.  Another great part of this recipe which is seen in many other video recipes is the beautiful cross-section which many recipes include.

Chicken Poppers 4 Ways –  This video recipe contains 4 different spin-offs of the same recipe in one video.  Great for someone who is picky and will only make one, or someone who wants to try all of the options.

5 Minute Mug Pizza – This recipe is a crude yet satisfying way to make a classic favorite.  Simple yet seemingly delicious (also not made by BuzzFeed).

 

One question I have for my classmates is: what is your favorite video recipe?  And furthermore, why is it your favorite?

While I am still needing to form my exact genre, I have an idea of doing a hybrid genre that is between an informal review and a best and worst list. My idea is to either pit different restaurants with similar cuisine genres against one another and see who is supreme and who falls short, or pick one type of cuisine genre, try different restaurants that serve this genre, and make a list that ranks them from best to worst. While I decide between these two genres’, I have been researching different food writing topics that I think would help both of my options. I’ve been mainly focusing on finding formal and informal reviews and articles that rank restaurants. I have also been wanting to find both positive and negative reviews.

During my research, I found things that worked and did not work and have helped me get a clearer idea of what my topic should include. It seems that the best rankings and reviews keep the audience in suspense, meaning that they save the big reveal till the very end; whether this be through putting the best restaurant as the last slide like in the “Best Seafood” article, or giving your final opinion, and the whole point of the article, at the very end as seen in “Chipotle vs. Qdoba”.

I also discovered that shorter is sometimes better. As a typical person has a small attention span, the reviews need to be short. While the “Best Seafood” article does a good job of this, they seem to fall short on overall length as the audience has to click through 31 slides. The review on Montana’s Trail House seems to achieve a nice balance of a formal review, written in a way that creates imagery in a reader’s head while also providing a lot of information in a concise amount of space. I also enjoyed this review because it used more than one sense; I was able to conjure images and smells, albeit in an unfavorable way towards Montana’s, thus creating a more interesting and powerful review.

What should it contain?

Sometimes:

• Save the best for last

• History of the restaurant

Always:

• Be aware of your audience and the length of your post

• Write with the senses in mind

• Write about what a reader would want to know: Ease of access, price, availability, location, food and service quality, and overall dining experience

• Visual Component: Actual images of the food served or the restaurant itself

Sources:

• Chipotle vs. Qdoba
• Best Seafood Restaurants in the U.S.
• Montana’s Trail House Brings Morally Hazardous Appalachian Cuisine to Brooklyn
• 2016 Top 25

Questions:

• What would you be more interested in reading? Battle between restaurants or ranking of one type of cuisine?
• Would you rather click through a slideshow or scroll through a text post?
• Do you like in depth reviews or short “this was good because…” reviews?
• Is there any other additional information you are looking for or wanting from a review/ranking?
• How can a reviewer not come off as condescending/sarcastic when writing a negative review?

 

“Photo essays”are a bit of an interesting genre, as they do not always feature text despite having essay in their name. Instead, photos become the main focus for the author to use to convey some kind of idea. In my five photo essays I’ve chosen, they all feature varying levels of text, but they all have photos.

Sources:

A Worldwide Day’s Worth of Food
This is what school lunches look like around the world
Photo Essay: Learning About Olive Oil With California Olive Ranch.
How Not to Live: A Photo Essay on State Fair Food.
Japan: A Food Photo Essay

Always:

Photos:
Photos are a must for the photo essay genre. They are featured in all 5 of the sources I have listed above. Their arrangement just might be different and may have the text formatted around it, such as the slideshows in “A Worldwide Day’s Worth of Food” and “This is what school lunches look like around the world,” or just have them in-body as the reader scrolls downwards on the website.

Have a theme:
Each of the texts I have picked have a general theme that the author has chosen to put them together as a collection. It could be daily eating habits, school lunches, olive oil, State Fair food, or just Japan, which the authors have chosen to do in the above sources. There is not just a senseless arrangement of pictures.

Convey an idea or illicit emotion:
The reason for this arrangement is that the author is trying to give a sense of what is going on with their theme. For example, TIME’s “A Worldwide Day’s Worth of Food” (USA) shows some levels of disparity between cultures, and similarly, Independent’s “This is what school lunches look like around the world” (UK) shows how people should be concerned how their children or eating compared to other countries. Some may just be purely comedic, like “How Not to Live: A Photo Essay on State Fair Food.”

Sometimes:

Text:
The amount of text may vary for each photo essay, to the point that a photo might not even have a caption, leaving the interpretation up to the viewer. This is the case with “Photo Essay: Learning About Olive Oil With California Olive Ranch,” but not the case for the rest of the texts which always have text with the photo. “Japan: A Food Photo Essay” notably features no introduction and has very short captions.

Slideshow:
Of the sources, 3/5 of them actually show the photos in a slideshow with captions alongside the photo. Thinking about it, I feel as though I’ve treated the work I’ve done for Jpop Dallas to be like photo essays, but I wonder if anyone else would think of it as being like a photo essay according to my list of characteristics?

Online or in print:
“A Worldwide Day’s Worth of Food” is actually only an excerpt of “What I Eat: Around the World in 80 Diets,” showing that photo essays can be in print too.

The genre I am writing about is the listicle. The listicle was highly popularized by Buzzfeed. Listicles appear all over Buzzfeed including the Tasty food section, which utilizes this literary form to compile recipes, cooking tips, and other helpful food information. Research has shown that we tend to read slightly slower on computer screens. The list format helps to mitigate that, while also capitalizing on short attention spans in today’s Internet Age. Lists give us focused, annotated “tables of contents” of the Internet. This means finding recipes or dinner ideas in one consolidated place rather than scouring the Web for hours.

As long as people want stories in bite-sized formats, there will always be a place for the listicle. With the tsunami of incoming stuff on the Internet, our brains will automatically try to find a sorting mechanism and try to make sense of it, which is why we naturally gravitate to the listicle. Lists let us process complicated information spatially, transforming it from cluster to linear progression. Lists can be categories; they can be timelines; but either way, they place digestible bites of information in context of a larger whole.

Functional Purposes:

• To curate information into a numbered list that is easy to consume
• To provide information in an entertaining way that attracts younger generations.

Formal Elements:

• Title with numerical identifier

• Witty subtitle

• Picture with link to website where the information was found and caption to provide context

Texts for Genre Analysis:

19 Lazy But Brilliant Recipes That Won’t Let You Down: This article combines the “listicle” genre made popular by Buzzfeed with the simplistic style of recipes made popular by the Tasty videos. Tasty’s “anyone can cook” attitude has opened up a whole new world of food writing.

17 Cheat Sheets Every Home Cook Should Know About: This category of food listicle focuses on cooking tips rather than the actual food itself. These tips are aimed at beginner level cooks whom Tasty targets with most of all its content.

17 Useful Tips And Tricks If You Have An Instant Pot: This article highlights a specific cooking product: the instant pot. Obviously, this listicle is targeted to people whom own instant pots. As the name implies, instant pots are for people who want a easier and faster way of making certain dishes, which follows the Tasty on Buzzfeed theme of simpler cooking.

7 Facts About Potatoes That You Didn’t Know And Will Now Want To Tell Everyone: This type of listicle intends to educate the reader about a specific aspect of food or cooking, in this case potatoes. These articles tend to contain quirky, interesting facts a reader wouldn’t casually find elsewhere on the Internet.

 

 

 

 

Food Tasting

 I decided to make my genre on something that I find very interesting… Videos. For my audience to be interested as well, I want to go in depth with my videos by watching food tasting. I am choosing this genre because I know my audience and myself will enjoy it. These videos are shared on YouTube by various accounts and are very popular amongst our world.

Videos range in length as I have seen some being as short as 2 minutes and others being as long as 17 minutes. To begin most of these videos, we get an understanding of who the people are that we are going to be amused by. While learning about the people, we also get to learn about their assumptions for what they are about to consume. To follow, we get to sit back, relax and enjoy the fun of watching people’s expectations change while they eat away at their food. I am very interested in videos of people tasting food from other countries. Here in America, people eat for example Chinese food expecting that to be how it tastes everywhere. Little do they know, food from other countries have totally different tastes back where they came from. For most meals, the “contestants” get to experience an appetizer, entrée and a dessert. One of the most enjoyable parts of these videos is the ending part after the eating is done. We get to experience a recap with a reflective interview that we can all enjoy.

These types of videos have many different purposes but the most important is for entertainment. All hundreds of food tasting videos I have watched, I thoroughly get to enjoy due to the relaxed, fun and humorous tones. Viewers get to experience critique but also enjoyment by the people involved in the videos.

Videos I will be using:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqYGGqTC_Us The Jewish Food Taste Test by BuzzFeedYellow. Being Jewish, I find this video to be very entertaining as people get to experience what I have eaten over time in my life.
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fo59LlkTDe4 Chinese People Try Panda Express For The First Time by BuzzFeedVideo. This is a video showing people from China getting the opportunity to experience the Chinese food that we here in America get to enjoy.
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zl3ZVlt_Io Indian Food Taste Test by Elly Awesome. This page has many different tasting videos with much amusement throughout.

Key Functional Purposes

-to provide preparation instruction

-to promote a certain brand or product or to generate views/traffic

I) Always:

1. Brief – All of the videos that I have examined are similar in that they are all short in length. The median length seems to be around 2:30, with the shorter ones around 1:00-1:30 and the longer ones around 4:00-5:00, much shorter than food-making instructional videos.
2. Some Sort of Narrative Element – Every video has some sort of narrative element, be it spoken words or captions. Usually there is a person that is providing commentary and instruction out loud as he/she is carrying out the steps. However, sometimes authors use written captions to accompany the video instead of spoken dialect.
3. Simple – I have yet to come across a drink preparation instructional video that requires more than a basic cooking/kitchen knowledge. Drink preparation is mostly measuring and mixing. Some of the “harder” drinks that I’ve seen prepared require the cooking of a simple syrup, but even this is an easy process that even beginner cooks can do.

 II) Sometimes

1. Background Music – Oftentimes, the videos will contain some sort of lyric-less instrumental track that plays lightly in the background. This serves to create a lighthearted, upbeat mood and fill awkward voids of silence that may arise.
2. Product Placement –Product placement is the deliberate use of a brand/product in exchange for some sort of compensation, particularly in a way that promote the brand/product. This is especially common with larger media outlets with large audiences who are sponsored or get paid to make videos and include certain brands/products.
3. Variety of Camera Angles/Shot Types – Although is not seen in every video, it is extremely common for these types of videos to contain alternating camera angles and shot types. When the preparer is speaking but not cooking, the camera usually pans out to a medium-shot that includes the person. When the preparer is carrying out a step, the camera oftentimes will zoom on the action of interest so the viewer can observe the intricacies of what is happening.
4. Ingredients List – Before getting started with making the drink, the preparer will sometimes provide the viewer with a list of ingredients/implements needed to make the drink. By doing this, the viewer can gather everything before the “making” steps and consequently be prepared to follow along with the preparer.
5. Introduction – Sometimes, the author will choose to include a brief introduction before initiating the preparation portion of the video. This serves to engage and “hook” the reading, giving him/her background on the drink, descriptions of the flavors, contexts for which consumption is appropriate, etc.

Videos

1. Powerade Green Drink Video: This, in my mind, in an example of a poorly made video, but I chose to include it because it contrasts the second video in regards to production style; there is only one camera angle/shot type used through the entire video and music, but no vocal narration (only written captions). It was also poorly stabilized, unengaging, and the captions were riddled with spelling errors. For what it was, I think It was also slightly longer than it need to be
2. Cosmopolitan Video: This video is an example of what I consider to be a higher quality video; there is a variation in camera angles/shot types, spoken narration, a brief introduction. The preparation process is clearly conveyed and the speaker is engaging with his presentation

 

I am thinking of writing a restaurant review, which will allow me to write about my experience at a restaurant and share my thoughts on it with my readers so they can decide whether or not they should try out this restaurant. I read a few different kinds of restaurant reviews, which all gave me more information about the restaurant that the author reviewed and what he or she thought about it. At first I was going to write a more formal restaurant review, but then I decided writing a blog style review listing out short reviews from different places would be more interesting.

The purpose of these blog style reviews is to review many food places that serve the same kind of food and compare them, so readers will have a chance to consider different places to try out. Most of the reviews I picked out were for restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I’m from, and I will be writing about places there since I have been able to try a lot of different restaurants back home. I noticed that in all of these reviews, the author would list out the name of the restaurant, the location, and what kind of food was served at the restaurant. For example, in the “Bay Area Boba” blog, the author included a list of top boba shops and under each one, she would write a short review of the shop. In all of my sources, there was a picture for each restaurant review, which would show either a picture of the restaurant or of the food that the author ordered. In some of the reviews, there would also be an exact address of the place; for example, in the Eater SF Coffee Shops blog, the address of each shop is included along with a map showing where exactly the location is. Each author reviewed a different number of places; for example, in the Bay Area Boba blog, the author did a review of the top 5 boba shops in the South Bay, while in the Top NY Restaurants, the author did a review of the top ten restaurants.

Here are the texts that I will be writing about:

Top NY Restaurants

Bay Area Boba

Coffee Around the SF Bay Area

Healthy Fast Food Around the Bay Area