Cassie Malouta remembers the exact day that she and roommate Apshy Vimal realized just how obsessed they are with food-centric social media accounts. “Last semester we dragged our entire apartment to the Donut Plant in Chelsea,” Malouta,said, “Because we had to have this specific blackout donut that we had seen on a food Instagram!”

Malouta and Vimal, both FCLC ’17, know they are not alone. From envy-inducing photos of indulgent treats, to beautiful pictures of healthy foods that only seem indulgent, food finds have taken over social media. At Fordham, this has inspired self-confessed foodies, like Vimal and Malouta, to create their own accounts dedicated to their love of food.

Vimal and Malouta started their Instagram account, Please Sir, May I (@please_sir_may_i) just earlier this month, and already have more than a hundred followers. They believe that people crave content like theirs because of the adventures they can incite, like the one they had that day at Donut Plant. With their account, they hope followers of Please Sir, May I feel inspired to go out into the city and try something new: “you can find restaurants that are maybe not on the map as much, like more obscure places that really have good food,” Malouta said.

For even further proof that food content is king, just look to Caitlin Sakdalan, FCLC ’18. She started an Instagram account, BeFatBeHappy (@befatbehappy) in 2014, to document her decadent food finds in New York City and beyond. In less than a year, her followers on that account have grown by 14 thousand.

“It’s crazy,” Sakdalan said of the popularity of her account. “It’s grown so organically, but in a way that I’ve been able to get ahead of.” She credits much of her account’s appeal to her followers’ desire to live vicariously through her pictures of indulgent comfort foods. “Everyone knows what it’s like to eat a salad,” she says, “But when you see something like [NYC restaurant] Black Tap’s milkshakes, you’re like ‘Oh my God, that’s crazy!’ It’s something special and unique.”

With that much success, it’s no surprise that Sakdalan is looking to expand into video content with her own YouTube channel, calling her plans for her videos “kind of like a more personal version of BuzzFeed Food and Tasty.”

The accounts she referenced here are ones that are taking Facebook by storm with an innovative new form of recipe video ready to turn the Barefoot Contessa on her head. Rather than feature chefs who walk viewers through the recipes, these videos show no actual faces or dialogue, instead choosing to rely solely on the ingredients and the method. And with each clip clocking in at less than two minutes, it is clear that viewers are attracted to the simplistic nature of these videos.

“You don’t need to see a person, somebody you don’t recognize, in a video,” Alyssa Fiorentino, FCLC ’15, and Social Media Editor for Delish.com, explained. “The idea is that the recipe is so easy that you don’t need somebody to sit there and talk you through it. You can just watch and learn. Anybody can do it.”

Fiorentino believes that the popularity of these videos is a win for food media, which in her experience, had always struggled to perform against pop-culture content. “Food, it’s both easy and really hard to [promote] on social.” She said. Everybody eats, and everybody knows somebody who cooks…but at the same time, a picture of a recipe is not always going to stand up to Beyonce news.”

But with celebrity chefs being kicked out of the picture, and novices like Vimal, Moluta, and Sakdalan posting food content and potentially garnering tens of thousands of followers, what does this mean for food in more antiquated types of media, like the Food Network and cookbooks? “I think that cookbooks can really make a nice gift,” Fiorentino says. “Chrissy Teigen is making a cookbook…cookbooks will always be worthy. But millennials are cooking on their phones and iPads.”