The best TikTok cooking videos are made by grandmothers

I was lucky to grow up with a grandmother who really knew how to work in the kitchen. She could make cookies from scratch, fry chicken to perfection, and turn even the most humble ingredients into something delicious. But if you weren’t lucky enough to have a grandmother like mine, luckily TikTok is packed with the best kind of culinary role model: someone’s mom.

Thanks to the ubiquity of TikTok, there is a cooking of every walk of life. there is Mom Gailwho makes fresh green beans and chewy peanut butter bars in her Kentucky kitchen. I live for Grandma Piathe Brooklyn-based Italian grandma who brings a distinctive flair to frying chops and stuffing mushrooms. I love to see the grandmothers from my home state from Louisiana, who often do things a little differently than mine, but with exactly the same care.

More than the recipes themselves, I really appreciate the authentic exchanges of tenderness between these women and their children or grandchildren. They cook to sustain yourselfof course, but also to nourish, to care for the people they love. The camera also captures that love in return from those children and grandchildren, who are so proud of their grandmother’s cooking (and probably her fiery personality) that they want to share it with the world. Considering how much hate and filth there is on TikTok and the rest of the internet, these videos are explosions of pure brilliance on my For You page.

I love watching a grandma tenderly mix a sauce or tediously peel boxes of tomatoes so the family can enjoy good marinara all year long. There is incredible love in these gestures, and on the screen you can see the great care they put into the preparation of this food. Most seem genuinely surprised (and delighted) that so many people care about their old recipes. When I watch #MeemawTok, as I’ve called it, I don’t have to deal with constant sponsors and boring brand collaborations, or listen to the uninformed opinions of an aspiring influencer.

These videos also seem like an honest antidote to the excess of superficial commercial wife content. It’s one thing to cosplay a 50s housewife and quite another when that was your real life experience. These women know when it’s worth working on something that’s really painful, when it’s smart to take a shortcut, and how to make something delicious with just a few humble ingredients. They don’t seem to care about the aesthetics of their videos (or their kitchens, for that matter), just about making delicious, comforting food.

I am grateful for this unlimited access to this wealth of food knowledge, passed down from generation to generation by women who are now creating traditions in families other than their own. When I or some other stranger on the Internet makes Mamaw Gail’s tomato macaroni or her fluffy cornbread, we play a role in keeping those food customs alive, and that’s a consequence of social media actually having real value.

Most of us no longer spend all of our time cooking, and that’s largely because we’re no longer required to do that work. But this knowledge has an inherent value that cannot be replaced with a bunch of recipes posted on the Internet. Being shown how to properly peel a vegetable or exactly when a sauce looks good is incredibly useful for any cook, even if that demonstration is done on your phone screen rather than in real life. And whether or not you have the time or inclination to cook all of this from scratch all the time, it’s really nice to have those skills in your back pocket when the need arises, passed down like a family heirloom.