Cooking has always been an act of remembering: recalling recipes, improvising with personal touches, and preserving culinary heritage through repetition and adaptation. Today, much of this memory work has migrated online. In 60 seconds of scrolling on Instagram, we travel from biryani to dal, from kitchen hacks to grandmothers’ recipes, from festive jalebis to dosa sizzling in cast-iron pans. These reels, from tutorials on peeling an onion to tips for running a kitchen on a budget, immerse us in the rhythms of everyday cooking.
At first, they may feel like a trivial amusement, a quick distraction between tasks. But a closer look reveals small, intimate stories. A grandmother rolling rotis with shrivelled yet steady hands; a 20-something employed in a different city filming his version of butter chicken to share with family over a video call or reel; a family sharing their Diwali sweets online; wedding proposals planned around a shared meal, and so on. Each reel breathes a story: tender, ordinary, deeply human. They are traces of cultural memory quietly mushrooming in digital spaces.
We usually imagine archives as official, institutional, and enduring: libraries, museums, government repositories, etc., designed to preserve memory, culture, and civilisation against time. Instagram, the popular social media platform, by contrast, is transient, designed for rapid consumption rather than preservation. Yet, paradoxically, it is here that much of our everyday memory now resides. A reel of a mother’s recipe, a photo of a wedding feast, a story about Navratri food traditions; these are emerging archives, a form of cultural recall.
However, digital archives have their own limitations. The French Algerian philosopher Jacques Derrida argues in Archive Fever that every archive carries a paradox: it preserves, but in preserving, it shapes what is remembered and what is forgotten. The algorithms shape visibility; content that does not gather enough engagement dissolves quietly into the feed. It then acts as an active curator.
Visibility on Instagram is not merely about what trends. The algorithmic curation is also driven by the social hierarchies we inhabit offline. It is both a creator of dominant narratives and a product of them. What circulates as ‘Indian cooking’ online is calibrated through an upper-class aesthetic: neat kitchens, nuclear families framed in warmed lighting, pastel cookware. This aspirational modernity in India is often Savarna-coded.
Anything that falls outside this visual grammar is often buried. The algorithm intensifies this bias.
Bahujan and Adivasi food traditions, community kitchens, and working-class frugality do appear online, but most struggle to travel; visibility itself becomes a form of caste privilege. Exceptions such as the Village Cooking Channel succeed, but only by adopting production values and narrative rhythms that fit dominant aesthetic expectations.
Against this backdrop, ‘anti-aesthetic’ content: mud-stove cooking, soot-stained walls, watery gravies stretched to feed many, occasionally surfaces as a counter current, but its virality is sporadic and often framed as spectacle or nostalgia. Cultural memory, in turn, becomes a recursive loop: shaped by caste, class, aspiration, and platform design.
This raises difficult and uncomfortable questions: Is online visibility a caste privilege? Does it operate as a new mode of extract, where the marginalised culinary worlds become consumable sometimes, but their creators remain peripheral and unseen? What happens to kitchens that fall outside the platform’s aesthetic grammar: cluttered, chaotic, working-class? Are they disqualified from becoming ‘archives’?
Gender complicates this further. Many women influencers navigate what looks like empowerment but operates as a soft disciplinary regime where domestic labour is curated into a consumable product–immaculate kitchens, calm demeanour, ritualised gestures–then monetised and circulated as aspiration.
Kerala-based YouTuber MyWaybyKalyani, with over a million subscribers, offers a clear example: labour staged as serenity, tradition, and ease. The platform rewards not the often-invisible toil of cooking, but its polished representation. Domesticity becomes content, and content becomes commodity.
This leads to a single urgent question: When domestic labour is transformed into paid performance, does the platform expand women’s possibilities or simply reinforce the expectation that they perform joy in domesticity and only in certain authorised forms of femininity?
To think of Instagram as ‘archive’ is to recognise that memory here is filtered beyond code. Digital archives are deeply enmeshed by histories of caste, gender, and aspiration, that seep into platform design and user practice. The question is no longer simply whose food is recorded, but whose labour becomes stylised, whose traditions are converted into consumable content, and whose lived experiences remain invisible. The archive, here, is then a negotiation.
For the diaspora, these consumable fragments become an emotional anchor. A Malayalee worker in Dubai watching meen curry (fish curry) or a Tamil student in Toronto watching a 10-minute easy pongal (a rice-lentil dish) making video finds in them a fragile sense of home. But unlike handwritten cook books or recipes passed down orally through generations, these digital memories are fragile, dependent on shifting engagement metrics.
A recent study titled “Archiving Activism in the Digital Age” describes these digital collections as “vibrant archives”: dynamic, connective, and always vulnerable.
But ephemerality is not always a weakness. Drawing on feminist digital art scholar Bilyana Palankasov, we can see how the fleeting nature of online images can actually intensify intimacy: what disappears feels more precious because it is briefly held and then lost. A disappearing thaali (a platter) story feels tender, precisely because it vanishes. Memory here is not just storage: it is renewal, performance, repetition.
If Instagram reels are the new archives of our kitchens, then we inhabit a cultural moment where memory is shaped by both possibility and precarity. These digital archives democratise visibility yet reproduce caste and gender hierarchies. They connect diasporas, yet flatten traditions into consumable aesthetics.
French philosopher Jacques Derrida reminds us that the archive is never innocent; Instagram reminds us that it is never secure.
To dismiss them as frivolous would be a mistake; they preserve everyday traditions in ways museums cannot. But to celebrate them uncritically is equally naïve. The challenge is in recognising both their potency and their fragility and understanding that our kitchens online are shaped by algorithms, biases, and the politics of looking.
When future generations search for the histories of Indian food, they may not turn to manuscripts, but to fragments of reels shaped by algorithms, aspirations, and inequities.
The final question that lingers is not whether these fragments will survive, rather whose stories the platform will decide are worth remembering at all.
Dr Anjitha Gopi is an Assistant Professor at Vellore Institute of Technology- Andhra Pradesh (VIT- AP) University, Amaravati, and a researcher whose work moves across gender, culture, and contemporary social questions. She writes on everyday life, digital cultures, and the shifting textures of Indian society.
Dr Ritu Varghese is an Assistant Professor at Vellore Institute of Technology, Andhra Pradesh. Her research and writings map the intersections of gender, sacred public spheres, and digital cultures.
Views expressed are the authors’ own.