I went to culinary school, worked as a line cook, then became a mother. Sadly, the upshot of that trajectory is not that my children eat three-course homemade meals every night, but that my Instagram feed is filled almost entirely with videos of people – mostly mothers – chopping salads into tiny dice. Microchopping, in social media parlance.
That big algorithm in the sky has rightly intuited that after most days of work and childcare, and a tripartite bedtime that takes two and a half hours at its most efficient, the only content the shards in my brain can handle consuming are these types of videos – not the novel taunting me from my bedside table, not that longform magazine article everyone is talking about, not even the new movie released on a streaming service.
