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.
Small, manageable, they are often quick cut, with the camera right next to the chopping board or mixing bowl. And the satisfaction of seeing large, unruly vegetables transform into perfect cubes, or leafy greens evolve into confetti ribbons, everything then piled into an oversized mixing bowl full of good-for-you crunchy veggies, is on par, for me, with a perfectly organized closet. In other words, my Valhalla.
But I’ve come to realize that it’s not just my Valhalla. Friends of mine also unwind after long days by watching other people chop vegetables, and social media accounts largely devoted to the content have millions of subscribers. For a particular subset of the world, it checks all the boxes to reach that pinnacle of viral addiction: it’s aspirational (who’s actually got the time to chop so much? And eat so much fiber?); it’s orderly (particularly set against the backdrop of the horrors of the world, and the reflexive bracing for some other tragedy or anxiety to rear its head); it’s beautiful, but not like those hateful “I’m so grateful” posts of people on yachts in foreign, crystal-blue waters. It’s attainable – if you’re only willing to get your knife out. And, perhaps above all, it’s soothing.
“The repetitive chopping, besides the sound, the feel, that is one of the only times that my mind can wander,” Melissa Ben-Ishay, one of the queen microchoppers, said. Her 1 million followers head to her @bakedbymelissa account for a mix of savory cooking and cupcake content, which comes from her eponymous brand of bite-sized, colorful confections that come in handy 25-packs. “It’s Zen. It’s therapy.”
Ben-Ishay is casual in her manner but precise on the chopping board, carefully transforming cucumbers into tiny dice, or pulverizing garlic with a smash of her knife and a magic quick cut, often looking straight at the camera and uttering one of her catchphrases, “chop it up”, with a kind of surfer vibe. I’ve come to think of it as the “hang loose” equivalent for mothers like me.
There’s a long history of these types of salads, starting, by various accounts, in 1950s Hollywood, where Jean Leon, the owner of La Scala, “invented” the chopped salad, allegedly to ward against stars, clad in evening gowns and tuxedos, staining themselves with an errant leaf or misguided flip of dressing. Nancy Silverton, of Los Angeles’s Mozza, told Bon Appetit that its appeal lay in the ability to “get a perfect, well distributed bite in every forkful”, and the La Scala salad was allegedly the first food she asked for after giving birth.
Spoon salads rode a wave a few years ago in newspaper food sections and food magazines, and now a combination of these mixed salads reign on social media. Type “spoon salad” into Instagram and an abundance of health immediately floods the grid. Some are tossed in bowls big enough to bathe a baby in, some are piled high into mason jars, ready for a healthful, colorful lunch-on-the-go.
Many of the people who post about chopped salads are women, but the appeal of a chop is gender neutral. A friend shared one of her favorite accounts: a guy in a sports tank top, rapidly slicing zucchini and other tender veg, grinning wildly while crunk music plays in the background. His account has nearly half a million followers.
Ben-Ishay seemingly spends hours every day by her cutting board, a cleaver-like knife in one hand, a bench scraper in the other, making salads so tiny they can be spooned up with a tortilla chip, her preferred salad vehicle. She’s so committed to the chop that she’ll even chop microgreens, which are, existentially, micro already. And she’s quick to use an abbreviation – “cukes” instead of cucumbers, “nooch” instead of nutritional yeast.
“She doesn’t even say the full words to things,” a friend and fellow Melissa-lover pointed out. “Everything is chopped.” A content creator for our attention-strapped age, if there ever was one.
Even for micro-queens, there are downsides: the time it takes, the clean-up. “On a regular basis, I’m on my hands and knees with a damp paper towel doing a swoosh of that little area between the runner and the edge of my island where all the bits of cucumber and cabbage fly,” Ben-Ishay told me, “because they fly everywhere.” And there are the upsides, too, the simplest being, in her words: “It makes salad fun.”
But, perhaps more to the point, for those time-strapped folks who’d as soon pick up a knife as get out the soufflé pan, it’s a particularly of-the-moment salve, one that’s just the right amount of Zen for our addled generation. In the world of the microchop, all is orderly, healthful and well.
So, as the news careens around us and we hurtle towards the rev up of the school year, if you’re feeling anxious or at loose ends? I have a remedy: chop it up. And if you don’t want to? Watch someone else do it.
Sophie Brickman is a contributor to the New Yorker, the New York Times and other publications, and the author of Baby, Unplugged: One Mother’s Search for Balance, Reason, and Sanity in the Digital Age. Her first novel, Plays Well With Others, comes out in August 2024
