Endless Thread - Ruby Tandoh, the World's Best Lasagna,and how the internet is collectively changing what we all want to eat

Episode Date: December 5, 2025

The internet decides what's for dinner. Ruby Tandoh is the author of the new book, All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now. A stint on the Great British Bake Off when she was in college launched her into the world of cookbooks — increasingly irrelevant in a world where we're more likely to turn to Google for a recipe than turn to our bookshelves — and provided her an education in how pop culture stokes our cravings. She takes Ben and Amory on a journey from the surprising history of AllRecipes and the "world's best lasagna," to the TikTok food trends of today. (Spoiler: they don't always taste particularly good.) Show notes: All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now Credits: This episode was produced by Grace Tatter and hosted by Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson. It was edited by Meg Cramer. Mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski.

Support for endless thread comes from Mathworks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Mayrotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? And, of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts.

WBUR Podcasts, Boston. Pandemics. Political unrest in America. The onset of winter. Whatever you are trying to escape completely, for certain set of people, there's really only one go-to show. With its own culture, its own delightful contestants and judges, and its own catchphrases.

No soggy bottom. No soggy bottom. A soggy bottom. For the uninitiated, that is not necessarily what it sounds like. It is food television icon Mary Berry, former judge of the show The Great British Bake Off. Or for us Americans, the Great British Baking Show. A show that is as politely British and rated G as you might imagine. And about as massively popular as you can imagine.

The show's finale episodes have pulled over 10 million viewers. But that doesn't mean the most proper presentation of prelines and bun cakes from across the pond is without controversy, including controversy swirling around its contestants. Before and after, they go on the show. Ruby Tando, contestant from way back in 2013, was a favorite at the time. Maybe because she was kind of funny. I'm making a rhubarb and custard cake, just because I really like rhubarb.

and I was like, I need to put it into one recipe, so I'll get it over and done with while I can before I get kicked out. Of course, popularity can be fickle, and Ruby is a woman. So she did get some extra attention online. There were suggestions that she only got as far as she did because she was attractive. But when online trolls attacked her, she attacked back. She called one person coming for her on Twitter,

a, quote, bitter old witch. After she made it to the semi-examination, semifinals, Tando wrote an essay for The Guardian that put those spicy responses into well-appointed long form. Writing, quote, as the series went on, I noticed an increasing degree of personal vitriol and misogyny. We female finalists are supposedly too meek, too confident, too thin, too domestic, too smiley, too taciturn. If I see one more person use the hackneyed doe-eyed pun, baker's dough, not like the deer dough, I will personally go to their house and force-feed them an entire Charlotte Royale. Well, we got good news and bad news. No, Ruby did not force-feed us an entire Charlotte Royal.

I confess, I don't even know what that is. But she did agree to talk to us because Tando's combination of sharp writing and being unafraid, nay, interested in the impact of the internet on our food choices, has resulted in a decade-long post-bake-off career of cookbooks. and essays. She's written about everything from why we eat what we eat to the dangers of food and wellness industries and her own struggles with disordered eating. Her latest collection of hot takes is fresh out the oven. It's called All Consuming Why We Eat What We Eat Now. The answer to the why in the past few decades is the internet. I'm Ben Brock Johnson. I'm Amory Seavertson. And coming to you from WBUR and B. Austin, this is endless bread.

Just kidding, endless bread. You know, we've made that joke on the show before. Yeah, it still hits. It still hits. Still hits. Today, Ruby Tando and our endless appetites. Three. Two.

One. Do you spend more time eating food or looking at food on screens? I absolutely spend more time looking at food, thinking about food, being presented. being presented with recipes and things like that without even wanting them than I do eating, like without a doubt. And I think actually that much is true for so many of us now, really, isn't it? Because, you know, it punctures every part of culture, even down to, I don't know, mainstream TV shows that end up incidentally being about restaurants, something like the bear, or, I mean, you only have to log onto Instagram and it's foods you're seeing a lot of the time.

So it's everywhere. It's relentless. Are you trying to push back on some of this? There's way too much food content online and it's changing our, you know, how deep our relationships to food can really be. Are you actively trying to push back against some of these things? Or is it more of a, I'm trying to name the thing as I see it and create more awareness that this is happening? I think what I really want is to just to understand. it and to understand my place in it and in theory to help, you know, other people to understand their place in it as well. I definitely don't think that it's inherently a bad thing, although I do think that it is an overwhelming thing. I've been part of food media for kind of a decade now and I've written cookbooks and I've done recipes online and all of this. I've been on food TV. So I've partaken in this kind of all-consuming food media landscape. And so I just wanted to take half a step back,

you know, beyond the trend cycle and ask, well, how does this all work? Because once you can orient yourself a bit, then you can navigate yourself through it a little bit better. I'm always kind of amazed when I hear about some beautiful new cookbook coming out because I myself am someone who's a little afraid to collect cookbooks, like, will I really use that? Or am I just going to Google, you know, butter bean whatever what the recipe would be creamy beanie creamy creamy there you go

yes yes I'm curious what cookbooks you have in your kitchen right now or what cookbooks were kind of a staple of your upbringing and kind of the space that those still occupy in your life in a world of Googling

butter bean recipes and such I mean I grew up with my parents had quite a lot of cookbooks. So like some classics, like, you know, Nigel Slater's Kitchen Diaries or the Moosewood Cookbook, Nigella Lawson and stuff like this. So I loved looking through those even as a child and I kind of carried a few of them with me into adulthood as well. And I hold onto them like these precious objects. But I mean, do I cook from them? Absolutely not. I almost never actually crack them open to cook, them kind of more about reading or kind of curating the kind of cook I would like to be, but in reality, I'm not. But, you know, in the age of Google, I can search for

any recipe any time and that kind of abundance of choice, unfortunately, does lead me away from cookbooks. If you too have Google the recipe, you've almost certainly encountered allrecipes.com, which is a key ingredient to understanding how the internet has changed. changed what's on the menu? All recipes is, you know, I would say my favorite and least trustworthy recipe website. That's so funny because I used to use it all the time and now I never use it. So that's that tracks for me. So why is it your favorite? I just think it's absolutely fascinating. So it's one of the earlier recipe websites online. It was developed in the late 90s by just some guides in Seattle. And what I love about it,

is that it is almost entirely user-generated. And it has been from the start. So you had this early democracy of recipe content. And obviously, without editorial intervention, what this tends towards is some recipes that are kind of great and become almost like folk hero recipes. And other recipes, a great many of them are just terrible or, you know, at best kind of derivative,

copies of things that are already on there. so on. Yeah, uninspired. Exactly. But I love it as an archive of American food culture because it captures a kind of largely ignored middle ground of just home cooking by people who have to cook more or less every day, usually for families. And I think so much of food media at the time when all recipes was becoming a thing was kind of divided between the coasts. So you've got the kind of big media groups kind of producing food media stars or, you know, somewhere like New York Times doing their cooking section. It launched around the same time as an independent thing. So in between the coastal things, you've got a distinctly Midwestern, middle American,

middle level of cooking expertise platform that was actually the biggest cookbook effectively in America. It had so, so, so many recipes on it. And I think that's fascinating. It's kind of like Wikipedia for recipes, it felt like, right? You still end up if you Google like how to make blah, blah, blah. Like it will, all recipes will be way up there. But it might have, for instance, a 4.5 star mac and cheese recipe posted under the username God loves ugly. Exactly. And that's why, like, what's not to love about that? I think it's fantastic that you could have logged onto the internet in like, I don't know, 1999, posted that recipe under God Love's Ugly, and it lives on. It has dedicated followers even now. I think that's beautiful.

And I think that was, it's such a relic, I think that's why I love it, of a time when internet food content was truly the novices game. I love the phrase that you used a minute ago here. You said something like folk hero recipes. What did you mean when you say that or what do you think of when you hear that phrase folk hero recipe? I mean, there's one on all recipes by this guy called John Chandler who has passed away now, but he uploaded the recipe in something like 2000 or 2001. I'm not exactly sure when. It's called world's best lasagna. And that has got to be, I would put money on it, the most made lasagna recipe in the world. I'm certain of it. You know, it has tens of of thousands of written reviews, even more star reviews.

So you can only imagine how many people have made it. And that's just some guy, just some guy called John. And I think, you know, what a wonderful legacy for him to have left. Just like this this lasagna, which I'm sure is good, but I would suspect benefited from being the first lasagna recipe on the early internet to call itself well best. Put it on his gravestone. Put it on his gravestone. These days, a lot of people are more likely to peruse, say, the New York Times cooking app than a book on their shelves, or even Allrecipies.com.

And often we find our way to these digital recipe collections through visual first platforms like Instagram and TikTok. The democracy of all recipes is giving way to the supremacy of who knows how to take a good picture. One of the most popular recipe platforms in the UK is Mob Kitchen. Its homepage is filled with well-lit images of brightly colored pastas and simmering beans. To Ruby, Mob is emblematic of how social media is changing recipes. Basically what they do is just to develop recipe after recipe after recipe with social media in mind. So obviously lots of recipe developers are already doing this on platforms like Instagram, but kind of mob consolidates so many of them in one place.

So you have this platform and it's huge in the UK. They've got so many paying subscribers and millions of followers on like Instagram and TikTok that is churning out these recipes that are so intensely craveable because they've kind of clocked the formula that makes a recipe go viral online. So they're really, really working that. And I think there's such a fascinating encapsulation of this new era of recipes that we're seeing, you know, in the age of social media. Some recipes on mob right now.

Crispy mushroom and black bean tacos with pea guacamole. Oh my God, pea guacamole? No. Crispy cod with spring onion and sesame butter sauce. Hmm. Ten minutes smoky Harissa creamy butter beans. They used to call me crispy creamy butter bean in middle school. Honestly, you could do a lot worse for a nickname.

I'd be proud to be crispy, creamy butter bean. I feel like I need to maybe profess my own ignorance as much more of a, you know, consumer, one who benefits from these kinds of online recipes than someone who tries to like make my own on my watching 10. I'm more of an eater. That's a good way to put it. I'm more of an eater. I'm the puppet whose strings are being pulled by people developing recipes online. So I don't feel like I even really understand the difference between a recipe created for the internet with certain goals in mind versus a recipe published in a cookbook. I mean, firstly, I'm glad that there are some people out there not publishing recipes online.

We cannot, we can't take more. Good. I solemnly swear not to post my tofu bacon, my tofu lettuce, tomato recipe. But to your question, I think obviously there are some fundamentals of tastes that cannot be changed particularly or improved. But a recipe in a cookbook is such a different entity to one that's designed for the internet. Precisely because a cookbook is a product that you buy with, let's say, 100 recipes in it. It is a body of work and it usually has a well-known food person attached to it. So what you are buying is a certain kind of authority. You're also buying an object and you're also

buying whatever kind of overarching food philosophy is represented by the sum of those recipes. That's the product. Whereas a recipe online is detached from those things. It has to sell itself on its own merits, on its own craveability. It doesn't have all of this other stuff to fall back on. And so what you have is recipes that are designed to be as instantly craveable as possible. So whether that's kind of certain colors being deployed again and again, certain adjectives, you know, crispy, crunchy chicken schnitzel, that kind of a vibe. I'm sure you've seen that kind of thing going around online. Like that's where we're going when a recipe has to sell itself. A crispy, creamy, spicy, shredded sheet pan second course.

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Creative Studio. Getting recipes from the internet instead of cookbooks is one way our digital lives dictate what we crave. There are also viral videos of specific restaurants or food items. A lot of times we don't end up eating the food we drool over online. It's almost more pure entertainment, like anything else on our social media feeds. A food hype man that Ruby writes about in her new book, All-consuming, is Keith Lee. He's a former emmer. MMA fighter who now basically exclusively post restaurant reviews on TikTok, often from the front seat of a car. Yesterday afternoon, I got an email from an employee of a family-owned restaurant here in Vegas.

I got it. Let's try it and rate them one through ten. Keith's reviews are usually wholesome and enthusiastic. Because places like this that don't nobody know of, this is a 9.8 out of 10. I'm a wholeheartedly agree with them. They are also hugely popular. Keith has 17 million followers from all around the world. Most of them can't visit the places he tries, but the followers who can do, which means that for many restaurant owners, Keith Lee's TikToks have been life-changing.

They're calling it the Keith Lee effect, and the owners here at this restaurant in Warner Robbins say it may have just saved their business. Keith reminds me of the show No Reservations or that show Diner's Drive-ins and Dives, except led by somebody who wasn't part of the food industry until he started posting about it. Most of Keith's videos are about small, lesser-known restaurants. But he also occasionally participates in food trends that have already gone viral.

Ruby follows Lee, and she noticed that while he was in London, he visited the bustling borough market to try some fan favorites. This feels like we're about to go on a ride at Disneyland that just opened. Including some TikTok famous chocolate-covered strawberries It is a very high-quality chocolate. The chocolate is super rich.

Very big and very fresh strawberries. That's a whack dessert from my perspective. Don't need it. Strawberries are delicious. Chocolate's delicious. You don't need to dip one in the other. It's fine. That's a bad take, I'm saying.

No, I know. I'm afraid I agree. I think it's a terrible dessert. It is terrible. Thank you, Ruby. Thank you. Oh, I love it. Okay, why is it terrible?

I mean, I think just, fundamentally on a chemical level, I do not think that strawberries and chocolate are good. That's just my opinion. One is more watery. Well, exactly. There we go. What about raspberries and chocolate, Ruby? How do you feel about that?

Oh, I would actually say that is far better. Thank you very much. Far better, but people sleep on it. Please go on, yes. But yeah, these, you know, strawberry and kind of chocolate fondue, it's, it became this huge thing in London. It was maybe two years ago, two and a half years ago. And people were calling them, you know, the barren market strawberries. That's where you got them from.

And they very quickly became viral for reasons I don't entirely understand beyond the fact that they just looked cute on camera. And I cannot tell you how big this trend was. Okay, we're in the barrow market and we're going to try the chocolate-covered strawberries. There were thousands of videos racking up millions and millions of likes. Each strawberry is like the fin of. handpicks using AI. This kind of quickly turned into a slightly meta phenomenon as well,

where it wasn't just that people were going and posting about it, it's that people were deliberately going because it was viral. First things first, the chocolate-covered strawberry thing that everybody's going crazy over. We're in Burrow Market trying the viral chocolate strawberry shop. And so there's this kind of exponential hype mechanism. You know, and people were even making up stories like, I flew from Australia to get the viral.

chocolate-covered strawberries, which of course wasn't true. But, you know, those videos then did well because people thought that was outrageous. The Kronutification of... I mean, they make the Kro-nut look like a kind of vestige of a more innocent time. You know, that's... They really do. The rainbow bagel, the Kro-nut, rainbow bagel. All of mine are New York-based. That's all I got. It's funny, actually, that you mention New York, right? because when I was trying to understand, well, where, why did we start getting into, so into the idea of kind of having what is already, quote, unquote, viral? You know, my research led back to kind of New York in the early blogging days. Oh, no.

Because when you have like the first shake shack, I think you know where I'm going with this. And you had the, the shack cam, I think it was maybe called at one point, you know, the webcam that monitored the queue. and that was like way back in 2006 or something like that. I'm terrible with dates. But in any case, you've got this physical line and then you have the representation of the line and all the kind of the line becomes a character in itself, right? That is a turning point where the line is this wonderful character

in any restaurant story. And now what we've got is the line takes this kind of slightly amorphous but extremely compelling form online where it is, you know, the view count, you know, when you go on TikTok, you can see, well, how many people have viewed this, how many people have liked it. And often I find myself looking at that before I even watch the video. And that is, you know, where the hype train has gone now. It's really interesting, but there is that through line way back to the blogging days. I sound geriatric saying that, but, you know, there is a continuity, even though the mechanisms have changed. The blogs, it came from the blogs. in my day. Do you think there's a pre-internet version of that? The funny thing is that the pre-internet versions, I mean, I think in general people are more interested in restaurants and stuff now.

So that kind of explains why these things are more of a thing now. But it's also about the medium. It's what I was saying before about when food media changes or when platforms change and technologies change, so do our ways of relating to foods. Because back in the days where restaurants buy and large, were reservations led and where you would make a reservation by calling up a restaurant, there is no visible manifestation of a hype line or a view count or something like that. There might be sought after recommendations, tables that are impossible to get,

but there wasn't that visibility. And once you moved to a line being outside a place or whatever it is, that's when you get hype becoming its own driver of more hype. And, you know, what could be a better ad for a restaurant than a line out of? the door. That's where we've come to. You know, I'm aware that for me, social media has made me see and therefore think about food so much more than I would otherwise, I think. And because you've been open in the past about dealing with an eating disorder, how do you think about the constant barrage of food content that any one of us might see, just say?

scrolling through social media any given day. And is it a good thing? Is it a bad thing? Is it something that we can kind of like take the reins back from? What do you make of it? I mean, for me, I think it's funny, I guess I actually draw a weird distinction and I don't know if this is a justified one between kind of seeing food online and actually the way that I relate to food in my day-to-day life. So, you know, these days my relationship with food is, you know, really peaceable and enjoyable and fun. But, you know, I think for a lot of people, you can spend all day browsing kind of hype bakery content on Instagram, and it really have no relation to the way you're eating. It's hard to figure out just like which parts of our online consumption, like figure into our real life.

But what I would say is that the content that is particularly enjoyable is actually in a weird way that all recipes style, you know, slightly old fashioned or slightly slower, slightly less glitzy food stuff where people will share a little bit of their lives. And they'll say, do you know what, I make this for some woman at church and whatever. That is the kind of stuff that when you chance upon it makes food seem very personal. and very warm and, you know, almost familial in its way. And so not that it's about advice or anything like that, but like those are the corners of the internet that I do try to encourage people to seek out if they're like, I am sick of seeing smash burgers or I'm sick of seeing like whatever. Like it's a different tempo. Dubai chocolate. Exactly.

Don't get me started on Dubai chocolate. I'm so curious to hear what you had to say about it now because it has taken over. Here's the thing. I always want to kind of find out, well, what is the root of this particular trend? But I think, you know, do it enough times and you realize that there will always be a new trend. It will probably come up, you know, while you're halfway through reporting the first one. And that's why, you know, it's nice to go back to fundamentals. Like, what is the deeper thing happening here? One of the realizations that Ruby came to while writing all-consuming was that she, a baker, cookbook writer, thinker of

of food thoughts has, quote, never had an original craving in her life. We asked her what she meant by that. I'm self-centered as much as as anyone. And I kind of thought of my food preferences as very unique to me. And so I existed in this little universe of my own cravings, my own tastes, the way that I like to do things. And of course that remains something that's important to me. But as I was looking at how media and the internet and all of these forces shape our appetites, I realized, like, do you know what?

I am so a part of these broader networks of taste. I am so a part of them. And my appetites are very much in conversation with those of not only people halfway across the world, but, you know, people kind of 50, 75, 300 years back in time. it is such an incredibly connective force, the way that tastes change and all of this. And it actually made me feel very much less precious about my appetites. And that was, frankly, a relief. And it's a really, really hopeful position to be in, to feel connected to other people

through the foods you eat. Well, Ruby, it's been a true pleasure speaking with you. And thank you so much for taking all of this time to talk to us. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. And thank you for, yeah, thank you for kind of engaging with the topic. So thoughtfully, I really appreciate it. Endless Threat is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was produced by Grace Tatter and hosted by me, Ben Brett Johnson. That's good. And me, Amory, what was that? Suflet, Severson. Sufla, oh, that's good. Amory, souffle, Sieverton. Or cinnamon roll. I love a cinnamon roll.

Cinnamon roll. Amory cinnamon roll, Siebertson. It was edited by Meg Kramer, Mix and Sound Design by Emily Dinkowski. The rest of our team is Dean Russell, Frannie Monaghan, our production manager, Paul Vikis, and our managing producer, Summante Joshi. Endless thread is a show about the blurred

lines between online communities and soggy bottoms. If you have an untold history, an unsolved mystery, or another story from the internet, you want us to dust with some sugar and serve hot you can hit us up endless thread at wb ur.org.