Japan Times article: The influence of social media on food in the 2010s

I am pretty bad about linking to my Japan Times articles when they come out. I totally forgot to link to last month's article, which is about lotus root, with an interesting historic recipe for karashi renkon (mustard-miso stuffed lotus root). It doesn't age (the article that is), so I hope you take a look!

In any case, for this month's article I was asked by my editors at The Japan Times to do something that looked back at the 2010s. I decided to talk about the influence social media has hand on the food scene. As is the case everywhere, social media or SNS as it's called in Japan has really taken over as the main thing that influences people. The 2000s may have been the golden age of individual blogs, but the 2010s were mostly about social media.

I mainly talked about the impact of Instagram and Twitter. Japanese people are on other social media platforms too such as Facebook, but in terms of being influences on thagrae food scene in Japan, I think it falls far behind that of "Insuta" as Instagram is called, and Twitter. I hope you take a look!

Read How Social Media Changed 2010 Eating Habits

Incidentally, the two Twitter accounts I referred to in the article are Ryuji and Yoshiharu Doi; the first is an example of someone using social media (including YouTube) full on to emerge as a cooking "star"; and the other is an example of someone already well established as a TV cooking star using Twitter in an effective way.

The recipe (because of course I always include a recipe) is for really easy onigirazu, or rice sandwiches - something that got really popular via social media, with a big assist from Cookpad, in the mid-2010s, and has now become quite mainstream. The photo above is an alternate one I took for the article.