This is a story about #content which, unless you’re a deinonychus, does not include print media. While reading the rest of this post, try and forget the fact that Bon Appétit is a magazine first (a fact easily forgotten by the BA team as made apparent by last months issue which featured a giant truck on their cover).

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The home cook’s love of Bon Appétit must rely on their knack for fancifying something just enough to impress someone. Nobody feels comfortable bringing parsnips to a potluck unless they can call them ~*confit*~ parsnips. And pulled pork sandwiches are so trailer trash unless it’s actually “shredded bo ssäm” between those buns. Recently the sentiment started leaning less on impressive tricks and more on relatable faces when Brad Leone proved that goofing around in the kitchen and in the editing room could bump up engagement numbers. “It’s Alive” was the best new series to come out of the test kitchen, and remains in that top spot. Given its success, the powers that be seem to be attempting to apply that same hashtag relatable filter on top of everything else that churns out of the test kitchen, from a 45-second feature of Molly’s “CEA SAL” (sic) shoes to a relentless feed of daily food photo captions that start with “HEY GIRLFRIEND DO U EVER FEEL LIKE NETFLIX IS BAE”.

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This brain worm has infected each head of the BA Hydra. Healthyish is 20% about food that’s mostly good for you, and 80% about hyper-local gender-neutral clothing dyed with organic food blends. Whether you think that’s a noble endeavor or a slimy cash grab from capitalist hogs who could have done a lot more good by giving that food to hungry people, the point is that BA’s content is much more about the stories of people who lay their hands on food and not so much about what hits the dish.

What does any of this mean for a viewer? Well, all this talking makes everything longer. Regular recipe videos went from 6 minutes of focused education to 18 minute sessions of Friendship Simulator 2000. It’s actually depressing to see a titan of industry sink to unbelievably lazy text-based dropship merch in the description just one year after the first sip of clout juice.

You might think the informative educational content might have migrated somewhere else, like the longform Bon Appétit Foodcast, but after a 1-year subscription I can confidently report that the problem is only worse in the format of an hour-long radio show about words that rhyme with “rice” during which you scream at Adam Rapoport to stop pronouncing Bon Appétit weird from inside your car on the way to work. When the interviewers aren’t obediently slobbing a guest’s fish stick in praise of ethical responsible business practices that turned out to be scams, they’re asking questions to some of the most tone-deaf caricatures of New York Foodies you could imagine. In episode 198 at 40:32, someone tries to argue that brunch is in fact an act of protest (suggesting of course that it only counts if you eat it at a restaurant like hers). In episode 164, the guest repeatedly scoffs in disgust at people who can’t afford world class mirin (29:01), at people who use non-imported sesame oil (32:28), at kewpie mayo (43:06), and at the word “umami” (26:32). It’s a true endurance marathon of audible shitheadery.

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So in the end, even though they lost Christopher Kimball, America’s Test Kitchen remains the insurmountable queen of thoughtful food content, and every night I pray to God Bridget Lancaster doesn’t become a viral tiktok sensation, lest ATK suffer the same fate as Bon “Fortnite Juice Recipe” Appétit.