They’re everywhere. On your Instagram explore page, your Facebook newsfeed, and don’t even get me started about your Pinterest homepage. Food pictures have taken over our generation’s social media, leaving us drooling every time we open our phones.
What you may not know, however, is that some of the pictures you’ve been salivating over were posted by your very own classmates. That’s right, Wash U just might be the home of the food photographer behind that melty grilled cheese pic that sent you straight down to BD at midnight.
To crack this veil of social media wide open, here are some insider answers to the questions we’ve been dying to ask five Wash U student food-stagrammers: @letsgababoutfood, @sticks_and_scones, @craftycollegegirl, @burnt_brioche and @sweetnseattle.
1. How did you accumulate your follower base?
Recent graduate Gabrielle Aaron created her food-instagram-turned-website after her sophomore year at Wash U and now has over 15,000 followers. According to Gabrielle, “Building a follower base has been the hardest thing,” with followers and likes constantly varying, depending on outside factors. Last summer, the Instagram gained around 1,000 followers a week, but now, Gabrielle says she has been losing hundreds this year as a result of the plethora of food Instagrams crowding people’s feeds.
This mouthwatering account is run by four Wash U juniors: Andreea Gavrilescu, Sydney Greene, Mariah Weintraub and Lily Schroeder. While they can’t remember the exact start of their joint Instagram, they said it “evolved naturally out of their shared obsession and love of food.” Andreea, Mariah, Sydney and Lily began simply “posting for fun and friends, but one day, we woke up with 500 followers and decided to get a little more serious about it.” Their trips to New York City allowed them to expand their photo variety and in turn got them more and more followers.
Sophomore Maddy Sherman has taken home cooking to a new level with her creative Instagram full of homemade dishes. Maddy started her food Instagram in the summer after her freshman year at Wash U. “After coming home from college, where dorm cooking is pretty difficult,” she explained, “I decided that I was going to optimize my time at home and cook as much as possible.” Maddy started her account mainly for friends and family, and so far has been focusing more on making the food than spreading the word about the account. In the future, though, she says she would love to expand her follower base.
Senior Isabella Neuberg started @burnt_brioche over the summer of 2015 after joking with her friends for a while about starting a food Instagram. Isabella says that she’s been building her follower base since she first created the account. Thanks to a semester abroad, Isabella had the opportunity to take a lot of great food photos throughout Europe, “which definitely helped grow my follower base a bit quicker,” she said.
Freshman Audrey Stocker started her Seattle-based food Instagram after her sophomore year of high school. She began posting pictures of food around Seattle and liking pictures posted by other Seattle food Instagrams, which she said “began following her back and tagging their own friends in pictures.” From there, the account took off and now has 13.5k followers–and it’s growing every day.
2. What gets the most likes?
@letsgababoutfood
No surprise here: sugary, gluttonous foods get the most likes according to this seasoned Instagrammer. Gabrielle attributes the fascination with overly indulgent food pictures to our generation’s preoccupation with health, which she thinks “leads us to enjoy gawking at the things that look so wonderful because we know they’re bad for us.”
@sticks_and_scones
“Dessert or anything ‘on trend’ like acai bowls or rolled ice cream” is what elicits the most likes for this Instagram account, according to its owners. Scrolling through the feed, you’ll find every New York City foodie item as it appeared in real time, a true walk through ghosts of food trends past.
@craftycollegegirl
Maddy’s baked goods are not only her favorite thing to Instagram, but they also tend to get the most likes and attention from her followers. She’s planning on focusing on dorm cooking soon, given it’s so hard for students to cook “real meals” at school. She’s specifically hoping to include no-bake recipes and microwave-friendly dishes.
@burnt_brioche
Like the girls of @sticks_and_scones, Isabella finds that “trendy” foods tend to get the most likes. If a particular type of food is popular, the number of likes depends less on the quality of the photo.
@sweetnseattle
Along with extravagant dessert pictures, Audrey says that Asian food (specifically dumplings) tends to get more likes than the average picture on her page. She also notices that the “photos with bright colors tend to do better than those with browns or the same color all around.”
3. Do you feel weird taking pics of your food in public?
@letsgababoutfood
Unlike most food Instagrammers, Gabrielle says that she will not spend more than one to two minutes trying to get a good picture of whatever she’s eating. If the environment is not aesthetically pleasing, she “would rather not ruin the actual experience and taste of the hot food” by trying to find the right angle. I think we can all get behind that statement.
@sticks_and_scones
Honest about the reality of photographing everything they eat, the girls admit that there was some discomfort at first, but now they’re all used to it. Plus, it’s not like everyone else isn’t also taking pictures of their food by this point, Instagram or not.
@craftycollegegirl
Maddy is the one Instagrammer in this list who gets off easy when it comes to public food photography. Since her account is centered around food she makes herself at home, the only judgmental glares she may get are from her family and friends when they’re getting impatient waiting on her homemade lunch.
@burnt_brioche
Isabella admits that she used to be “a bit self conscious about taking pics of my food everywhere I went”. Although, by now, she says, “Most of my friends are pretty used to me taking food pics in public.”
@sweetnseattle
Audrey says that while she got over her embarrassment about taking food pictures in public a long time ago, she notices that her friends get more self conscious than she does. According to her, “As long as I get a good picture, I don’t really mind the strange looks from other people around me.”
See? Your classmates are good for more than just last-minute homework answers. Now that we’ve revealed some true campus foodies, give them a follow to keep up with the best and newest foods St. Louis, New York and L.A. have to offer.