Appetite Series

Who decides what
we want to eat now?

Twelve people

Twelve people · Twelve drawings · One a month

The Appetite Series looks at the people on our screens who are quietly — and sometimes very loudly — changing what we eat.

Chefs, creators, critics, founders and cultural figures whose influence now travels through feeds, videos, platforms and algorithms. They can turn an unknown restaurant into a queue overnight, revive a forgotten dish, move an ingredient around the world or change what millions of people suddenly consider worth eating.

Some cook. Some review. Some entertain. Some simply point a camera at lunch. But each has become part of the new machinery of appetite.

Every month, Eat Your Screen draws one of them and asks a bigger question. Who decides what we want to eat now?

Illustration: a bearded man in a blue jacket bites into an overstuffed sandwich on a New York street, a yellow cab passing behind him. A hand in the foreground holds up a phone filming him, his face repeated on its screen, and cyan machine-vision brackets track his head and hands.

No. 01 / 12

NextAppetite maker

Action Bronson

Appetite as performance — eating for the camera

Chapter 01 · You Photographed Dinner Before You Ate It

Illustration: a man eats a forkful of loaded fries alone in a parked car, the seat beside him covered in takeaway containers, a phone on a mount filming his face. Through the window, a family watches from a lit takeaway at dusk with a queue stretching down the street.

No. 02 / 12

ComingBoth

Keith Lee

The verdict economy — one review moves a whole street

Chapter 02

Illustration: a laughing, heavily tattooed chef in a white t-shirt and apron passes a loaded plate across a busy professional kitchen. Cooks work behind him, one tossing a flaming pan, while two people in the foreground film him on a phone and a small camera.

No. 03 / 12

ComingBoth

Matty Matheson

Persona and authenticity — the chef as character

Chapter 03

Illustration: a woman in a white shirt serves from a large bowl at a crowded kitchen table of friends drinking wine. A laptop sits open on a recipe beside handwritten pages, and a phone on a small tripod films her, showing her on its screen.

No. 04 / 12

ComingTastemaker

Alison Roman

The recipe as identity — cooking to signal

Chapter 04

Illustration: a bald man in glasses and a linen jacket lifts a forkful of pasta at an outdoor table in an Italian street market, a stallholder with crates of tomatoes behind him. A two-person film crew records the meal and a monitor beside them shows his face.

No. 05 / 12

ComingTastemaker

Stanley Tucci

Taste as class — who is allowed to be discerning

Chapter 05

Illustration: a woman in a dark satin robe eats from a bowl in front of an open, brightly lit fridge late at night. The kitchen behind her is dim, with a laid table and a camera waiting on a tripod, and a hand in the foreground holds a phone showing her on its screen.

No. 06 / 12

ComingTastemaker

Nigella Lawson

Intimacy and the lens — the camera in the kitchen

Chapter 06

Illustration: a curly-haired cook in a white t-shirt and blue apron places a garnish with tweezers, absorbed in the plate, while other cooks work along the pass behind him and a room of onlookers watches from a gallery above.

No. 07 / 12

ComingBoth

Jeremy Allen White

The kitchen as drama — service as spectacle

Chapter 07

Illustration: a smiling man in a blue jacket hands a burger and fries to children across a table of identical trays. Behind him an industrial hall of workers packs the same boxes in rows under a camera crane, while phones and a large camera record from every side.

No. 08 / 12

ComingAppetite maker

MrBeast

Scale — food as content at industrial volume

Chapter 08

Illustration: a man in sunglasses sprinkles salt down his raised forearm onto a large steak in a gilded dining room with chandeliers. Every diner around the table holds up a phone, and his image is repeated on each of their screens.

No. 09 / 12

ComingAppetite maker

Salt Bae

The meme meal — gesture eats the dish

Chapter 09

Illustration: a man in a yellow jacket presents a sandwich to camera on a London street while a friend films him on a compact camera. Behind them a red bus passes and diners eat at pavement tables, and hands at the edges of the frame hold out two more bowls toward the lens.

No. 10 / 12

ComingAppetite maker

TopJaw

The city as a list — place reduced to itinerary

Chapter 10

Illustration: a grey-haired chef in whites and round glasses gestures over a single small dish displayed on a plinth as though in a gallery, a young commis at his shoulder. A family photograph and an open handwritten notebook sit beside it while a phone films from below.

No. 11 / 12

ComingTastemaker

Massimo Bottura

Waste and virtue — the moral plate

Chapter 11

Illustration: a young cook lifts noodles from a wok while filming themselves on a phone under a ring light in a small kitchen. Their image multiplies into a cascade of identical screens rising behind them, and in the windows opposite, neighbours are filming too.

No. 12 / 12

ComingAppetite maker

Anonymous TikTok creator

The feed eats itself — everyone is the machine

Chapter 12

The drawings are original works made for Eat Your Screen. Each portrait is our own interpretation of a public figure, drawn for the series. Rights and permissions.

Who decides whatwe want to eat now?

Twelve people

Action Bronson

Keith Lee

Matty Matheson

Alison Roman

Stanley Tucci

Nigella Lawson

Jeremy Allen White

MrBeast

Salt Bae

TopJaw

Massimo Bottura

Anonymous TikTok creator

Who decides what
we want to eat now?