Food writing is dead. We had a decent run of it – an unbroken 201 years from the publication of Brillat-Savarin’s Physiology of Taste in 1825 (to which our front cover attests). But nothing lasts forever. Over the past few years, short-form video has become mass media’s dominant format. Food culture is now being moulded by a new generation, who do not have to rely on the gatekeepers of legacy media to reach their audience: young cooking influencers who use montage and jump cuts to sell a dizzying array of recipes; enterprising YouTubers who put together travel content and dispatches in the exploratory spirit of Bourdain; restaurant influencers who have supplanted the critic with the art of kayfabe, performing ludicrous characters to grab our attention. This transition has contributed to the homogenisation of food media into a series of tics and formats that please the algorithm, and yet it has also allowed people shut out of food writing to speak about their culture on their own terms. The content they produce is chaotic, tasteless, infuriating, diabolical, unpoliced and, sometimes, brilliant. The age of the influencer is upon us: you can love it or hate it, but either way, you have to take it seriously.