Why Instagramable meat-and-cheese boards are big business for ‘charcuterie influencers’
Millennials are feasting with their eyes and loving the most appealing food images on social media
Maggie Johnson filmed herself in October washing cartons of blackberries and grapes over a marble-lined sink, slicing wedges of cheese and opening packages of cured meats before arranging them around a circular wooden board.
Three months later, she’s amassed more than 175,000 followers to her TikTok page @magsmeals, where she regularly shares charcuterie-related videos.
“It blows my mind every time I open the app and have a hundred notifications or 2,000 new followers,” she said.
Johnson – who started making charcuterie boards for her sorority sisters in college – realised she had tapped into an obsession among young Americans seeking out charcuterie content.
Though charcuterie has been a culinary delicacy for centuries, it only flourished into a social media phenomenon in the past year, marking those like Johnson as “charcuterie influencers” along the way.
Aspirational meat and cheese
The word charcuterie is derived from the French words “chair” and “cuit”, which translate to “flesh” and “cooked”, respectively. According to the food blog Serious Eats, charcuterie first rose to prominence in the 1400s in France “to represent storefronts specialising in the preparation of pig and offal at a time when shop owners weren’t allowed to sell uncooked pork”.
The owners of these shops, known as charcutiers, grew popular for their thoughtful meat preparation that helped establish stylised plates of “cooked flesh” as a part of French gastronomic culture. Over time, breads, cheeses, fruits and vegetables joined the boards as accoutrements to the succulent meats, forming the charcuterie board as we know it today.