Welcome to Eat Sleep Instagram , our weekly series of conversations with photographers behind the most drool-worthy Instagram accounts about how they’re navigating the digital age, deliciously.
This week, Taste Talks writer Amanda Odmark caught up with jack-of-all-trades @lukasvolger , co-creator of gay culture and food magazine Jarry , who told us about the new issue (coming this week!), hanging with Alice Waters, and building an online brand for burgers that feels authentic.
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Taste Talks: You have a lot of fun projects going at once, from Jarry Magazine , to your new cookbook Bowl and your own line of veggie burgers . How does social media play into that for you?
Lukas Volger: Differently for each of my projects. Instagram is where I put most of my social media energy, and for my personal feed I just try to be me, though with emphasis on my interest in food. Made by Lukas has been tricky for social media because it’s a line of veggie burgers, an actual product I sell; I still haven’t figured out how to make posts that aren’t nonstop pleas to buy stuff, and I don’t think anyone particularly enjoys engaging with that kind of thing. But Jarry (while is a group effort with my partners Steve Viksjo and Alex Kristofcak; I’m only partially involved in the Instagram feed) is fun because it’s all about the community we built. It’s very people-oriented, by and large it’s the way people find us, and for lots of them it’s our primary point of contact.
TT: How much time do you spend on social media?
LV: Oh, too much. As much as I love it, and have definitely used it as a resource for my work and to make friends, I have to do a social media fasts every now and then as a way to reset, put it all into perspective.
TT: How has social media offered connection for you? Do you have a favorite story of social media connecting you to someone you admire?
LV: For sure! I met Emily Gould through social media (though at the time—eight, nine years ago?—were we calling it that?). She’s old friend now. I originally wrote to her because I loved her writing, and she’s still one of my favorite writers. Last month I was traveling through Vancouver, Seattle, and San Francisco, and the bulk of my socializing was done with people I’d met through Instagram. At Jarry , we found our Issue 1 cover guy Blake Bashoff (Anjelica Huston’s personal chef) through Instagram, as well as many of our contributors. And I’ve definitely gone on dates via Instagram. 🙂
TT: Do you have any rules or advice for folks who are working to develop their social platform?
LV: Instagram presents a wonderful opportunity to combine both style and substance, and for food feeds I always gravitate towards those that are more than just pretty photos. We can’t all be amazing photographers and stylists, and nor should we be (I’m certainly not; I leave that to the actual pros). But we can be ourselves, hone our voices and personal aesthetics, and do our very, very best to resist the lowest-common-denominator temptation of trolling for likes and whatnot. Like writing, the best stuff reads as honest and real. Personally, hashtags and excessive tagging make me nauseous, but I know that those features are popular, so I try to be open-minded about it. But moreover, in my own feed I try to follow the rule that there should always be some value or a takeaway—in the form of a tip, recommendation, factoid, etc.—included with a photo.
Oh, one more thing. The word “content” makes my skin crawl, how it has been appropriated for our digital age. Never think of your work as “content.” Call it what it is—paintings, photographs, drawings, recipes, stories, essays, interviews—and be proud of it. “Content” sounds like cheap, empty, fill for the blank screen of a fleeting publishing platform, which I think is exactly what it’s supposed to sound like? But—that’s just my opinion.
TT: Do you get work/clients from Instagram?
LV: Not too much. I’ve connected with people through Instagram, though. I don’t do a lot of outside freelance work, and I don’t have a crazy following.
TT: How do you use Instagram to build your businesses?
LV: With varying degrees of success, I think it’s best to think of Instagram as a way to build and interact with your community, because it’s hard to tie it to sales deliverables. So with Made by Lukas , which as I said is faltering a bit, I’m training myself to think of it that way, and that’s largely how we utilize it for Jarry . For my personal Instagram it’s more about it being a home base for what I represent in my projects, like what a website used to be.
TT: Okay, last but not least: What was it like having dinner beside Alice Waters?
I’ve loved her cookbooks and everything that she represents—the purity and consistency of her message, her excellent recipes, and her activism for a long time. Then to sit right next to her at her own restaurant… Yeah, it was completely amazing.
