Samantha Chery

Egg shortages have left people scrambling for alternatives or eating the cost of expensive cartons. Avocados and tomatoes could get pricier as tariffs on Mexico and Canada fluctuate.

But rising food costs are no problem for content creators who craft recipe videos without actual food. Some TikTokers have built followings by cracking brown Lego eggs, prying open balloon avocados and stacking burgers with crocheted sliced tomatoes.

In one video, Kiyana Phillips, 21, shows off her homemade Chipotle bag, complete with a hand-drawn version of the fast-casual restaurant’s logo. Using a two-dimensional fork and some video-editing magic, she pretends to dig into a burrito bowl, pouring queso over the entrée and dipping chips into a container of guacamole - all of which are made out of paper. “Chipotle Mukbang: Broke Edition,” she titled the video, which has racked up 2.5 million views.

Food historians and trend experts say that while the fake-food phenomenon - using construction paper, Legos, crocheted yarn, wood or balloon scraps - has found a fan base on social media in the past year, people have been making imitation food for centuries. Still, the most recent videos also serve a distinct purpose in today’s society, providing entertainment and comfort in distressing times.

Phillips, an aspiring art teacher in Greenville, North Carolina, said she drew inspiration for her PaperEats TikTok page last year from ASMR and mukbang videos.

In one of her most popular TikToks, of a seafood boil, she starts the video by giving a new meaning to imitation crab: Phillips snaps open a paper king crab leg, revealing a dangling piece of its “meat.” She spends the rest of the video “cooking” colored paper in a hand-drawn pot and skillet, including small, cut-up squares of white, red, yellow and green paper to represent her seasonings and sticks of butter (yellow rectangular tubes) that morph into pools of curvy pieces of paper when “melted.”

She has heard from viewers that her recipes, which she gets from her favorite restaurants, fan suggestions, her mom and TikTok, instill a sense of childlike wonder and nostalgia for her nearly 1 million followers. Some kids have tried their hand at making paper food after watching her content.

“I like that it unlocks some people’s childhood. They get a sense of joy,” she said. “I also want people to understand you can make something out of nothing. … Just use your imagination and be creative, and whatever you want to make, put it to the test.”

The videos have also been a way to joke about how expensive real food has gotten. “Only seafood boil I can afford,” one commenter wrote with a sobbing emoji under her video, which racked up 55.7 million views.

Kate Festeryga, founder of the agricultural technology start-up Edie Farming and an avid food trend analyst, says that, on top of the satisfaction the artsy tutorials bring, society might also be embracing fake food because of its affordability, reinforcing how pricier food and the skill to prepare it well can sometimes be deemed a luxury.

In recent years, Festeryga has noticed how celebrities and influencers have flexed large amounts of food on social media as luxury items: vast tablescapes of fresh food, carrot sticks placed at the bottom of flower vases and Hailey Bieber dropping groceries in an ad campaign. Fake-food creators, on the other hand, are satiating the appetites of cooking video fanatics without the steep grocery costs and food waste.