Abstract
On March 23, 2020, Christina Tosi, pastry chef and owner of the renowned New York City bakery Milk Bar, asked her Instagram followers if they wanted to join her baking club (“#baking club starts”). Since then, Tosi has been baking and leading what she calls Bake Club on Instagram Live at 2 p.m. When Bake Club members (known as Bake Clubbers) look back, 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic will be memorialized through photos of food posted on Instagram, which trigger the taste of a countless number of cookies, the relationships such food allowed us to develop, and the unique ways – like exchanging recipes and learning to be more creative in the kitchen – that food connected us to other people through mostly virtual interactions. As a card-carrying Bake Clubber, I watched, baked, and wondered how the group developed a collective home baker identity for its members, the importance of this identity, and what this community formation teaches us about food and activism. This article attempts to understand how cooking, food, a celebrity chef, and a hashtag foster parasocial relationships (those that might not occur in person) during the COVID-19 pandemic.