Why is everyone making Gigi Hadid’s pasta?

In 2022 you’d be lucky not to have come across a celebrity recipe. Only a few years ago, the odd Oprah approved salad or a rouge viral food combination (see: Channing Tatum’s odd sandwich fillings) was more than satisfactory. These recipes have since snowballed, surges of them being written and shared by celebrities left, right and centre. When did every star in Hollywood become a chef and, more importantly, why has the public’s appetite for their recipes grown?

May I redirect your gaze to the celebrity recipe that tipped the trend into the mainstream: Gigi Hadid’s infamous spicy vodka pasta. In 2020 the model posted an Instagram story of her preparing the dish, which consists of rigatoni cooked in a creamy tomato sauce. Nothing ground-breaking, one might think.

Within a week, the internet was flooded with recreations. The meal blocked Instagram feeds and headlines like ‘I made Gigi Hadid’s Pasta’ clogged search engines. The recipe grew in acclaim on TikTok (where else), where is currently boasts 113 Million views.

Whether Gigi intended to or not, she exposed an infinite online market for the celebrity world’s weeknight meals. Others were quick to capitalise. Social media ate up Chrissy Teigen’s Spicy Miso Spaghetti (a recipe that has some notable similarities to Gigi’s). Kylie Jenner quickly followed suit and filmed a TikTok showcasing her additions to instant ramen (butter, garlic and egg if you were wondering). Meghan Markle jumped on the band wagon with a courgette Bolognese past recipe, and Taylor Swift made the bold move from pasta to baked good with her viral chai tea eggnog cookies.

Why is the public so hungry for celebrity recipes? Well, for one, they’re pretty easy.

‘It’s surprisingly easy and really tasty’ says 19 year old Gigi-pasta fan, ‘I don’t normally cook but I make it all the time now after seeing it on TikTok. It’s definitely worth the effort’. For the young and culinary inexperienced population of social media, celebrity recipes are approachable – and surely there’s nothing wrong with a trend that gets people to cook fresh food?

But, undoubtedly, its more than that. ‘Eating like my favourite model’ is another reason for making for making the dish, according to Gigi’s fan. As celebrities film themselves making simple meals in their own kitchens, the great chasm between ‘us’ and ‘them’ lessens. ‘They’re just like me!’ you might think, ‘they love carbs and definitely don’t have an army of maids and private chefs at their beck and call!’. For fans, it’s a way to a connect on a human level with the stars they love.

From there, it’s easy to see why every starlet and their mother are rooting through their family recipes and chucking them on twitter. While in reality, models like Gigi have been on strict diets since early teenagerhood, trends like this can help them build a fan base who relate to them while promoting unattainable body standards.

In the era of the relatable celebrity, blatantly showing off luxury items and expensive chefs won’t cut it. Any celebrity worth their salt knows that using social media to break down the gulf between them and their audience is essential to stay relevant. Sharing pasta recipes is just their most recent way of doing it.

Words by Kate Bowie