doomscrolling
noun [ U ] humorous
UK /ˈduːm.skrəʊ.lɪŋ/ US /ˈduːm.skroʊ.lɪŋ/
the activity of spending a lot of time looking at your phone or computer and reading bad or negative news stories.
Even if this word is new to you, we’re guessing that the experience isn’t. Most people spend hours of their day tuned into social media, flicking through photos, stories, reels, videos – anything that the algorithms can throw our way. But with all that content and access to everything in the world and beyond, how many of us actually feel…connected. In our modern screen-topia, it takes something truly unique to make people come together. For video producer, writer and content creator, Beryl Shereshewsky, the key to that connection has always been food, even though it took her a while to find the space that was right for her.
She started her career in 2012 as a business production assistant but slowly found herself gravitating towards the video production side of the media outlets she belonged to. Even when she was in Brand Marketing – and hating every minute of it – food was in the back of her mind. “I was always kinda interested in food but I didn’t have any experience in video beyond what people around me were doing.” It was the early days of YouTube, content creators weren’t even a blip on the radar yet and brands rarely did any major video content.
So when she was approached by Great Big Story – a micro-documentary platform by CNN – she leapt at the opportunity, becoming one of their first employees. Over the next five years she worked her way up to Series Developer and then realised that most of her stories ended up being food stories because to her, food was the perfect medium from which to explore cultures. “I thought, here’s this one medium where race and religion and things don’t matter, because we can all appreciate good food,” she says.
Like so many media platforms, COVID hit Great Big Story hard and the company was dissolved in 2020. Without a job and with few opportunities presenting themselves in the video space, Beryl took all the ideas she was dying to make a reality, got creative and launched her own YouTube channel. “I thought, ‘I’ll just pilot them and someone might hire me.’” But as it turned out, she didn’t need someone to hire her, she’d just unlocked the secret to being her own boss.
This freedom to create and to tell the stories in her own voice was a golden opportunity to explore parts of her own life that she hadn’t had a chance to commit to screen and her ties to India became one of the topics that she decided to delve into. Beryl’s husband of seven years, Rajat Mehrotra, hails from Moradabad in Uttar Pradesh and it was through him that she was introduced to true home-cooked Indian meals. “When he and I started dating he was living with his sister who was a really great cook and I just loved it,” she says, “And when we got engaged, we started travelling back to India for long vacations.”
Here, she met his family and found that it was food that really came to the rescue in situations where communication was a challenge, “His mom didn’t speak much English and my Hindi wasn’t great (it’s got better though!) and one of the ways we found to connect was through cooking,” explains Shereshewsky, “She taught me how to make Uttapam and Paneer and this all made me even more curious about Indian food. When you marry someone from a different culture part of that journey is learning about their culture”
She found herself coming back to Indian food repeatedly, even in her YouTube videos. “I did a couple of videos about my wedding in India and cooking Indian food and I realised that a lot of people liked hearing about my views, appreciation and respect for the culture.” The opportunity was there and she dove right in with a brand new series concept, ‘Eating The Alphabet In India.’ As the name suggests, she had taken on the challenge to find one Indian food item that corresponded with each letter of the alphabet.
Her plan was to explore food through a new lens, “Rather than just being, ‘Oh here’s the food it tastes really good’, I could kind of look at the history of it,” she says, “There’s a lot of food that can be invented in places but the food is usually the result of historical exchange and – for good or for bad – wars and occupations. And in a country like India when there’s been so much outside influence for hundreds or thousands of years I thought it would be really interesting to look at the history of that.”
With this mission in mind she, Juhi – a friend and local guide from Mumbai – took to the streets of Delhi to embark on a month-long exploration into food, culture and all things edible. Let's take a look at what went into making this viral video series:
What was your selection process, how did you choose what dishes made the cut?
People weren’t always happy about the dishes I chose. In the comments I’d get questions like, ‘How could you not do R for roti?’ But for me, it was all about storytelling. I was looking for items that had interesting facts that might connect people. For example, that’s why I picked F for Frooti. I’d asked my husband what his favourite drink was as a kid and I felt like more people might connect more to that nostalgia instead of say, F for falooda – there were plenty of people outraged about that.
Was it hard to find enough options for each letter?
No! There were a lot of options, but I think I went with choices that I thought would be surprising for Indians and things that non-Indians might not know about. So now if people go to an Indian grocery store, they’ll see Frooti and some of these packaged things that I mentioned and it would inspire them to try it. Like with Jaljeera, I’ve got messages from people in the US telling me that they tried Jaljeera because of the video and that for me was more rewarding rather than picking something like Jalebi.
Image Credit: Bliss Is My Food
Which letters posed the most problems in the series?
The ones you’d expect really! But Q for Qubani Ka Meetha was especially hard. There was only one place in Delhi that had it and of course, when we called they said they weren’t making it and I literally begged him to do it.
Another hard one was X because there was one restaurant in Delhi that made Xacuti and they said they weren’t making it because it takes six days to get the spices ready. I found a woman through a Facebook group who said she could make it but then she couldn’t and we ended up going to the Goan state building canteen and asking them to make it and there were all these guards yelling at me to put my phone away. It was…an experience.
What were some of the most unexpected reactions you got to your videos?
The best example was O for Old monk rum. I knew that I wanted to talk about the culture of alcohol and ferment in India that was heavily erased during colonisation. Even at my old job, it was something I wanted to do but it didn’t get approved because my bosses at the time didn’t think it was ‘interesting enough’. So I thought it was my chance to talk about it, through old monk rum. And I was so surprised, I didn’t expect it to be so popular, it had over a million views almost overnight, that wasn’t really a point of nostalgia for me. I mean my father-in-law only has old Monk or whiskey in the house but since I was never a college student in India, I had never really thought about it like that.
Which letter was the most historically important to you?
I think P for Parle G surprised me, I didn’t know that the guy who made it did it as a clap back to the British, and I think that this kind of story is something that can really easily be lost because the product is so ubiquitous in the country. It’s the same way in New York City when you talk about immigrant cuisine, there are certain items which you feel have always been there but then actually, it hasn’t and there was a reason for it coming into creation.
And it wasn’t as popular but I also loved Chicken Manchurian and learning about Nelson Wang and the Hakka-speaking Chinese in India. Through that, I learnt about so many other Desi-Indian Chinese dishes and most Americans do not know about Indo-Chinese food, which is so sad because it's 1000 times better than American Chinese food.
Why are you a food content creator, why did you make this your space?
I think that there are two types of people in the food space. There are the people who are there to teach you how to make food – the chefs of the world. For them, the food is about the food itself, the cooking and preparing side. For me, I think about food less as ‘the food’ but more about the story. Even on my YouTube channel, I cook dishes but I’m not really teaching you how to make anything, I’m teaching you a way to connect with someone who looks or sounds different from you and realise that you have something in common with them.
That commonality can be something as simple as ‘I like mangoes’. I may be a Jewish woman from New York and you can have an Indian woman with a very different upbringing, but you put us down at a table with some mangoes and suddenly we’ll both be talking about how much we love mangoes. So from there, you can find more common ground and things that bond you. And sometimes I think people don’t give enough credit to how food can bond people. Put a group of strangers down at a dinner table and by the end of the meal, I guarantee people will be in the conversation as opposed to maybe just sitting people in a circle and telling them to start talking.
Where does filmmaking fit into the equation?
Food just has this great way of equalising people. Through all my years in filmmaking, I realise that there’s a story you want to tell and for me, the story that I wanted to tell and how I wanted to tell it was that we have more in common than what divides us, and that food was the way to create that community. Over the years being part of those conversations and hearing those memories has changed the way I see the world and how I see people. I actually think that I like people more now than I ever did, and that’s because of food.
When people talk about the dishes that they love, it always has a connection to culture, family, friends or memories that bring joy and to me, that’s a bigger draw to me to want to try something over ‘oh yeah, that tastes really good’. I want to feel their emotions, and experience that too.
What is your path forward in food, and what do you hope to achieve?
I think one of the things that I always felt was missing in food content is the voices of people from those cultures. Sometimes in food shows and chef shows, it’s like the culture has been removed and people focus on the differences and that stuff is ‘weird’ and it’s so isolating and not part of the vocabulary I like to use.
So the way I developed my shows was in a way that people got to introduce their culture to everybody and also I’ve felt that in doing that, it’s made people more interested in exploring things from that culture because it's almost like an invitation from that person to try these dishes.
There’s something really nice about handing people the baton to talk about the things that matter to them and people appreciate it the internet and social media are such great places to do that. Though that’s not how this series worked since there are only 60 seconds and it's hard to include all of those things, which is why I tried to focus on the history rather than things that were personal to me. It’s just about sharing space.
Beryl is already hard at work on her next project, replicating the alphabet format in New York City, and meanwhile continues to connect with people around the world to share their favourite dishes, recipes and snippets of culture on her YouTube channel. Through her lens she’s opening up channels of communication where people of all backgrounds can come together and just rejoice in the joy of food.