In a world full of divisions and disagreements, there is one thing that unifies us all at the end of the day: food. After luring over 321,000 followers in through her food account @hungrybetches, Michele Mansoor, a Eugene Lang senior majoring in screen studies, is the food-Instagrammer of The New School.
What better thing to dedicate an entire Instagram to?
Mansoor’s Instagram account launched in May 2014. “It started kind of as a joke — just jumping on the bandwagon and having fun with it,” Mansoor said. The 21-year-old now has over 1,200 photos of insanely delicious-looking foods.
“It happened pretty naturally after I developed the kind of ‘signature’ style of photos I have now,” Mansoor said of her growth to Insta-fame.“I’d get reposted by big accounts like @infatuaion and @new_fork_city and the following increased pretty quickly.”
“I’d say my page specifically is very pornographic, and for the same reasons people want to watch porn, people want to see delicious images of food.” To Mansoor, pornographic is “wet, drippy, intimate and close up.” Her goal is for her followers to become aroused by her photos and for them “to feel some sort of sense of pleasure by looking at this page but while not physically consuming the food.”
As she always uses natural light, Mansoor takes most of her photos outside. In order to keep up with the intimacy of her photos and feed, she tries gets up close and personal with the food itself — all of her photos just a few inches away from whatever delicious dish she’s about to dig into. Being outside, she often gets strange looks and comments from passers-by. People ask her about the food and if she’d like them to take a photo of her with it. “The easy way to get them to leave me alone is ‘this is my job’.”
Running @hungrybetches is a job for Mansoor. She explains that “just like any business you have to put money in to support it.” That being said, food-Instagramming does come with its perks, such as, well, free food!
As Mansoor has developed @hungrybetches over the past two years, she has also developed relationships with companies and local NYC restaurants. Businesses in which Mansoor has developing relationships with may give her free meals/ tastes in exchange for a post to @hungrybetches. It’s a win-win for everyone, free food for Mansoor and quick publicity for the restaurant.
Getting paid in food? Not too bad.
As she runs @hungrybetches, Mansoor is also preparing to graduate in May. Additionally, she’s working as a street scout for a casting director. “Once I graduate I’ll have a huge weight lifted off of my shoulders. I’ll have much more time to devote to @hungrybetches.” When she’s not composing the perfect food porn shot, Mansoor may spend the day out with friends, or even with other food Instagrammers.
A food Instagrammer that Mansoor has become close to is Skyler Bouchard of @nycdining. Bouchard has about 129,000 followers and a feed that leaves each and every one of them drooling. The two embark on these food excursions often, walking around the city popping in and out of different restaurants to taste and photograph as much as they can.
When it comes to their businesses, Mansoor explains that they operate quite different. @hungrybetches is 100% about the food, keeping her name and face separate from her Instagram profile, whereas Bouchard is in a lot of her own posts, has her real name and her personal account linked on her profile and has partnerships with companies, making her more of a “food personality.”
When it comes to food Instagrams, Mansoor describes the appeal for Instagrams dedicated to food as a strange satisfaction. For her, scrolling through pictures of food is a way to indulge in the deliciousness of it all without actually eating.
What sets her apart from other food Instagrams is her consistency. Mansoor does her best to post at least once a day, whether it be a throwback or a brand new photo. Every post on the account is a photo she has taken herself, and her goal is for each photo to be just as good or better than the previous one.
As for a food recommendation from the NYC dining expert herself? She says to get steamed veggies with tahini from Souen, the organic macrobiotic restaurant with locations in Soho, Union Square and the East village. Critics, aka @hungrybetches, call it “the best place on earth.”
We’ll take her word for it.