I am NOT a small plates or London food scene hater.

I am half English, half Japanese, and I cherish both food cultures. I love a big plate: roast dinner, pie and mash, full English. While also raised on small plates: goma-ae, karaage, korokke, tempura; tables crowded with dishes, everyone reaching across as nothing belongs to any single person.

Luckily, I’ve always lived where the food my mother grew up with has been accessible. For immigrant families, it is uniquely comforting to see foods from home become available elsewhere. London’s culinary landscape is one of the things I love most about the city for that exact reason.

Though, I do fear we are cannibalising it with the small plates epidemic.

London has stopped borrowing small plates from other cultures and started repackaging the idea to sell on to whoever pays. “Small plates”, in the cultures they come from, reflect how people eat. Izakaya, tapas, pintxos, meze, dim sum: different traditions with a common ethos. You order food for the table, try things, share, and maybe even order more, because it costs little enough that you don’t have to conduct a minor financial audit beforehand.

So how has London taken the format, removed everything that made it work, and left us with a complete ripoff?

Small plates became a property market aesthetic.

You know exactly what I’m on about.

Exposed brick, low lighting, natural wine list, menu printed in font that makes £8 dip feel reasonable. Padron peppers, some sort of whipped cheese, then section where everything costs £25+. Miso somewhere, maybe harissa, maybe yuzu, maybe “burnt”. It is difficult to tell which country you are supposed to be eating in (which is quite telling).

London restaurants borrow from other cuisines - great! London was built through cultural exchange, that’s why it’s the greatest city in the world. The issue really emerges when the food becomes completely detached from the people, places, and customs behind it. There is a difference between taking inspiration from another food culture, and extracting its most marketable characteristics, removing the context, and selling them to a wealthier audience. The London small plates wave has mastered the latter, fitting perfectly into the gentrification script.

New postcode is granted “up and coming” status. New flats appear, independent shops disappear, then there is a small plates restaurant serving an internationalised version of everything for an extortionate price. The food rarely represents, or tells you anything about the area, because it instead represents the people that the area is expected to attract next. It’s both fascinating and alarming; it’s gentrification on a plate, lit by candle, with some sort of charred cabbage and tahini.

When £30 meant something.

Remember when £30 a head was an occasion (I am 24, this was not that long ago)? You got dressed up with your family, maybe it was a birthday, probably in the West End. Now, £30 nearly covers two small plates, two drinks and service charge in Zone 2 (and you’ll still be hungry after, obviously). Or potentially just one of those larger plates sitting towards the bottom of the menu. Always substantially more expensive. Usually some sort of fish? Meat?

The economics are so confused. The whole point is that you order lots of little things to share, yet each little thing costs £8, £12, £16 and suddenly the mathematics isn’t so generous. It’s hilariously ironic - a restaurant selling you the concept of sharing while designing a menu that turns sharing into the most expensive possible way to eat.

So who is this for?

Go through different parts of London, Zone 1 to 5, and you can see the demographic history within its food businesses: South Asian restaurants, Halal butchers, Chinese takeaways, Caribbean kitchens, Polish shops, Turkish bakeries, English caffs, telling you who has lived, worked, and built communities there. Today, those places are forced to compete with an unfamiliar kind of establishment.

A Sri Lankan restaurant that’s been making hoppers for decades struggles to get noticed. Whack the word “modern” somewhere, paint the outside white, dim the lights, add some candles and a natural wine list: now you’ve got yourself a restaurant destined for TikTok virality.

Clearly, these distinctions are all about who the food is being sold to, not the food itself. It seems the cuisines that were already here become more valuable once they have been removed from the communities that brought them.

London imported the plate without the culture.

In the Basque Country, pintxos are part of the rhythm of the region. A fluid movement between places, eating something small, having another. They are not a pretentiously curated concept and every bar has its own established identity. In Japan, the Izakaya understands seasonality, locality and what is good now. Specials change and menus are handwritten to tell what is best today (not to perform an aesthetic borrowed from the “trendy” London visual code). For many food cultures alike, small portions are a reflection of the behaviours around eating. Whereas London has grossly misunderstood that relationship, taking the plate and leaving the philosophy behind.

Hot Take: Perhaps that is because Britain has never really had the same relationship with food.

Britain is unusually disconnected from where its food comes from. Strawberries are purchased all year round and produce is from wherever it’s the most profitable to grow. We are accustomed to food being permanently available, detached from time and place. Therefore, maybe it was always going to be easy to import the appearance of another food culture without replicating the things that gave it meaning. Borrowing the plate size is all well and good, but the relationship to food that made the plate can’t just be neglected.

All in all, we have made sharing too expensive.

Ultimately, this is why the small plates boom matters, beyond how jarring you find £12 aubergine.

For me, in adulthood, eating out has never been the ordinary way to socialise that it once was. Meeting friends, ordering food, and sharing it is becoming much harder to do - and the paradox is that small plates should have been the perfect answer to an expensive city, allowing you to try more, share more and eat more casually. Instead, we have made them one of the most expensive ways to leave a restaurant hungry.

London has become SO unaffordable, transient, and designed around whoever will pay the most for a place in it. The restaurants change with postcodes, postcodes change with the rents, and small plates win…

That is why the small plates thing irks me. It is a small problem within a city with much bigger ones, but that is the point; you can see a city’s biggest changes in the smallest things…like a £9 plate of about ten padron peppers.

(Say nothing if you catch me ordering them).

With the rise of algorithmic infinite scrolling, calls to restrict children’s access to social media have grown exponentially. Concerns about poor mental health and online safety have fuelled support for increasingly interventionist policies, culminating in Labour’s latest announcement: a ban on social media for under-16s.

Portrayed largely as a safeguarding measure, the ban follows an institutional framework that has changed remarkably little since the e-safety assemblies of my school years nearly a decade ago: protect children from harmful content, online predators, cyber bullying and dangerous online challenges. Though important, the proposed solution confronts a wider challenge: should governments be investing in bans that can be circumvented, or in education that cannot? Further, as researchers increasingly investigate links between excessive screen exposure, cognitive decline and even future neurodegenerative risk, should social media be treated less as a safeguarding issue and more as a public health one?

Before addressing these questions, it must first be established: does a social media ban actually work?

Many are sceptical, and rightly so. If any country should have solved the problem of regulating online behaviour, it is China.

For more than two decades, the Chinese government has operated the most sophisticated system of internet control ever constructed: the Great Firewall. Through extensive website blocking and a vast moderation apparatus, Beijing has successfully restricted access to significant portions of the global internet. Yet circumvention remains widespread as VPNs, proxy services and ever-evolving workarounds continue to bypass the Great Firewall, demonstrating a simple truth: the internet is fundamentally resistant to borders. Thus, if China cannot fully control a borderless technology, Britain is unlikely to achieve lasting success through age restrictions alone.

Australia’s recent experience suggests a similar reality. The country’s nationwide social media ban for under-16s implemented in late 2025 was presented as a landmark intervention designed to protect children online. However, recent reporting from The Molly Rose Foundation found that over 60% of Australian children continue to access social media, arguing against the legislation as a “high stakes gamble on children’s safety” that the UK should not rush to enforce. Further, Australia’s eSafety Commissioner reported substantial increases in VPN usage following the ban’s introduction, raising concerns about enforceability and unintended consequences.

But, even if Britain were somehow able to solve the enforcement problem, a more important question would remain unanswered: what exactly is the harm we are trying to prevent?

For years, concerns surrounding social media have been dominated by safeguarding. Online predators. Dangerous challenges. Cyberbullying. Harmful content. These dangers undoubtedly exist and should not be dismissed, but they are also relatively exceptional. Most teenagers will never encounter an extremist recruiter online. Most will never participate in a viral challenge that lands them in hospital. Most will never experience the dangers that dominate political speeches and newspaper front pages.

Almost every teenager, however, will experience compulsive scrolling.

They will experience disrupted sleep. Endless notifications. Constant algorithmic stimulation. Difficulty concentrating. Difficulty disengaging.

The average teenager’s relationship with social media is not defined by extraordinary risks. It is defined by ordinary dependency, prompting researchers to increasingly question whether social media’s greatest danger lies, not in what young people are seeing online, but in what prolonged exposure to these platforms may be doing to the developing brain.

In 2022, researchers led by Laurie Manwell proposed the concept of “digital dementia”, arguing that excessive screen exposure during critical periods of neurological development may increase vulnerability to cognitive decline later in life. The study highlighted evidence linking excessive screen use with attentional difficulties, memory impairment and structural changes within the brain, raising the possibility that the long-term consequences of today’s digital habits may not be fully understood for decades. As the authors stated, “emerging evidence suggests that some of these effects are similar to those seen in adults with symptoms of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) in the early stages of dementia.”

Overall, the study is not suggesting that today’s teenagers are destined to develop Alzheimer’s disease. Rather, it reflects a shift in how researchers are conceptualising the problem. The body of literature linking excessive screen exposure with poorer sleep quality, diminished attention, impaired memory formation and reduced psychological wellbeing among young people is growing. Teachers frequently describe classrooms characterised by fractured attention spans and increasing difficulties sustaining concentration for prolonged periods. Whether every concern ultimately proves causally attributable to social media is almost secondary to the wider point. Attention is shifting away from exceptional online dangers and towards the cognitive consequences of prolonged digital immersion.

Unlike safeguarding risks, these consequences affect everyone.

Broadcast interviews with children on the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 were striking. The language often resembled discussions around addiction more than technology. Children described social media as an escape, and something they struggled to imagine life without. Many acknowledged spending excessive amounts of time online with remarkable nonchalance.

Therefore, given the highlighted health risks, comparisons with smoking may be instructive.

Anti-smoking campaigns did not succeed because children were taught the intricacies of public policy, nor did they rely primarily on moral arguments about personal responsibility. They were effective because public health campaigns translated an abstract risk into something tangible - diseased lungs, cancer, death. Visceral imagery and health-based education embedded the consequences of smoking into public consciousness from an early age. Smoking ceased to be understood primarily as a behavioural issue and became understood as a health issue.

Social media remains stuck in an earlier phase of that process. We warn children about strangers online, dangerous content, harmful challenges. Yet far less frequently, we explain what these platforms may be doing to sleep, concentration, memory and cognitive development. If social media’s most significant danger is ultimately found to be cognitive rather than behavioural, then much of the current conversation is focused on the wrong problem.

A teenager can confidently dismiss warnings about online predators.

“I wouldn’t talk to a stranger.”

They can dismiss warnings about dangerous content.

“I know better than that.”

But it is considerably harder to dismiss evidence that a platform has been deliberately engineered to capture attention, exploit psychological vulnerabilities and encourage compulsive use. Generally, it seems optimistic to assume children can successfully navigate these systems without meaningful education, particularly when many perceive safeguarding arguments as irrelevant to their own behaviour. I often wonder whether I would have approached social media differently had somebody explained it in the language of health rather than safety:

“This product is competing for your attention.”

“This platform is designed to keep you here.”

“We do not yet fully understand what years of constant algorithmic stimulation may be doing to the developing brain.”

Ultimately, Britain cannot build a digital wall around its children, but it can educate them. Children should understand how recommendation algorithms function, how attention is monetised, and the emerging evidence surrounding cognition, sleep, memory and mental health. They should be taught both how to stay safe online, and how to stay mentally healthy online.

When a threat has no borders, education is often more powerful than prohibition.

Every year, I vaguely absorb Love Island discourse through osmosis, recognise a few contestants, and move on. Yet this season, I found myself unexpectedly locked in. In part due to the romances, but predominantly as I was astounded by how quickly a mundane disagreement escalated into a villa-wide conflict about gender, mirroring a wider online zeitgeist defined by the growing tension between manosphere narratives and a growing female counter politics.

The fallout from the “It’s Not That Deep” challenge was remarkable. As the girls confronted the boys over behaviour they found disrespectful, the conversation rapidly moved beyond individual actions. Criticism of specific behaviour became interpreted by some of the boys as evidence of a broader double standard against men. Social media soon followed suit. Viewers split into camps and contestants became avatars for ideological positions. Within the space of a single episode, typical dating show drama evolved rapidly into a divisive dispute about modern gender relations.

This is why Love Island remains culturally significant. It is less of a dating show, and more of a microcosm of society, renegotiating gender relations in real time. Some commentary has focused on whether the men this year are more sexist than previous seasons, but I think that misses the point. Rather, we are witnessing the changing face of misogyny.

In earlier seasons, sexism most definitely existed, but it often manifested differently. Women frequently reinforced patriarchal expectations themselves, competing for male validation, judging one another harshly, often internalising standards that disadvantaged them. While there were obvious tensions between men and women, this season feels different, with both men and women appearing increasingly aware of gender as a political category. The women possess a language deriving from a shared sense of collective gender consciousness that many contestants in earlier seasons lacked. They are quicker to challenge once tolerated behaviour and articulate why something feels unfair, having grown up alongside conversations about sexism, emotional labour, consent, gaslighting and accountability.

The men, meanwhile, have grown up alongside a different cultural shift.

Increasingly, misogyny no longer presents itself through overt claims of male superiority. Instead, it manifests through the language of grievance. The argument is no longer “women are inferior”. It is that men are disadvantaged and judged more harshly, women benefit from “double standards”, and therefore criticism of male behaviour has become unfair.

The contestants’ reactions to the challenge were the perfect epitomisation of this: the women’s discussion of behaviour such as “wandering eyes” or comments about “body counts” triggered the men to discuss gender. Quickly, criticism of individual actions became interpreted as criticism of men as a group. Thus, rather than engaging with conversations about the behaviour itself, the dispute increasingly revolved around double standards and whether men were being unjustly targeted. When Aidan insults Jasmine’s outspoken demeanour, labelling it “off-putting”, he redirects attention towards her delivery, weaponising a sense of male grievance to discredit her criticism and punish her for articulating it rather than addressing the behaviour she was challenging. In doing so, the focus shifted from what was being said, to the woman saying it - a familiar manoeuvre in which female dissent becomes more objectionable than the behaviour that provoked it.

However, viewing misogyny as operating exclusively from one direction misses the deeper contradiction at the heart of this discussion, and reactions within the online Love Island commentary sphere complicates this picture. The reaction to Priya illustrates how patriarchal assumptions can be repackaged and legitimised through ostensibly progressive forms of discourse, often under the guise of female solidarity.

On one side sits the more conventional misogynist: a woman who speaks her mind is difficult, argumentative or attention-seeking, and the hostility directed towards Priya by some viewers follows a depressingly familiar script. Yet some of the most intense criticism has emerged from a very different place. Across social media, many viewers have framed their defence of Jasmine through the language of female solidarity. Priya is criticised for not being a “girl’s girl”. On the surface, this appears progressive, however, a contradiction lies here.

In attempting to defend women, some viewers end up reproducing some of the oldest misogynistic tropes in existence.

Priya becomes cast in a familiar role: the woman who broke an unwritten code, pursued the wrong man, betrayed another woman. The language may be new, but the archetypes are old. The loyal woman. The jealous woman. The woman who steals another woman’s man. The woman who betrays the sisterhood. These are not feminist inventions, they are some of the most enduring misogynistic narratives in popular culture.

The result is that Priya finds herself trapped between two different forms of misogyny. One criticises her for being too outspoken; the other criticises her for failing to perform the correct version of womanhood. Both ultimately judge her according to expectations that rarely apply to men, and the irony is particularly striking given the context. Love Island is, at its core, a competition structured around romantic selection. Contestants are quite literally encouraged to pursue one another’s partners, explore connections and compete for affection, and still women who do so often find themselves subjected to a uniquely gendered moral scrutiny. Men are permitted agency; women are expected to demonstrate loyalty.

This is what makes the contemporary obsession with being a “girl’s girl” so problematic. While often deployed as the language of female empowerment, it can just as easily become a mechanism through which women police one another’s behaviour. The term superficially promotes solidarity, yet functions by imposing a rigid set of expectations about how women should act and what forms of desire are considered acceptable.

In this sense, “girl’s girl” discourse represents a distinctly modern form of misogyny. Female solidarity is not inherently problematic, but such rhetoric can easily transform into a moral framework in which women are once again judged according to their ability to conform to prescribed ideals of femininity. The language has evolved but the policing remains.

This is ultimately why Love Island is so captivating this year. The enduring lesson of this season is that misogyny does not disappear when society becomes more conscious of it. It mutates and absorbs new vocabularies, adopting new justifications, reinventing itself in forms that are often harder to recognise. Love Island did not create these tensions, it has simply just condensed them into a single villa and broadcast them back to us…

…and I will be tuning in.

Admittedly, in the past week, I found myself seeking out the sequel to a low resolution, mass-produced video depicting an adulterous mango neglecting his vulnerable banana wife.

The dialogue is monotone; the visuals are marked by pronounced morphological drift as characters mutate from frame to frame due to the limited generative capabilities of AI tools. Characters lack any stable identity, their forms repeatedly reconstituted, while the narrative relies on caricatured social scripts and formulaic arcs of betrayal and humiliation. Yet, these videos have amassed millions of views across TikTok, Instagram, and X, capturing attention with remarkable efficiency.

This content is the digital equivalent of ultra-processed foods. Like UPFs, it is cheap to produce, void of craft, and engineered for compulsive consumption. Where studios invest years into coherence, detail, and emotional depth, these videos instead offer a low fidelity, high stimulation alternative - easy to produce, easier to consume, and difficult to resist. What they lack in quality, they compensate for in immediacy, revealing a content economy where coherence is optional, but engagement is everything.

However, the problem is not just aesthetic. It is ideological.

Beneath the absurdity lies a troubling reliance on stereotypes. Gender dynamics are flattened into familiar scripts: women as duplicitous, hypersexual, or opportunistic; men as dominant, virile, and emotionally indifferent. Class is rendered through crude “rags to riches” arcs that aestheticise poverty. Race, though never explicitly named, appears to be portrayed through visual and narrative shorthand. The question feels ridiculous, but it is unavoidable: are the fruits standing in for ethnic categories?

Darker “nightshade” characters are frequently cast as hypersexual, and physically dominant figures, while lighter or “softer” fruits occupy more passive or vulnerable roles. Mixed race offspring appear almost exclusively as the product of infidelity, emerging at the narrative’s climax as evidence of betrayal. These are not neutral story choices, rather, they map uncomfortably onto longstanding racialised tropes around sexuality, legitimacy, and deviance.

Even the imagined prompts behind these videos reveal the logic at work. One can almost reconstruct them:

• “Create a drama where an unattractive wife is cheated on by a more desirable partner - give her an hourglass figure and voluptuous lips”

• “Introduce a more ‘dominant’ male rival - make him a dark vegetable like an aubergine”

• “End the story with mixed race offspring”

The specifics vary while the structure remains consistent. What emerges is not creativity, but iteration - an algorithmic recycling of the same archetypes, refined only for maximum engagement.

Particularly unsettling, is the absence of authorship. Since these videos are AI-generated, the content is detached from any single creator. No identifiable writer, no accountable producer - just prompts, outputs, and distribution at scale. This creates a peculiar form of cultural production as harmful ideas proliferate without clear origin or responsibility.

Yet, despite recognising all of this, we keep watching.

Engagement here is not an endorsement of quality, nor a failure of critical thinking. It is a function of design. The content thrives because it draws on patterns we have been socialised to recognise: misogyny, colourism, hypersexualisation, and humiliation arcs. They do not challenge perception, but instead, exploit it. The familiarity is what makes them watchable.

This raises a more concerning question: what happens when this content is consumed not critically, but passively?

For audiences without the inclination to interrogate what they are seeing, these narratives risk becoming ambient truths. Children, in particular, encounter not just absurd fruit dramas, but encoded messages about relationships, race, and worth. Given the repetitive nature of the content, over time, the exaggerated becomes normalised.

There is little to suggest that this trend will slow. According to a recent Forbes article, the “Fruit Love Island” series has amassed over 300 million views on TikTok alone. The incentives are clear: low cost, high return, infinite scalability.

What is less clear is the long-term cultural cost.

It appears that we are moving further away from the idea of media as a labour of love. Rather, we are beelining towards a model of content as rapid, disposable, and optimised for engagement above all else. The question is not simply whether these videos are entertaining, it is what kind of entertainment this is?

Is it a hollowed-out form of reality television, stripped even of the social context that once made it sociologically and anthropologically analysable? Or is it something more primitive: content that bypasses interpretation altogether, activating familiar scripts of betrayal, desire, and hierarchy at a subconscious level?

Either way, its success tells us something uncomfortable about both the platforms that distribute it, and the patterns of attention and recognition we continue to reward.