Going Analogue: Why Weâre All Craving a Little More Groovy and a Lot Less Scroll
Kristen Hess - The Artful Gourmet is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Something is shifting. You can feel it.
People are pulling out vintage cameras [https://go.shopmy.us/p-54157192] and buying vinyl at record stores. Theyâre scrapbooking again â actually cutting things out, gluing them down, pressing ticket stubs and Polaroids and handwritten notes into books that nobody else will ever scroll through.
Theyâre hosting dinners where the phones stay in a basket by the door. Theyâre choosing Saturday afternoon road trips over Saturday afternoon doom-scrolling. Theyâre texting their four closest friends instead of broadcasting to four hundred followers. Or getting together in real life [https://open.substack.com/pub/artfulgourmet/p/finding-your-tribe-a-food-writers?r=6fy3xt&utm_medium=ios] to talk, laugh, eat and drink together for real moments that matter.
Theyâre calling it âgoing analogue.â And honestly? Iâve been doing this my whole life â I just didnât have a name for it until now.
The Internet Feels Broken. And We Know It.
Hereâs what the cultural conversation is starting to catch up to: itâs not that technology is bad. Itâs that the current version of the internet feels kind of broken. The algorithm is a treadmill. The pressure to post in real-time, to perform your life for the feed, to be âonâ every waking hour â itâs exhausting in a way thatâs hard to articulate but impossible to ignore.
People are waking up to the fact that attention is finite. That how you feel after scrolling is directly tied to what youâre consuming. That the era of following everyone and engaging with everything on autopilot is giving way to something more intentional, more protective, and a whole lot more human.
Younger audiences especially are deliberately re-introducing slower, more tactile practices into their hyper-digital lives. Film photography. Vinyl records. Handwritten journals. Phone-free dinners. Not as a rejection of the modern world, but as a correction to it. A way of saying: some things are worth actually experiencing instead of just documenting.
And hereâs the piece I find most beautiful: a like or a comment means more now, because people arenât handing them out on autopilot. The ones who show up â the ones who read the whole post, who leave the thoughtful comment, who share the thing because it genuinely moved them â those people are your people. Thatâs community in the truest sense.
People donât want to be followers everywhere. They want to be regulars somewhere.
Nostalgia Isnât Escapism. Itâs a Compass.
Iâve been thinking a lot lately about why nostalgia hits so hard right now â and I donât think itâs because we want to escape the present. I think nostalgia is a compass.
It points us toward the things that have always mattered most, the things the noise tends to drown out: friendship, family, food on the table, music playing in the background, and the particular feeling of being somewhere together with nowhere else youâd rather be.
Growing up, food was never just food in my world. It was the thing that gathered people. It was Sunday dinners [https://open.substack.com/pub/artfulgourmet/p/the-roast-that-owns-the-afternoon?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web] that lasted for hours.
It was road trips [https://theartfulgourmet.com/beef-stroganoff-casserole-a-family-recipe-a-memory-a-song-for-dad-%F0%9F%92%95/]with the windows down and the radio turned all the way up â a classic Fleetwood Mac song bleeding into an America song [https://open.substack.com/pub/artfulgourmet/p/a-recipe-in-memory-of-dad?r=6fy3xt&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=webĂtamp=5.9] bleeding into Steely Dan or The Doobie Brothers â with a cooler of snacks in the back seat and absolutely no agenda except take in the sights and explore our magnificent country out West.
It was my momâs Pot Roast and Mashed Potatoes, her Chicken Divan [https://youtu.be/q3_NTziM-Qo?si=tOD5kwAjTzFr0ts6]. Or my Dadâs favorite - Beef Stroganoff [https://theartfulgourmet.com/beef-stroganoff-casserole-a-family-recipe-a-memory-a-song-for-dad-%F0%9F%92%95/], and my Grandmaâs Beet Soup with Polish potato dumplings â comfort food recipes handed down from her mother, and her motherâs mother, or my Dadâs mother, all made with love and served with conversation.
Those memories donât live on a hard drive. They live in my soul. In the smell of Momâs homemade Chicken Noodle Soup [https://www.kristen-hess.com/post/pot-of-gold-mom-s-chicken-noodle-soup] simmering on the stove. In the way a certain vintage photo, or 1970s song [https://youtu.be/NmEyGiaqm7k?si=w3PD4sieHLq2-phW] can drop me right back into a specific moment â a specific time and place, or a specific feeling of everything being exactly right.
That is what I wanted to honor when I started Groovy Eats [https://theartfulgourmet.com/youtube-channel/].
Why I Started Groovy Eats
Groovy Eats isnât just a cooking series. Itâs a love letter.
Itâs a love letter to the recipes [https://open.substack.com/pub/artfulgourmet/p/ep15-i-into-focus-theres-no-place-957?r=6fy3xt&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web] and the road trips [https://artfulgourmet.substack.com/p/a-recipe-in-memory-of-dad] and the record players. To the era when you didnât need a filter or a ring light to have a beautiful, meaningful meal.
When you called your friends and said âcome overâ and they came over â and somebody put on a record and someone else opened a bottle of wine and somebody else chopped the onions and you just⊠were together. Fully present. Fully there.
The series is built around a simple but deeply felt premise: food and music are the original time machines. Play the right song while youâre making the right dish, and youâre not in your kitchen anymore â youâre somewhere else entirely. Youâre nineteen again, or twelve, or thirty-two, in a place and a moment that mattered.
Every podcast [https://open.spotify.com/show/2dI0lF9FW9bPByWm0W6JwM?si=4MpD4dIvSbatYNL6s86Vcg] episode, every blog post [https://theartfulgourmet.com/groovy-eats-ep3-march-1975-the-eagles-best-of-my-love-beginnings-of-socal-sound-chicken-parmigiana-at-dan-tanas/], every Substack [https://open.substack.com/pub/artfulgourmet/p/groovy-eats-ep3-march-1975-the-eagles?r=6fy3xt&utm_medium=ios] essay, every YouTube video [https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4mM8WGjGb1K-XSaXMmDgE8d51e7uxri0&si=F8jTPd0MmOH5rU9O] in this series is me chasing that feeling and inviting you to chase it with me. Itâs retro recipes made with fresh, elevated ingredients â comfort food that honors the past while feeling relevant right now.
Itâs 70s, 80s, and 90s playlists [https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6hN9iYSgbZGn0lPUmSapzf?si=MmEIym7eRb-aWaanjRHrWg&pi=vF9jZHxrSWeTU] that set the mood and tell a story. Itâs the behind-the-scenes of my food styling and photography [https://kristen-hess-artful-gourmet.kit.com/profile/products]world, stripped back to something warm and human and real.
Itâs intentional. Itâs personal. And it is, in every possible way, analogue in spirit â even when it lives online.
What Groovy Eats Looks Like in Practice
On The Artful Gourmet Podcast [https://artfulgourmet.substack.com/podcast], Iâve been opening up about the stories behind the food â not just the what but the why.
The episode [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-artful-gourmet-podcast/id1837585685?i=1000758116596] where I talked about my food writers retreat [https://open.substack.com/pub/artfulgourmet/p/finding-your-tribe-a-food-writers?r=6fy3xt&utm_medium=ios] in Pennsylvania, sitting around a table with a community of creative people who all found each other through their shared love of words and food and storytelling â that episode wasnât really about the retreat. It was about the hunger we all have for real connection. For smaller circles. For the kind of conversation you can only have in person, over a meal, away from the noise.
or the Groovy Eats Valentineâs Day episode where I talk about the soul and romance of Al Green and a retro 1972-style Valentineâs Day dinner. And a deep dive into the Eagles musical history and the late night dinners of Chicken Parm and Penne Ariabatta [https://artfulgourmet.substack.com/p/groovy-eats-ep3-march-1975-the-eagles] they had at Dan Tanaâs in West Hollywood while writing their most famous hits.
On YouTube, the Groovy Eats cooking videos [https://youtu.be/zCmUaefhn6s?si=IAP-3E8nsJhngfKj]are shot to feel like a memory. Warm light. Real kitchens. Music that means something.
The camera lingers on the sizzle in the pan, the steam rising from the pot, the moment when a dish comes together and you just know itâs going to be good. Thereâs no hustle energy here. Itâs slow, itâs sensory, and itâs intentional.
On The Artful Gourmet blog and Substack, Iâm writing the longer stories [https://theartfulgourmet.com/groovy-eats-ep3-march-1975-the-eagles-best-of-my-love-beginnings-of-socal-sound-chicken-parmigiana-at-dan-tanas/] â the heartfelt essays [https://open.substack.com/pub/artfulgourmet/p/february-1972-when-love-didnt-rush?r=6fy3xt&utm_medium=ios] that take you somewhere. The piece about chasing comfort [https://theartfulgourmet.com/theres-no-place-like-home-an-amazing-macaroni-cheese-recipe/] in my tiny New York studio apartment on a freezing January day, when all I wanted was a home-cooked meal and ended up at Zabarâs in the rain, hunting down the perfect cheeses for a gourmet mac and cheese that tasted like childhood.
Or a nostaglic post [https://theartfulgourmet.com/groovy-eats-ep-1-january-1978-chicken-divan-baby-come-back/] about January 1978 that lives in the sweet spot of retro dinners and memories â when soft rock ruled the radio, casseroles ruled the oven, and dinner brought everyone to the table.
The Groovy Eats recipe posts [https://artfulgourmet.substack.com/p/february-1972-when-love-didnt-rush] that pair a retro dish with a retro song [https://open.spotify.com/track/41sGGCCoHI2GLV9qadX80A?si=65aPkvwWSH-T1RNxFG4Vbg], an artist, a playlist [https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6hN9iYSgbZGn0lPUmSapzf?si=KpDZtSxPRKixXe3iZSbHPA&pi=QGLgvG6KTRupN] and a memory, so that cooking becomes a full sensory experience [https://youtu.be/zCmUaefhn6s?si=lt7jQCzRR_T3m8BD] rather than just a task.
Each of these pieces of content is me doing what the analogue movement is calling for: building in a delay between living and posting. Creating things that feel collected rather than manufactured. Letting the story breathe. Bringing something tangible â a real recipe, a real memory, a real emotion â into a digital space that can sometimes feel pretty sterile.
The Future Is Both
Hereâs what I keep coming back to, and what I think the analogue trend is really telling us: social isnât dying. Itâs evolving.
The future isnât offline or online. Itâs both, held together by intention. And the creators and communities that will matter most going forward are the ones who understand that â the ones who bring real texture, real warmth, real humanity to what they share. The ones who make you feel like a regular somewhere, not just a follower.
Thatâs what Groovy Eats is for me. Itâs my version of the scrapbook aesthetic â layered, personal, imperfect in the best way. Itâs my vinyl record, my vintage film photo, my phone-free dinner table.
Itâs the place where food and music and memory get to exist together, without apology, on their own unhurried terms.
If youâve been feeling the pull toward something slower, something more real, something that actually fills you up instead of just filling your feed â pull up a chair. Put on a good song. Make something beautiful to eat.
Thatâs the whole vibe. Thatâs Groovy Eats. [https://youtu.be/q3_NTziM-Qo?si=C7l28c_rWVE_taDt]
Thanks for reading Kristen Hess - The Artful Gourmet! This post is public so feel free to share it.
Tune into the companion podcast [https://open.spotify.com/episode/4NKsn8i35EShBu9K3C4RQb?si=AQU_-VWcTWmmip3KrOylIw]on The Artful Gourmet Podcast - listen wherever you tune in.
Stay tuned for Groovy Eats Ep4, coming soon! Disco Night | Retro Cocktails & Late Night Bites đ đȘ© đč đ€
Explore the Series:
* đïž Groovy Eats on [https://open.spotify.com/episode/3N8iHm0OzkfrI01om1CuHM?si=Fv0qm5wfSn2vGar-4XXu4A]The Artful Gourmet Podcast [https://open.spotify.com/episode/3N8iHm0OzkfrI01om1CuHM?si=Fv0qm5wfSn2vGar-4XXu4A]
* đș Groovy Eats on YouTube [https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4mM8WGjGb1K-XSaXMmDgE8d51e7uxri0&si=enGtuu9cRnfqRYeY]
* đ Groovy Eats on the Blog [https://theartfulgourmet.com/groovy-eats-ep2-valentines-day-1972-steak-diane-let-stay-together/]
* đ Groovy Eats on Substack [https://open.substack.com/pub/artfulgourmet/p/groovy-eats-ep3-march-1975-the-eagles?r=6fy3xt&utm_medium=ios]
* đČ Groovy Eats on Social [https://x.com/artfulgourmet/status/2022711686898073831/video/1?s=46]
Kristen Hess is a Food Stylist, Photographer [https://www.Kristen-Hess.com], Writer, and the creator of The Artful Gourmet â a food and lifestyle media brand rooted in fresh comfort food, visual artistry, and the stories we tell around the table. Find her on Substack [https://artfulgourmet.substack.com], The Artful Gourmet Podcast [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-artful-gourmet-podcast-with-kristen-hess/id1888332096] and YouTube Channel [https://www.youtube.com/@theartfulgourmet] and her food blog at theartfulgourmet.com [http://theartfulgourmet.com/].
Kristen Hess - The Artful Gourmet is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit artfulgourmet.substack.com/subscribe [https://artfulgourmet.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]
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