The first time June Xie pitched her Webby Award-winning YouTube show Budget Eats to the producers at Delish, it didn’t go over well.
The show was “shot down as not on-brand.”
But once everyone went into lockdown in 2020, what was on-brand suddenly mattered less than what she could film from her home kitchen.
The first episode was shot on her phone and originally included 11 hours of footage. It may have driven her editor crazy, but the format immediately resonated with viewers.
Xie thinks part of that is because: “I thrive off of the chaos of restrictions. Whether that’s something ridiculous like having $15 to spend or ‘Can you stretch out a whole week’s worth of meals from just these ingredients?’ I feel like that makes my brain spin in a controlled manner… It allows me to liberate myself from perfectionism and just make something edible.”
Not everything she makes on the show is necessarily tasty, but on Budget Eats, that is distinctly not the point.
By limiting herself to a restrictive budget, Xie aims to help viewers understand how to throw out the rulebook and try new things. Forgiving yourself when those things don’t work is just part of the process.
“I don’t even know what rules we’re functioning off of. Maybe the rules that dominate food media? But those rules get boring. That’s why you have 50 episodes all with different hosts telling you the same things over and over again.”
Xie is of the philosophy that if you try something and you like it, that’s all that matters in cooking: “Just today I posted a comment from the latest Budget Eats on YouTube, and it was someone saying, ‘Why is she putting sweetened condensed milk into all the salty things?’ My response was, ‘Why not?”
Xie’s family is Chinese, so her improvisational approach to feeding herself is heavily influenced by the complicated relationship she has with American and Asian culture: “I grew up with different flavor profiles. I grew up with different textures… A big part of Budget Eats is I’m in my 90-square-foot personal home kitchen, shooting and cooking by myself with no director telling me what to do. That’s given me a lot of agency.”
Xie is heavily involved in the Hearst Union, has auctioned off cookbooks she acquired in the Delish test kitchen for charity, and frequently posts about food justice on social media. She feels that as a public figure in a post-pandemic world, she has a responsibility to remind people that, “It’s impossible to turn back into our previously blind selves… How much impact do I have as one person? Probably not a whole lot. But if I can just sprinkle [social justice] into everything that I do… then people will come to grasp it as… an aspect of life that we should be paying attention to.”
That’s part of why she keeps Budget Eats so simple. For home cooks, especially those short on time and money, elaborate culinary instruction from restaurant professionals is often not very useful. Recipes can get too involved or expect you to locate lots of potentially obscure ingredients. Xie has zero interest in making her viewers’ lives more complicated.
“It’s interesting, a lot of viewers have reached out to me saying that I’ve changed the way that they cook. That I’ve enabled them in some way to fall back in love with cooking. To cook more often without fear. That kind of message makes me wonder, where did this fear come from? Who bred in us this fear of cooking when it’s the main means of actual survival?”
She wonders if the very gorgeous food photos that abound throughout her industry have something to do with it. It can take the Delish team hours to find the right shot, and viewers don’t get to see the nitty-gritty side of that work. Xie doesn’t even feel like she knows what she’s doing and has found it, “fascinating to admit you’re not an authority figure even though others may view you as one. A lot of people want me to write a cookbook. I don’t want to write a cookbook. I don’t know what the point of writing another cookbook to put on the market is.”
June Xie beaming while surrounded by cookbooks and measuring cups, things she is suspicious of
Allie Holloway
For Xie, “The whole spirit of this show is no recipes, no cookbooks. No real constriction on how to do something beyond what you can afford and what’s already in your kitchen. The whole restriction on Budget Eats is the budget. It’s how much money you have to spend… People who are actually forced to cook on a budget… won’t have money to buy that cookbook. So who is this book for?” She’s also uncomfortable with the idea of packaging her personality on paper, in part because she doesn’t feel she could do it in a way that feels authentic.
In short, she says, “I don’t have a self that I really want to sell.”