Photo-Illustration: Chef Bae/Instagram
Wearing an olive-drab apron over the white T-shirt-and-jean-shorts uniform of influencers everywhere, Brooke Baevsky is explaining her morning to her audience on TikTok. “I traveled about two hours from Tel Aviv to G@z@,” Baevsky says, spelling the name of the territory this way in the caption.
In October, Baevsky, a food influencer and private chef based in Los Angeles who calls herself Chef Bae, was in the small farm community of Shuva cooking for Israeli soldiers coming back from the front lines. The outdoor kitchen where she worked and posted was set up by a trio of brothers who have been providing hot meals for members of the IDF. Ten minutes from the explosions in the north of Gaza, Baevsky prepared industrial-size bowls of gluten-free schnitzel; fennel, potato, and celery salad; and chickpea stew with fish balls. “The IDF not only has Israelis but Moroccans, Druze, and Arabs, so there was pressure when it came to my spice game,” she tells her viewers.
Later, Baevsky felt another kind of pressure: Some of her 250,000 Instagram followers and nearly 400,000 followers on TikTok weren’t thrilled by her decision to cook for soldiers waging a war in which Gaza was months ago so thoroughly flattened that its authorities could no longer count the dead. “I’m so glad people are exposing their sadistic selves,” one wrote. “How do you sleep at night?” several asked. “To be this willfully ignorant should be a crime,” wrote perennial spoiler candidate Jill Stein.
Scores of Jewish Americans and other members of the diaspora have traveled to Israel to cook for IDF soldiers. “We need the soldiers to sit and feel at home,” said Eliran Trabelsi, one of the brothers running the kitchen in Shuva. “They’re coming out, they’re coming out for 45 minutes and then need to go back to Gaza. So we need to make sure that those 45 minutes will give them enough strength to stay as long as they need and to be as positive as possible.” (IDF soldiers are generally well fed. When deployed, they receive several hot-meal kits; a “sweet refreshment” kit with Belgian waffles, crêpes, powdered sugar, and sprinkles; and a “gluten-free treat,” an IDF spokesperson said.)
Most of those who go to Israel for this sort of volunteer work come home without facing extreme public condemnation. The breezy tone of Baevsky’s video definitely triggered additional negative attention. The bubbly presentation that social-media pros generally bring to food videos does not function the same way with Gaza in the distance. “Yes, I got in a Hummer, I couldn’t help myself,” she says offhandedly in the video before describing a soldier she thought was cute, “so of course I personally fed him seconds.”
Once the video got to left-leaning silos on Twitter, it was described, succinctly, as the “Zone of Pinterest.” (Baevsky did not reply to an email.)
Baevsky, 28, was raised in a Jewish family in central Massachusetts before becoming a private chef for celebrities, with clients such as (Vox Media board member) John Legend and Mindy Kaling. She went on a Birthright trip in 2018. Since appearing on Chopped two years ago, she has built a career as an influencer, partnering with Goop and Erewhon. Before October 7, 2023, a series of videos of volunteering in Israel might not have caused much of a blip among an audience coming to her page for Sunday-night meal prep and $1,200 açai bowls. But during the war — with college campuses in tumult, top cultural institutions unsure of how to fill their calendars, and friendships in the U.S. burned — a food influencer’s comment section is an absolutely likely place for heated words.
“Post–October 7th, it was very different talking about Israel,” said vegan food influencer Ben Rebuck, a Jewish chef who said that he lost 20,000 followers in the weeks after the October 7 attack for expressing his support of Israel. “It is difficult talking about Israel at any point because a lot of people in the world see Israel as the perpetrator and the aggressor in this situation. It’s not my personal belief,” he said. “So when my whole platform is about promoting veganism and plant-based food, I think people are often confused as to why you can support — I don’t believe genocide is the correct word to use — but people say, ‘How can you care about the treatment of animals but not care about the treatment of people?’ They conflate the two issues.” (Rebuck also noted that Israel has among the highest rates of vegans per capita in the world.)
Rebuck’s case also shows the limits of calling for cancellation in the comments. After losing followers, he said, his page has more than doubled in size over the following year. Chef Bae also does not appear concerned. In most instances when an online personality has her social media flooded with negative comments, deletions and moderations would ensue. She has chosen to let people speak — both in her favor and against — as she continues to post day-in-the-life videos from Tel Aviv, drinking green smoothies and going to the fish market, miles away from the front.
