Discovering World Cuisine on Tiktok With North_Omaha_Cat_Lady
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Discovering World Cuisine on Tiktok With North_Omaha_Cat_Lady
You probably want to join her when she gets her fat bitch on
A quick note for longtime subscribers: So sorry I never got a post out last week, it’s a long story, but I think you’ll agree that this story (and the one I just did for Forbes about Adam Conover) more than makes up for it! Enjoy.
Also, corrections corner: A previous version of this article misidentified Rosie Madsen as Rosie Robertson, and called her a teacher rather than a paraeducator.
When Omaha, Nebraska, special education paraeducator Rosie Madsen (aka north_omaha_cat_lady) started making videos on Tiktok, she was just trying to entertain herself.
It was mid-pandemic, the 2020 election was on the horizon, and she, like everyone, was a weird combination of desperately bored and antsy as hell: “It was like June of 2020 when I started. [My videos were] really heavy on politics and COVID. We were on lockdown… And I did an occasional food video.”
Madsen has always enjoyed watching people cook, “kind of like a spectator sport,” and the more time she spent on the app, the more she discovered: “There were all of these videos from other countries, and they never explained anything about what the ingredients are. So I was one of the people in the comments going, ‘What is this? What is this? What is this?’ I was like, well, I’m good at research. I’ll start looking this stuff up.”
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Two million Tiktok followers later, it looks like her research has more than paid off.
A significant subset of her following is there for her culinary reaction videos. In these videos, she explains what someone is cooking, even if that thing happens to be, say, algae or cow’s stomach in rural China, whether she’d ask them to, “Set me a plate and pour me a double,” and does it in a profoundly respectful, disarming style. The politics (and comedic sketches, often done as her “Trumplican” alter-ego Flossie Mae) haven’t gone anywhere, but food makes up a significant portion of her channel.
Madsen has always enjoyed watching other people cook and eating adventurously, but: “I grew up in the Midwest. I grew up with casseroles and bland food… I’ve never been to culinary school or anything like that. I’ve never worked in a restaurant—well, I worked in a cafeteria at the University of Minnesota making sandwiches.” That said, her culinary curiosity is seemingly inexhaustible.
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On her Tiktok page, she waxes poetic over Lebanese Disney princess Abir Saghir’s remarkable attempts to make a dish from every country in the world, scolds outdoor cooking enthusiasts MenWithThePot whenever they do something that could be the slightest bit bad from a food-safety perspective, and occasionally goes viral for her perfectly timed reactions to people using unconventional utensils to make mac and cheese.
This diversity of content and Madsen’s utter lack of pretense make her work so compelling that it’s utterly impossible to read, let alone respond to the hundreds of comments on any one of her videos.
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I’m a bit of a food obsessive, yet Madsen’s videos regularly teach me about ingredients and techniques I’ve never encountered. As a longtime educator, she says that’s important to her, especially when she reacts to creators from other parts of the world.
“I think some of the Chinese accounts, they must be blocked on some level where they can’t communicate with Americans because they never answer and questions. But sometimes they put something in Chinese on the screen. So on some of those I’m actually sitting there swiping and taking screenshots and then I go to Google Eye and I’ll use translate. Some of it… does not translate well at all, but I can get a kind of an idea of what it is. In some of the videos I’ll add a pinned comment asking ‘If you know the name of this dish, please tell me, I’d love to know.’”
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Two years in, she has learned to identify a staggering array of international cuisines, once even managing to explain a dish made from “the fat pad on the butt of a sheep—it’s only a certain breed of sheep—that is common in Mongolia” with an assist from “a friend who’s a veterinarian.” When I asked about her adventurous palate, she was quick to clarify that:
“The only thing I don’t think I would try is fugu. There’s only one place I know you can get it in the United States—New York City—it’s extremely expensive, and when it’s not prepared correctly it’ll kill you… Anthony Bourdain was my favorite. Some of the stuff that he showed—I’d love to go to the Vietnamese night markets. Oh, God, there are so many places that look amazing. And then we got COVID.”
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Madsen has spent most of her life in the Midwest and hasn’t had the chance to travel to most of the places she covers. She’d love to go back to Iceland (fermented shark is on her list) and Scotland, and she dreams of visiting an old high school friend who has lived in Japan for decades—in part to see her friend—but mainly because of the sushi.
Her social media presence lets her get close to travel without leaving home, exploring the world from her couch, or, as she puts it, “Getting my fat bitch on.” Still, as much fun as it can be, having 2 million followers from every walk of life requires some serious self-confidence. Luckily, that’s not a problem for Madsen: “I’ve never been one of those people who wanted everyone to like me. I don’t like everyone. It’s kind of like, no, I always want quality over quantity. If you don’t like me, it’s like, ok. I don’t care. One less troll doesn’t like me. Big deal. That’s shocking to some cisgendered men. I will match your energy, and I will tell you exactly what I think of you… You start it. I’ll finish it.”
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Sometimes, especially when Madsen makes political videos addressing abortion or gay rights, she finds that her audience expects her to be all-knowing. They want her to tell them where they can protest in their cities or otherwise “spoonfeed them like baby birds.” She has a day job and, more importantly, feels that as an educator, “If they actually start researching for themselves, they’re creating pathways in their brains. It sticks a lot better.”
As we wrapped up our interview, I asked Madsen if there was anything else she wanted people to know. It says a lot about her character that she immediately wanted to address the universality of food and how it brings us together.
“People seem, like, shocked that I’m not saying everything looks gross. And I know that some people on Tiktok do that for views and likes. That’s their thing, that’s fine. But if I was just sitting there saying ‘Ew, that’s gross! What is that!’ then you wouldn’t learn anything. Some videos take zero research for me… and then some of them are really, really, hard.”
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But despite any level of difficulty, it’s beyond worth it when people tell her, “‘Your videos made me enroll in culinary school. Your videos have made me want to cook more. I went to the Asian market for the first time.’ I’m like, good! You might find something weird and try it and not like it, but you don’t know until you try.”
For Madsen, this is the point, the reason she comes back to food over and over again. Because if she can introduce people to something new, they might just learn something about the world and, who knows, maybe even themselves.
You can follow Rosie Robertson on Tiktok or Instagram, and request a custom video from her via Cameo.