There's not much else that needs to be explained in the way of Jonathan Cheban. By now, we all know he is Kim Kardashian's longtime BFF who came up from small-town New Jersey and is now running what he would likely call Instagram's preeminent food empire: @Foodgod. But while we all know who he is and what he does, no one has ever asked (well, OK, some people have): What gives him the right?
Since the account's inception, he's amassed more than 3.4 million followers, most of whom are presumably there for the Kardash cameos, but some of whom are truly there for the exorbitant amounts of Insta-food the deity pretends to eat. And while, sure, yes, the stuff he posts is ridiculous in a what is that kind of way, it is painfully obvious to scroll through his feed that this is all a shtick, and one that he just fell into in the way that fame-adjacent people do when they have an influx of new followers and nothing to post but selfies (see: Jordyn Woods and her post-Kylie fallout boohoo collection, see: Nicole Richie and House Of Harlow 1960, her uber-successful fashion line borne of Simple Life fame, and see: every other famous best friend to have ever lived). The difference is, it's not an organic pairing, him and food. And it's not something he's particularly good at either.
For those unfamiliar with the story that led Jonathan to the Foodgod identity he's entirely embraced (seriously, he has the handle tatted onto his forearm and is legally changing his name to Foodgod next month), the L.A. Times reported on it beautifully earlier this year:
[Years ago] a friend suggests the name Foodgod and Cheban kind of likes it. Once, in the middle of a mob scene at a food court with Kardashian and Kanye West, Cheban hears West call out to him over the roaring of the crowd and paparazzi. “Foodgod! Can you get me a Diet Coke?” And so he was christened by Ye under the bright yellow neon lights of the golden arches.
He now specializes in having high-end restaurants create extremely over-the-top edible monstrosities so that he can pose near them. Sometimes, the food is not so extremely over-the-top; sometimes, the food is just expensive. Sometimes, he poses near not so extremely over-the-top food that is still probably expensive and takes a picture of himself doing so.
This, he says, makes him a trendsetter, someone who is uniquely qualified to speak on what's hot in food and what's definitively not hot in food. This, of course, is the natural evolution of someone who used to run a Kardashian stan account peppered with pictures of random desserts that were captioned the way your grandma who occasionally signs on to Facebook might have described them.
He's certainly not the first to make a living by standing open-mouthed near food while someone takes a picture. Sure, the other food influencers you follow on Instagram have a unique point of view other than "because I can," and they work extremely hard to make/arrange/photograph the food you see. Likely, they don't have the world's most famous family to @ them every so often for a lil klout boost, but they, too, are posting pictures of food, at the end of the day.
And what's so wrong with having that be the way you make a living? Literally nothing. Influencers work hard. Jonathan Cheban...probably doesn't work that hard, but he's making his living. Kind of. Ugh. Am I jealous of Foodgod and all food influencers everywhere? Probably. Who do they think they all are???
