- Hi, I'm Merle, I am a Tasty producer in New York,
and today I'm gonna tell you why I started Tasty Veg.
(upbeat music)
Okay, so this first video was one of the ones
that I was experimenting with when I first started
doing vegetarian content.
This one was tricky, but once you get the hang
of the cutting motion, it's super, super simple.
My approach to this was to just pick one vegetable
at a time and then see how many different ways
I could cook it or bake it, and I was focusing on potatoes,
and I found out that this is actually a really popular
street food all over the world,
so I think that lent itself to the success of the video.
A lot of people would be like I've seen this in my city,
or I've seen this in Japan or I've seen this in Mexico.
This video is different because you wouldn't look at this
and be like oh, that's a vegetarian video.
You would just be like oh, that's so cool,
I want to try that, I bet you I could do that.
So it did so well, it caught my boss's attention
and he was like wow, maybe it is actually possible
for you to do plant-based food and it can go viral.
After the success of the tornado potato
and a handful of other vegetarian videos
I made for Tasty, I was allowed to start
the Tasty Vegetarian page, just kind of as an experiment
to see how vegetarian content can work
and if our audience was large enough
to handle its own page of just that content.
So about a month in to starting the Tasty Vegetarian page,
I had the idea to make a video
about how you could regrow your own fruits at home.
The idea behind this was that you could save money.
I was pretty sure a lot of people didn't even know
you could regrow your own food,
and it seemed like a good use for kitchen scraps.
So I dove into this project
and it ended up paying off tenfold.
It's by far my most successful video,
probably the one I've put the most love into.
I was still relatively new as a producer
when I made this video, but I just dove into this project
because I was so excited about it,
so I had the whole thing shot three weeks into
all my hard work and then I submitted it for notes
and I got the feedback that I should have gone through
research first because we needed to make sure
the stuff I was putting out to the world
was actually true, so I ended up having to wait
an additional two and a half weeks
before we could actually publish this video.
I think one reason you'd want to regrow your own fruit
is because you more than likely have
at least one of these things in your house as it is,
and you're gonna throw the scraps away anyway,
so why not make the scraps work for you,
and you might be able to save
a little bit of money down the road.
I mean, if you buy something at a store
and then you find out that by buying that,
it can then make another one for free,
it just sounds like a genius idea to me.
Not to mention, you actually know where
your food is coming from,
so there's the benefit of your confidence
in how healthy this actually is for you
and where your food is coming from,
and whether or not you've used pesticides.
The other really cool thing and another reason
you might want to try regrowing your own fruit is that
you can do it in pretty much any sized apartment or house
and anywhere in the world.
So there's no reason not to try it.
You'll save money and it's fun.
So after this video was published,
I was looking through the comments and I saw
all these people telling me like there's no way this works,
I'm sure you guys are faking this,
but meanwhile I'd spent three weeks
running to flower shops and trying to make this video happen
and then I had people like Alvin at work saying.
- Why would you even do this, it's not even a Tasty video?
- But then the video blew up
and I saw people commenting pictures
of their own regrown gardens and all these positive comments
and it ended up being completely worth it.
It's my favorite video,
so you gotta work for the things you love.
(upbeat music)
Well this pancake video was part of a challenge we did
to make a week of vegan content.
Through that week, I actually started
to get interested in veganism myself.
One of my goals is to make food that's good first
and vegan second, and these pancakes accomplish that.
In going vegan, I don't want to feel like
I can't eat the things I love,
and pancakes were my favorite breakfast growing up,
and they still are, and so I just wanted to make
vegan pancakes that were just as delicious.
Fluffiness is important for them to be delicious.
My goal with veganism and my goal with making vegan content
is to just show people that it doesn't have to be scary,
it doesn't have to be bland, and it doesn't have to be hard.
But I will say, I don't think you need to be 100% vegan.
I think baby steps and like, you know,
don't feel guilty about wanting to eat cheese,
cheese is delicious, just do any little bit that you can.
I don't want anyone saying that you're a horrible person
just because you're not vegan.
I want to show you a vegan recipe
that you don't want to pass up on,
and then maybe from there on forward,
you'll elect to eat vegan food just because you want to.
It doesn't have to be every meal, it could be one meal
a week, one meal a month.
It could be one meal a year.
I just think it's important to try new things.
One way that I come up with videos
for Tasty Vegetarian is that I'll look back
at what we've done in the past
and see what's done really well
and then I'll try to make a vegetarian version of that.
So back in the day, Alvin made this one-pot
Swedish meatballs video that absolutely killed,
I have to give it to him,
and I was like okay Alvin, I'm gonna make that dish,
but I'm gonna make it vegan
and it's gonna be just as delicious.
Something that I hope can change is that people will stop
judging other people for with they eat
and the decisions that they make about their diet,
and instead start asking questions
and realize we're all doing our best.
Just because it's different doesn't mean it's bad.
I was very happy with how these
Swedish meatballs turned out.
If you're gonna ask me if they tasted
exactly like meatballs, like real meatballs with meat,
of course not because they're not meat.
However, they can tell you they capture
a lot of of the same savory notes,
and if you're nostalgic for them and you miss them
and you don't eat meat, they will absolutely do the trick.
The vegan cinnamon rolls were another video
that I made during our vegan week sprint,
and the ideation was the same for these.
I wanted to take a past hit video
from Tasty and make it vegan.
Two and a half years ago, I was hired at Buzzfeed.
I started as an intern, as many of us do,
and I was actually making food pretty much from day one.
I worked really, really, really hard for six months
and finally I was given the opportunity
to come on to the Tasty team.
Before Tasty, there was Buzzfeed Food
and I was making videos for them,
but then Tasty came about and was a huge success,
and I was lucky enough to jump on the team.
Buzzfeed is my first job,
it's the only full-time job I've ever had,
and before I came here, I took a year and a half
off to go home and kinda figure out what I wanted to do.
When I got to New York, I didn't have too much of a plan,
I just applied to Buzzfeed online,
and a day after I moved to New York,
without any real plan or any job,
I got a call saying that they were interested
in doing an interview with me for an internship position.
I was so excited, I remember calling my mom
and my entire family kinda freaking out.
So six months after I was hired as an intern,
I was offered a full-time position with Tasty,
and I was a Tasty producer.
I gladly accepted and then basically turned around
and said "okay well now I'm gonna be vegetarian,
"and I don't want to use any meat in any of my videos."
I was really nervous at first,
and wasn't sure how they were gonna take that,
but to my surprise, they were very open
and they were very accepting of my choice.
They were up for the challenge.
They were like okay, if you can make vegetarian
Tasty videos work, go for it, and I did.
This whole experience had been incredibly humbling,
but also it's given me the opportunity
to really trust my instinct and to believe that
other people will feel the same way that I do
and to see it as a success has meant more to me
than you can even imagine.
I feel really good about what I do
and I'm lucky enough to enjoy going to work every day
and feel like I'm doing a little bit of good for the world
because I've had the opportunity to take something
that I'm super passionate about and make it approachable
and easy for people all over the world.
So I really don't know anyone with a cooler job than mine.
- [Man] Oh yes.
(relaxed music)
(camera clicks)