Tyra Banks’s diet according to her “Everything Supermodel Tyra Banks Eats in a Day†video on the Harper’s Bazaar YouTube page is like food, but make it insane. I don’t say this to food shame, but to celebrate Banks’s culinary innovations in the fields of jerky, takeout, and more. It’s all the more impressive considering that Banks probably recorded this before the coronavirus delayed work on ModelLand, and yet it sounds like something someone came up with after being trapped in their house for a month. Listening to Banks describe the way she likes her bagels in the morning is so much more revolutionary than anything any Test Kitchen chef has ever done. She either goes plain or onion depending on her plans, “and I fill up the entire scooped-up bagel rounds like a moat,†with whipped cream cheese. That’s when Banks puts on her lab coat (proverbially. She’s wearing a men’s blazer in the video). Here are the instructions:
I take that plate of that moated cream-cheesed bagel and I put it inside of the microwave. And then I shut the door. And I set it for 20 seconds. And then what starts to happen is the molecular makeup of that cream cheese starts to change. It’s like a science project. And when you take it out of the microwave, it’s not just heated. Oh no. It’s creamy, and it has a slightly tart flavor that it didn’t have pre-microwave.
She keeps going, acting out the orgasmic pleasures of biting into a hot cream-cheese bagel like she’s Meg Ryan at Katz’s. The video really gets going when Banks gets into her ordering strategy: She goes to a delivery app, chooses two restaurants of the same cuisine, and orders the same dishes from both places, for a taste test. “And what happens is, next time you order, you know where to order from, because one of them is always nasty.†Genius. Even ordering dinner is an act of reality-competition-series self-production. As Johnny LaZebnik clarified when he posted this portion of the video to Twitter: “i cannot emphasize enough that the prompt here was ‘tell us what you typically eat in a day.’â€
And in case you were wondering after all of this: Has Tyra Banks perfected candied sriracha maple bacon jerky at the Culinary Institute of America near Napa, California? Of course she’s perfected candied sriracha maple bacon jerky at the Culinary Institute of America near Napa, California. This isn’t amateur hour.