Chrissy Teigen Is Eater’s Media Personality of the Year

We needed Chrissy Teigen this year. Open Facebook, and there’s a racist, sexist, and/or homophobic meme shared by a relative or friend from high school. Scroll through Twitter, and the timeline is an endless stream of tweets regarding the latest powerful man to be outed as a sexual abuser and whatever is happening at the moment in Donald Trump’s upside-down circus. Switch over to Instagram, and it’s mostly fine, but, wow, that algorithm is awfully annoying. Who needs to see food pics from five days ago?

But, then, one more flick of the thumb through Twitter, and something like this pops up:

That was Teigen’s reaction to one of the most “this is 2017” stories to surface in recent weeks: Papa John’s being endorsed by white supremacists over its founder’s comments about NFL players kneeling during the national anthem. The story is so absurd, and the tweet is so perfect. It displays humor and exasperation, and it reveals a human who’s relatable: Chrissy Teigen is a wealthy, famous model and has a husband who is an excellent musician, but she tweets just like us.

Scan her timeline, and you’ll find a mix of funny, happy, and serious, but all of the tweets read like they’re from a regular human, not some mega-celebrity. She also loves food — cooking at home and dining out — and loves to tweet about it, just like us. She has good taste, but she isn’t a snob. She likes fancy restaurants and everyday chains, such as Outback Steakhouse, where she has been known to drop $1,000 in gratuity. Teigen isn’t just good at social media. She appears to be a good human, a celebrity who doesn’t use her societal status to be awful to people, but instead applies it toward good deeds.

She is really good at social media, though. A quest for banana bread ingredients has never been so entertaining:

Everything worked out, by the way. She got the bananas.

Already a food enthusiast, Teigen became a food professional by publishing her first cookbook, Cravings, last year. Now, she’s close to publishing a follow-up called Cravings 2. “Look, I don’t want to be one of those dead-inside laughing-with-a-salad chicks, and I don’t want to seem like one of those annoying, ‘I can eat anything I want anytime’ chicks,” she wrote in the introduction of her first book. “It’s just that I wanted to be honest in this book about the kinds of food I love, the kinds of food I crave. I just have to find ways to make those cravings work with my day job (e.g., sometimes with a well-timed ‘f*ck it’).”

Yes, more of that, please. Let’s just read Chrissy Teigen tweets and eat Chrissy Teigen food and ignore everything else from here on out. For many people, 2017 has mostly been a massive, ugly, steaming landfill. But Teigen’s presence is a nice flower poking out of the garbage.