When you can’t look away

I’ll begin this post with a disclaimer: I am not on TikTok and have no plans to join any time soon. When I report on TikTok trends it’s because I learned about them via someone’s cross-shared post on Instagram or through an online article, like Aaron Hutcherson’s latest in The Washington Post. He discusses the reasons we are attracted to the terrible TikTok food videos that abound on the platform.

You know the kind of videos he is talking about: spreading spaghetti and meatballs on a countertop to create a “pasta board”, cooking in weird places like hotel rooms or bathrooms, unholy combinations of ingredients tossed together with abandon, and the like. Hutcherson contacted some of TikTok’s most popular bad/weird food video creators and posed the question that many of us have, which is “WHY ON EARTH ARE YOU DOING THAT?”, only Hutcherson is more circumspect in his queries. The answer given by most is, unsurprisingly, to get as many views, clicks, and comments as possible. Some of the creators didn’t want their names shared to protect their privacy and I don’t blame them, I wouldn’t want to be associated with those videos either.

A couple of the people interviewed don’t create the absurd cooking videos, instead they record their reactions to them. I have seen several from @Chefreactions and @tanaradoublechocolate and usually find them to be funny. Chef Reactions (shown in the screenshot above) says he creates his videos with humor in mind, but he also points out bad food safety practices and hopes he can save someone from getting food poisoning if they were inclined to make one of these terrible recipes. He must be doing something right; he has almost 600,000 followers on Instagram.

One criticism about these bizarre recipe videos is that they waste a lot of food. “To spend $100, $150, which is some people’s weekly, if not monthly, food budgets, just for the sake of p—ing people off on the internet? That kind of gets me,” Chef Reactions said. One of the content creators says she eats everything she makes, even if it isn’t very good, but I suspect she is in the minority.

Whether you find them fascinating or repulsive, these videos get clicks, so they are not going away any time soon. Even if someone finds a video off-putting, they are likely to share it. The reason people do that is because they want to feel like they are “part of a larger communal experience,” says Alex Turvy, a researcher who studies digital culture. One thing I can say about these videos is that they reinforce my decision to stay off TikTok.