From Tasty to Toilet

Why food videos are so !@#$’d up

January 27, 2023

Why is Food Content Like That?

As the resident Very Online™️ person of my IRL friend group, I often get requests to explain the strange videos my friends encounter. Very often, they are food videos. This is partly because we’re all cooks and foodies, to some extent, who are more likely to discover a range of food videos based on our habits, but it’s also because video creators can’t help but do fucked up shit with food. 

There’re whole subgenres of food-focused borderline-fetish content like mukbang. There’re the virality-bate cooking hacks you’ll see on channels like 5 Min Crafts and the videos debunking those hacks from Ann Reardon. There’s the ongoing psychosexual drama of the M&M’s spokescandies. There’s all the random shit people keep doing to butter on TikTok. Then there’re the people showing you how to make an ice cream sundae in your toilet. 

I love food. I love cooking and eating it. I enjoy a lot of culinary content. I also have a lot of thoughts on the bloated ecosystems of low-quality food content out there and the platform features and trends that have created these ecosystems. 

But first, the links. 

Platform Updates

Instagram 

The Rest of Meta 

TikTok

Twitter

YouTube

Google 

Pinterest (disclosure: I’m currently a contractor at Pinterest) 

Culture Movers 

Film & TV

Music 

Creator Economy 

AI 

Scams 

Pivot to Gross Food  

Buzzfeed’s Tasty was one of the big stars during the height of Facebook’s infamous “pivot to video.” Their short, simple recipes were optimized for the sound-off autoplay of the Facebook newsfeed. Facebook was pushing video hard, making it harder for publishers to drive traffic to their websites via outbound clicks, and eventually offering publishers money to make high-quality content they could run ads against.  Then Facebook video metrics turned out to be high key sus. And they stopped subsidizing publisher video content. 

Some outlets could make the remaining ad revenue split work. If you could make video content cheaper, more likely to grab user attention, and more likely to provoke strong emotions that generate engagement, then the math still worked. Here’s where the race to the bottom starts. If I can spend next to no money making videos that confuse, disgust, and outrage you within the first few seconds, then I can scale that into a profitable video business on Facebook. The outrage comments and shares signal engagement, engagement leads to algorithmic reach, reach autoplays my videos in more feeds. Rinse and repeat. 

It works great for grievance politics, but what about a topic so universal we all engage with it? Something so important to our fundamental existence we’re all hardwired by millennia of evolution to feel strongly about it? I’ve got it! Gross food videos. 

That’s how we get to the toilet ice cream video (originally shared on Facebook). Video content creators following the logical conclusion of the autoplay incentive structure Facebook setup. Videos carefully honed to trigger our “oh fuck this” and “are they serious?” reactions so perfectly that they escape their Blue App quarantine zone and spill over onto other platforms. These videos aren’t good. They aren’t trying to be. They are designed to hijack just slightly more of your attention than the average video on Facebook. Cause that’s the system Meta has engineered for video creators over the years. 

Wait, There’s More

TikTok really changes the game when it comes to weird food trends. I want to get into how that platform’s trendiness collides with the weird food ecosystem it’s inheriting from Meta. I also want to dig into some of the structural differences on YouTube that have made it easier for different kinds of food content to thrive. 

I’m going on vacation starting late next week. So here’s what to expect over the next few weeks. 

  • Friday, February 3rd - Platform Updates focused Kinda Brief Lite Edition

  • Friday, February 10th - “Why food videos are so !@#$’d up” Part 2, but no Platform Updates

  • Friday, February 17th - Return the chaos that I consider routine for this newsletter 

Finally, please send me any and all weird food content you have questions about. I’d love to include some of your examples, answer your questions, and investigate the trends behind them. Drop a link and a question in the comments!