Another Observation about TikTok Foodies
They have gone too far.
Every TikTok lives a life. They begin as every TikTok begins: In idiocy and thirst, but also with hope. No TikTok will ever be anything but the legible stain of a person transcribing the precise sound of every one of their farts; even the half-decent TikToks that exist are basically recordings of more interesting- or amusing-sounding butt rumbles. Some of those are worth remembering, and will be remembered, but most of them are just kind of fleetingly unpleasant. In summation, TikTok is an amusing enough platform that is jarringly popular among banal sociopaths, may well be doomed, and is objectively driving people insane. My friend’s stepmom—who is in her 60s—has 150,000 TikTok followers, which is more than enough reason for me to never use it, but I still engage with a lot of its content through Instagram Reels, and spend way too many of my precious hours indulging in this slop, but I am an idiot.
Maybe you also spend some or even a lot of time watching TikToks. If so, you may have noticed that much of this experience boils down to cringing through bad content. There are, we can only assume, a daunting number of insanely garbage videos produced every day, most of which pass unremarked and unmourned. This is what the Good Lord intended, if only because everyone being aware of every garbage TikTok that has ever existed would be absolutely soul-crushing; servers can handle this amount of garbage, but humans cannot. Humans break. TikTok breaks them.
For all the garbage TikToks that we cannot and will never see, there are a great many that achieve a sort of rank antifame. The most grating of these are food reviews which are a sort of upside-down version of engagement—Why are you eating the burger like that? You manage to sound more like AI than AI. Hey smoothbrain, you forgot to include the name of the restaurant! Go live in a toilet forever!—all of which is a rare example of the invisible hand of the marketplace doing what it is supposed to do. This holds true along a scaled continuum, with the most generic TikTok food reviews generating the same oafishly janky attempt at being a foodie.
“I’m trying the viral—” SHUT THE FUCK UP!
What you’ll see is some middling TikTok personage introducing some trendy restaurant that they are “UHHHBSESSED” with, but are most likely visiting because they watched a video of some other influencer eating there. When their meal appears on camera, they will act completely shocked to see the food that they just ordered. If it comes with a side of fries, they’ll nod their head, widen their eyes, and point their fork toward their meal. They will roll their eyes into the back of their head, as they say, “Ohhh my gawd, I wish you could smell this,” as a matter of requirement. If they’re eating a burger or a sandwich, they’ll take a monster bite, make you watch them chew for 30 seconds, and in the middle of their exaggerated grazing, they’ll do this weird finger hook thing over their mouth. For some ungodly reason, they will moan and it will be oddly sexual. If they are eating a fried chicken sandwich, they will hold it in their palm and fist a giant dipping cup so all the sauce drips and oozes down the side of the container, thus wasting it all and making a huge mess. If the number of likes is any worthwhile metric, there are large tranches of people who find this appetizing. It also almost seems like it’s some algorithmic prerequisite to hoist the burger right up to the camera right after the first bite. They are almost always in a car.
I understand that TikTok is the app equivalent of the orb of confusion from SpongeBob, but the stunted vocabulary of all these creators has convinced me that they have essentially nuked their brains in a microwave until they turned to mushed peas. These foodies will say melts in your mouth for food that doesn’t melt. The sheer abuse of the words “delicious” and “salty” and “creamy” and “crispy” makes me yearn for prose that reads like the author tortured a thesaurus—supposedly these are the only adjectives available to describe a burger. A comment like “the cheese is so cheesy” is somehow not as obnoxious as people saying “like literally” in every sentence. I won’t even get into this bizarre obsession with the cheese pull.
And if you want to know where the food is from, you’ll have to wait until the end of the two-minute video and they’ll flash the name of the restaurant for about half a second.
The worst kind of food trend, though, is the ASMR recipe videos where the cook will drag their chef’s knife across a slice of toasted bread for an audible five-second scrape before cutting the sandwich in half and squeezing it with both hands so all the meat juices ooze out. Again, there are apparently millions of people who find this appetizing. These overcaffinated mutants will take a bite and the deafeningly loud crunch of their toasted baguette or sourdough feels like I’m getting molested. These videos are too dumb to live, but not dumb enough to halt their mass production. There are also those harrowing cooking video montages of ingredients slapping on the countertop one-by-one, and after they taste their sandwich, they flash this obnoxiously exaggerated face as they moan “SOOO GOOD!!” while slamming both hands on the table, closed eyes, nodding and while smiling and crunching because “the food is sooo good!” I have also had the misfortune of discovering demented concoctions like unholy tacos made by boiling beef, eggs and cheese in a bag of Doritos or boiled up chips made into mashed potatoes or dry packet ramen oven-baked in tomato sauce and cheese which people now consider “pizza.”
Being aware of all the dipshittery in an average TikTok food review can do nothing to protect you from low-effort content; only logging off can do that. But familiarizing yourself with all this degraded patois and deranged idiosyncracies can enhance your experience with aspiring foodie influencers all the same. I hope this run-down can add something to these wretched reviews and recipes. It highlights the heroic scale of their idiocy. It can add an affirming and contextualizing echo of parallel tryhard wrongheadedness to a TikTok that’s otherwise just a blaring cheese-gust. TikTok, until it goes away, is going to be what it is, and it is mostly bad. But if you have to see bad content, and you will, you might as well reverse-engineer it’s badness while you’re doing it.
I have never seen a tick tock.
WINNING.
Like you mentioned, so much of this barrel-scraping content has migrated over to IG (whether through Reels or people just straight up re-posting TT's) that it's basically driven me off the platform for good.