You might have seen some bizarre video of a chicken with an entire block of cheese stuffed into it, getting rolled in crushed hot Cheetos, and then baked – and still not looking like food on the other side. Or maybe it was a video of a woman pouring an entire half-gallon of spaghetti sauce onto her counter, and then layering cooked spaghetti over the top of it and calling it ‘perfect’ for a dinner party. This is not really food – what spawned these videos?
The Origin of Everything Broken in Social Media
There’s a principle in AI: you need to be very careful of what you reward when the AI is ‘learning’, because if you tell it to optimize for the wrong thing, it will pursue that wrong thing to the end of the Earth. Take the AI taught to win Tetris – when the blocks were too high for it to continue putting pieces down, and it realized it was going to lose, the AI simply paused the game. It didn’t win, but it wasn’t told it couldn’t pause to avoid losing. Or, the AI taught to go towards the finish line in a racing game – some of it’s iterations figured out that going backwards was way more efficient time-wise, and it had to be told that wasn’t allowed.
What we’re seeing happen on social media is the human equivalent of rewarding the wrong thing, allowing the human player to go backwards or pause the game because the reward is still there. Essentially, nobody is actually eating these awful conglomerates of mac and cheese, beef, chicken, and hot Cheetos, or toilet bowl punch, or whatever else gross appeared on your social media feed. It’s Stunt Food, and stunt food generates clicks – the reward.
Stunt Food
I heard the term ‘stunt food’ coined by a TikToker called EarlyPete, but others (including a whole host of commentary channels) have already been reporting on this phenomena before there was a phrase to attach to it besides ‘food waste’.
Stunt food covers an entire spectrum of food and recipe content online, and not all of it is inedible. At one end, we have things that produce edible results, but could have been done in a simpler or less click-baity way: the Buzzfeed Tasty 100 layers of lasagna, duck fat potato confit, or three-day brownies recipes are all convoluted versions of real food, and don’t taste like garbage. However, the odds of you actually recreating it are low, because the process adds an additional several hours. On the other, we have things that are no longer safe for human consumption because of the process to make it: the still-attached-to-the-waterline toilet punches and waffle-iron burnt skittles. The middle covers things like chicken or ramen made with crushed Cheetos, or sorbets that fail to mention the blender needed in the recipe, stuff that’s edible, stuff you could make, but not stuff that’s inherently good.
Stunt food generates clicks. Ragebait generates clicks. Gross-looking things and exotic foods treated the wrong way generate clicks. It’s a well-known fact at this point. If you can get someone to comment that something looks disgusting, you’ve generated a comment. If you do something outrageous in the video, or it keeps getting worse, so much worse that the viewer just has to share it to show their friends how awful it is, then you’ve successfully generated some shares. Humans are naturally curious – if you can create a video that’s unpredictable, people will keep watching even if the final product is obviously going to be horrid halfway through the watch time. A similar principle of taking familiar things and making them unfamiliar and uncomfortable is commonly used in horror movies! Stunt food!
It’s Only Worse In Video
Stunt food has gotten more extreme with age. In the early days of the internet, it was baconating everything, and posts about 2 A.M chili – now, it’s macaroni and cheese on everything combined with cutting and tying meat in uncomfy and >PG 13 ways. With so many participants, the internet no longer cares that the food is often literally inedible. Someone is still seeing it for the first time, and commenting in outrage or desire.
The content farms responsible for 60% of the trash are told by the algorithm that the bright, snappy red of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos in the thumbnail got clicks. The bright yellow and dark brown of overly gooey mac and cheese against a grilled burger is what gets clicks. Cutting a hole into a roast gets clicks. It’s the end result of rewarding clickable content over good content, and it’s going to get worse before it gets better. I am still seeing toilet bowl punch videos, filled with neon-colored candy and bright red Hawaiian Punch.
Genuine content creators making real, edible food recipes are competing with content farms that don’t have to worry about their food being consumable, or their instructions to make said food followable, giving them one heck of an advantage. Some of the hacks have actually killed and maimed people (don’t poach eggs in the microwave, and don’t heat oil in a tin can), and the content channels don’t care. If anything, it actually benefits them that so many people are showing up to type mean things in their comment sections, trying to warn children not to do the things depicted in the video. It gets comments, it gets clicks, and when controversy strikes, it gets more comments and clicks, further encouraging bad behavior. Just like the AI from before, they’re being rewarded for doing the wrong thing, because the wrong thing has been incentivized.
Sources:
https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2021/06/10483768/viral-gross-food-videos-countertops-rick-lax
Youtuber Jarvis Johnson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4lc3CG9_gg
Youtuber Ann Reardon (channel) : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsP7Bpw36J666Fct5M8u-ZA
