Welcome to Delicious or Distressing, where we rate recent food memes, videos, and other decidedly unserious news.
In five years, we shall only communicate in memes, and the English language as we know it will be dead. Kidding, sort of. But the lines where internet culture stops and our own analog lives begin is blurrier by the day. Independent restaurants and fast-food chains regularly launch items that seem tailored to make a splash on social media. TikTok recipes and techniques dominate home cooking trends now. Some seem like flashes in the pan, while unfortunately I will never be able to look at a baked feta again without thinking about my decreasing relevance as a content creator.
To keep track of it all, we are ranking these moments in time. Delicious here means its inherent delightfulness, not its taste, and distressing means…distressing. It’s an absolute science so please do not ask further questions. Some of these will one day be nothing but a distant memory, while others may end up worming their way into the way we see food culture—or onto grocery aisle shelves.
This week, we’re looking at corn kid, hot dog straw guy, and other things vying to be the food main character of the week.
Corn Kid
Is there any love more pure and absolute than the love that corn kid has for corn? “Look at this thing,” he says, brandishing a corn cob in a video that’s evangelized TikTok into CornTok. “I can’t imagine a more beautiful thing.” He makes joyous arguments for loving the vegetable: (1) It’s a big lump with knobs; (2) it has the juice; and (3) it is corn. The musician schmoyoho, who created the 2010 YouTube hit “Double Rainbow Song,” has lately autotuned corn kid’s words into a strummy, synthy song that sounds exactly like the internet’s bygone era, when the digital world felt as fresh and innocent as an ear of summer corn. “Just cried to a corn song,” a commenter on the song video says. It’s true, listening to the lyrics “when I tried it with butter, everything changed” is a deeply cathartic experience. 5/5 delicious. — Karen Yuan, lifestyle editor
Hot Dog Straw
In Australia, there’s something known as the Tim Tam Slam, in which you bite off opposite corners of a chocolaty biscuit and use it as a straw for hot tea, thus suffusing the Tim Tam with tea and the tea with Tim Tam. Oft have I wondered, What if instead of tea this were beer, and instead of a cookie this were a hot dog? JK, WHAT MONSTER WOULD WONDER THAT?! A Yankees fan, inevitably. What I love about this video is that there’s no hesitation, no trial and error. This is a man who has drinking beer through a meat straw down to an exact science. I’ll rank this 5/5 distressing, with the potential for a 3.1/5 delicious if you subbed in a Bloody Mary for the beer. —MacKenzie Chung Fegan, senior commerce editor
