Journey Into Hell With These TikTok Table Food Videos
We cannot have this as a society.
I will get this out of the way to start: I am not a food blogger. I have very few "dishes" in my repertoire (eggs, potatoes, uhh salad?) and I have made many big mistakes in my uneventful cooking career. But I have also eaten my fair share of food, and so I think I can say with authority that the "trend" of making nachos and—god damn it—spaghetti like a knockoff Lowcountry boil is extremely bothersome.
If you don't know what I'm talking about, I'm sorry to ruin your day but here is a good example:
There are a lot of very useful and good food things on TikTok and a lot of silly bullshit. What's specifically annoying about this one is that it's supposed to be a "hack" but it presents more like a dish at a wedding reception for 12th-century nobles that would instantly vaporize every attendee.
This is by no means "new." BuzzFeed wrote about this TikTok trend back in September of last year, and I assume millennial writers such as myself are at least six months late to finding out about whatever Zoomers think is cool. There are many iterations of it on TikTok, and over time it made its way over to Twitter, and the insanely cursed Twitter account Chefclub Network made its own version in December:
I will freely admit that I don't know what's so off-putting to me about the nachos, and that it may very well be a me problem. Sure, there's the hygiene factor and the germ awareness that makes this seem uniquely gross to me now, but I think even more than that, 1) making complicated nachos with chips straight out of the bag seems like a waste of time and 2) that's entirely too much aluminum foil and the cleanup still seems kind of miserable.
Most of all, though: It's not even a "hack"! What steps are being removed here aside from not baking the chips? The whole concept of nachos is itself a hack.
As bad as the nachos are, however, whatever the fuck this is, is so much worse:
Mio dio che schifo. Non si può nemmeno chiamare pasta. È un abominio e inferiore alla merda e anche un cane non lo mangerebbe.*
I very much appreciate the desire to simplify food and to "innovate" aka be lazier about it. But like Icarus, we have flown too close to the sun and now instead of pasta we have Table Wets. People have been making nachos for several decades and pasta has been around for over a millennium; let's just trust what works for as long as it keeps working, please.
*If this doesn't make sense take it up with Google.
