It's tempting to explain this phenomenon as peer pressure and wanting to be popular taken to an extreme. Who knew that "getting the weird kid to eat [whatever]" was actually something that was web scale.

The Merrier's Fare

Between animal cruelty of a wide variety, environmental impacts including dedicating land both to raise cattle as well as to raise food for the cattle, releasing food known to be contaminated for economic reasons, the "completely-depend-on-yet-somehow-hate" thoughts some have about migrant workers, destroying "surplus" crops, our agricultural system is not a pretty thing to look at.

As the extended saying goes: "The more the merrier, the fewer the better fare," so that the larger the group, the worse or more meager the food will be. Scarcity is our assumption with a growing world population, even without a belief in threats to arable land due to climate change. All along the supply chain, corporate conservatives running the show have handy justifications for any ethical shortcomings.

The liberals can lament the system as a cruel but necessary one. Their justification lands with the same effects as the Christian conservative's "welp, I guess God gave Adam dominion over the animals, so..." Vegetarians and vegans recognize that they're fairly powerless to make the system less brutal. They're not personally littering, but they also can't stop another Deepwater Horizon from exploding every day.

The Choices We Have

All this is to say that, at the macro level, we don't expect to have food system that works perfectly. Even at a basic level of whether the food it provides (especially that which is in abundance, subsidized, and promoted) is healthy, we're certainly not all in agreement. The food pyramid I grew up was a wet dream of the agriculture industry. At least some territory (mostly in the posters on walls of public schools) has been ceded to public health academics since then.

In most grocery stores, we generally don't see any reflection of this shift in attitudes. To whatever extent "actually healthy" diets exist, they are supported by industry only insofar as they reflect a persona to be marketed to. Obviously, whether loose regulation allows fad diet scam arts, actively promotes large scale food production systems that aren't good for us, or both, we can't really trust our food to be healthy any more than we can trust it to be created ethically.

Consuming Not-Food

In an era of agricultural industrialization, we might expect food to less "real" in minor ways. The ubiquitous cavendish banana looks pretty odd compared to bananas with seeds inside. We employ genetic engineering so plants can survive round up and make freakishly large edible sections of fish and chickens.

But we have food that ends up only for display. A sandwich on the deli counter gets thrown away at the end of the day. But there is plenty of other would be food that just becomes mass in a landfill.

And then we have images of food. Not just matter that is unrealized as food, but food icons, drawings, plastic models, CGI and endless commercials to show them.

And beyond that, we've got coffee, cigarettes, alcohol (on the more legal side of the spectrum) to act as meal replacements. We somehow need the idea of "meals" and also need the idea of replacing them. And we won't just replace them with calories and nutrition.

With so much inanity around food, it's not that surprising that anything that seems to approximate the purpose of eating is fine. So drink your dinner, smoke your breakfast, and maybe have a sensible soylent for lunch.

With that level of disconnection, the signifiers for food worthy of attention can become that which is most processed, shiny, bright, and colorful. Maybe in some way we're imagining a ripe and inviting fruit, but any natural fruit or flesh has no potential to compare to a signifier-infused artificial product.

So what else conveys this new aesthetic of "food-like"? Anything looking like candy has potential. In fact, the journalists of Buzzfeed have proposed an entire list of forbidden snacks.

At the less extreme end of the spectrum, but using this same aesthetic criteria, uniform chicken nuggets, caked in crispy greasy breadcrumbs and ready for sugary barbecue sauce find no competition against a drumstick with a bone in it. Jamie Oliver has found some discouraging anecdotes around this situation in fact.

Back to Tide Pods

Would people eat Tide Pods if we didn't massively overvalue popularity (in general with celebrities, but in the farm leagues of YouTube specifically)? I'd say no.

Would people eat Tide Pods if being outrageous wasn't one of the best ways to be promote yourself? I'd say no.

Would people eat Tide Pods if we didn't have a terribly broken relationship with our food system in general? I'd say no.

Self-destructive consumption with a possible upside of popularity is not new, but it's worth seeing that there's more context here than just "kids being stupid for attention." When we subsidize unhealthy and environmentally expensive foods, allow industry to drive recommendations, obscure the realities of food production, or promote monocultures of crops, we make the system functionally harder to interrogate.

Even without considering "ag-gag" laws, at a certain point, food production has become so disconnected from our experience that we might as well eat a god damned tide pod.

Certainly, we should interrogate mechanisms of popularity and confidence in the contexts of platforms that exploit our psychology. But we also cannot allow incumbent industries to operate without challenge or critique.