Food. Food food food.
Food is a very important part of our lives. For survival and biological reasons, of course, but also because we humans like to enjoy ourselves, and it’s a very big serotonin trigger. (Serato-who?)
That’s where food porn comes in. People love delicious, delectable, often calorie-dense foods; people love foods presented beautifully in restaurants; people follow food bloggers and even mukbang-ers (people who eat food on camera) on YouTube and Instagram; people constantly post pictures of food on their social media… We really live in a food-obsessed culture, and it’s a worldwide phenomenon.
But here’s where the differences come in. Russian side of the Internet has recently been swept over with an interesting meme, so to speak: people took some of the most universally hated foods in Russia (like the-food-that-shall-not-be-named (aspic)), combined them into a grid and tried to get bingos with what they actually did like amongst those.
That grid included a lot of quite habitual combos for me, like, say tomato juice and Tabasco, so that got me thinking: what about the Western, anglophone Internet and their food porn obsession? What are some popular food combos that might actually be super weird?
So I went on a quest, and here are some of the weirdest combinations I’ve found that Americans and Brits seem to adore (sometimes influenced by opinion, admittedly). Do tell if you love those, because we at Society19 are genuinely curious.
Peanut butter and Doritos. Peanut butter in hamburgers. Peanut butter and cheese. Peanut butter, mayo and pickle sandwiches.
All of those are very real combinations that a lot of people love — even though they don’t sound food porn-ographic at all. Peanuts, generally, are culprits in a lot of crimes against the culinary art. Hilariously, however, the most terrifying-sounding combo (the sandwich, of course) is one of the most loved ones — and I can attest to the fact that it is, in fact, delicious.
A lot of people seem obsessed and religiously devoted to ketchup, and I personally couldn’t disagree more. This is not food porn and not a weird combo discovery — it’s a food murder scene.
People eat mac & cheese with ketchup, scrambled eggs with ketchup (don’t), rice with ketchup, pasta with ketchup… The list goes on. These people are unstoppable. I am, personally, not strong enough.
…preferably Feta.
While sounding absolutely ferally wrong, it is one of the most delicious combinations on earth, and it originates in the ex-soviet nation of Azerbaijan. This is true food porn, especially compared to the previous point. Do yourself a favour — try it out when it’s watermelon season again.
See, this is the most notoriously infamous “weird” food combo — so famous that it doesn’t sound that weird anymore — yet it is also the one that’s the most disagreed upon, so I had to mention it. People either love it or hate it — there’s no in-between, for whatever reason.
The side that hates it seems to be outweighing the side of lovers on the Internet (which to me is a shocker, actually, despite the fact that I don’t like it much myself) but it doesn’t lose in popularity nonetheless.
That’s not where it ends, however, I just highlighted the most bizarre-seeming ones to me (amongst the popular ones, that is).
But here’s the little bingo of the most popular weird combinations I found — do play, do share, do discuss, do not fight!
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