Nasty food is one of the hottest social media trends on TikTok, Instagram and Facebook with viral cooking videos featuring epic food fails that everyone loves to hate. Enjoy them for what they are: idiotic fun!
Spend any time on social media, and you’ll surely see nasty food videos turn up in your feed. Like one that recently made the rounds with the title “I learned this pasta trick in Italy.”
The “Italian” Job
First off, cooking hacks someone “learned in Italy” are an entire nasty food sub-genre. In this one, our intrepid “home chef” shoves a whole box of store-brand pasta into a blender, blitzes it into “pasta flour,” and then proceeds to make … “fresh pasta.” She rolls it out, cutting thick slices of “fettuccine,” which she cooks and dresses with jarred pasta sauce.
The result looks like what you’d expect: a stodgy pile of slugs on a plate. Even though “Grace” declares it tastes just like fresh pasta, we know she’s lying.
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The format hasn’t changed much since. A more recent variation: freeze a whole egg in its shell, slice it into rounds while still frozen, and fry the rounds into “mini eggs.” The hack has resurfaced repeatedly on TikTok, racking up millions of views each time despite FDA and USDA warnings that freezing eggs in the shell creates invisible cracks that can allow salmonella to ender. But the visual is cute, which is probably why nobody reads the comments.
The food is inedible, obviously, but the video is a viral hit that’s racked up 12 million views on Facebook, tens of thousands of reactions and shares, and more than 100,000 comments.
As someone with culinary school training whose work involves developing recipes for edible food, I should be offended by this mess. But, no, I find it oddly entertaining. I kind of admire its diabolical stupidity.
It’s just one of an endless stream of similar #foodfail “cooking” videos on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. (LinkedIn may be the only platform where they don’t turn up.) This one surfaced in my feed because a chef acquaintance couldn’t help commenting: “This is not fettuccine, linguine, or anything Italian.”
You’d think that as someone with culinary school training whose work revolves around developing recipes for edible food, I’d be offended by this mess.
But, no, I find it entertaining in a so-bad-it’s-good way. I kind of admire its diabolical stupidity.
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Recipe for Viral Nasty Food Videos
These things all follow the same format: A youngish woman in a generic kitchen slowly talking her way through a “recipe.” Whoever’s recording prompts her with off-camera “oohs” and “aahs” and questions. The kitchens all look like something out of a generic AirBnB rental or maybe a staged house for sale that a realtor friend is letting them use. Some bland Discovery Channel universe.
The nasty food “recipe” often involves a variation of dumping ingredients into a casserole dish (or even just dumping everything into the kitchen sink), always with lots of processed cheese, pasta or chicken (or both!), and jarred spaghetti sauce, and shoving that puppy into the oven for the big reveal.
#Fail by Design
This TikTok from @mchasfun for the “Ultimate Fall Mac N Cheese” takes that model to the next level.
@mchasfun Ultimate Fall Mac N Cheese #cooking #crazy #receipe #pumpkin #fall #halloween #cookingonabudget #funfood ♬ original sound – MC Has Fun
The video begins with MC pouring two boxes of dried fusilli into a hollowed-out pumpkin. That’s followed by a can of Bud Light, which she takes care to show to the camera, half a brick of Velveeta, and a boatload of shredded discount-supermarket mozzarella and Cheddar cheese. Diligently presenting crap ingredients to the camera is another hallmark of a fail-by-design “cooking” video.
She crowns this with rosettes made from pepperoni (“I like Hormel because they’re just really salty”), crescent roll dough and canned tomato sauce. She pauses to show us how to make them. Adding a final sprinkle of fake Parmesan dust, she puts it into the oven at 400°F for 30 minutes.
You don’t have to be Gordon Ramsay to see where this is going, and that’s the fun. We all know there’s not nearly enough liquid for that pasta to cook.
We’re all here for the nightmare big reveal.
@mchasfun doesn’t disappoint, cutting into the pumpkin to reveal cheese that hasn’t melted and – of course! – pasta that hasn’t cooked. You can hear it clink as it falls onto the plate.
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You can’t tear your eyes away from these slow-motion culinary train wrecks. Watching this, we’re all Top Chef judges. And judging by the creators’ faux-naif replies to insulting comments, they’re in on the joke.
What’s more, nasty food videos have spawned a sub-genre of reaction videos. I’ll watch Philadelphia-based comedian Tanara Mallory’s TikTok duets (@tanaradoublechocolate) several times over. I love everything about them, from her cheery catchphrase (“Everybody’s so creative!”) to her perplexed shock as she reacts to the latest inane cooking video.
Awful = Engagement
Nasty food videos aren’t meant to feature anything someone in their right mind would actually make, much less eat. (Though, I guess, one person’s disgusting is another’s delicious.) Food is merely the medium for this low-brow art form.
They exist to garner views, comments, and shares. If you hate ‘em – and I can understand why you would – your best bet is to keep scrolling. Resist the urge to react at all, other than to maybe click the option to “hide all” from whatever account is spewing this muck. Any reaction, even just pausing to watch, feeds the beast.
After all, we live in an attention economy. Your eyeballs, even appalled eyeballs, are worth a lot.
Views ≠ Brand Equity
Here’s the thing brand marketers should take from all of this.
Nasty food content works because it’s engineered for a specific reaction: disgust, disbelief, the weird compulsion to comment and share. It gets views because the algorithm rewards time-on-screen, and nothing keeps eyes glued to a screen like a slow-motion culinary disaster. Creators know this. The format is a feature, not a bug.
But views aren’t sales. Engagement doesn’t always signal trust. And a brand that chases the same reaction — shock, novelty, trend-of-the-week — is playing a game where the rules are written by the algorithm, not by the customer who’s deciding what goes in their shopping cart.
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The current wave of sourdough pastry content on TikTok is a subtler, more sophisticated version of the same dynamic. The food is genuinely beautiful — skilled bakers making cinnamon rolls, donuts, and cookies that look worth every calorie. But layer a gut health claim over a butter- and sugar laden pastry because it contains a sourdough starter, and you’ve built an audience on a premise that doesn’t hold up.
The videos get traction. The comment sections fill up. And somewhere a brand manager is watching the views tick up and thinking, We need content like that.
In fact, they probably don’t. They need content that makes their product look genuinely useful and good, something a home cook would save, make, and buy again because it worked, not because they were briefly convinced it was a probiotic.
The nasty food genre has been around long enough now to prove that point. Creators who built a following on fail videos haven’t built food brands. They’ve built an audience that shows up to watch things go wrong. (Or in the case of pseudo-gut-health videos, watching things go unrealistically perfect.) That’s fine if you’re in the attention business. It’s a liability if you’re trying to sell something at retail.
Content that builds brand equity looks different: It teaches the customer something useful about your product, it makes the recipe look achievable, and the image earns a save rather than a share-because-it’s-horrifying. Those are different metrics, and they produce different results.
If you’re a food or beverage brand trying to figure out which side of that line your content is on, that’s a good conversation to have before the next shoot.
Or take a cue from me, and just enjoy them for what they are: the “culinary” equivalent of a Jackass stunt.