The spiciest food memes and GIFs
What are the funniest food memes? Is it possible to communicate the full gamut of human emotions simply through the medium of food reaction GIFs? Can food memes or food GIFs help improve our relationship with breakfast, lunch and indeed dinner?
Memes, as we at Memix will argue all day long, are a vital component of modern day conversation. They’re the essential glue that holds together 21st century discourse. The oil that greases the wheels of conversation, from social media to political campaigns to the family group chat.
However, as consequential and significant as memes are, they’ve got nothing on food. We’d literally die without it! Our civilisation would collapse into an unthinkably brutal, bloody orgy of chaos without it!
So anywho, we thought we’d explore the overlap between food and memes. Memes and food. Who’s hungry?
SALTBAE MEME
Remember Salt Bae? His real name is Nusret Gökçe and he grew up poor, the apprentice to a butcher in his homeland of Turkey. Obviously he did something right somewhere along the way, as he went on to open a chain of fancy steakhouses where footballers and their pretty wives like to eat and show off on Instagram.
In 2017 his level of fame became astronomical, after he started sprinkling salt in a bonkers from-the-shoulder fashion that’s really inefficient and not actually how you season meat, like, at all.
The ridonkulous prices – one punter shared a $37k bill on reddit, although $5k of that was tip, and 30k was three bottles of Petrus and two of Dom Perignon Rose, can’t really blame Salt Bae for that kind of profligacy – only went up at that point.
Also remember he gatecrashed the World Cup final? Mad. Suggest we find another less bombastic Salt Bae, in future.
WHITE PEOPLE FOOD MEME
A common trope in food memes is the ideas that white people aren’t great at seasoning. Our love of bland food, the thinking goes, is part and parcel with our poor sense of rhythm and overall background lameness.
Is this a fair point? No, probably not. Historically, countries where ingredients that add spice to food – hot countries grow chillis, crudely put – had it easy. Whereas in the chilly, damp north of Europe where white people got going, everything was blander.
So it’s not our fault, basically. Leave us be.
MARSHMALLOW MEMES
I grew up in the UK, and marshmallows WERE NOT A THING when I was a kid. Certainly, the idea of toasting them on a fire was entirely alien. Until American TV shows made it seem normal.
Same thing with piñatas. And basically all of Halloween.
In this way, food memes can be read as a vector of American soft-power cultural imperialism. Folks in Europe grow up with all these fun American ideas of eating and drinking, which makes them easy targets for the insatiable maw of US consumerism.
IT’S CORN MEMES
In our fractious, divided era, when politics and ideology and even the very notion of gender and the self is apparently fluid and ripe for revolutionary upheaval, it’s a joy to come across something as pure and wholesome as the corn kid meme.
Man, that boy sure loves his corn.
‘I can’t imagine a more beautiful thing’ he says, and you believe him. We all like corn. Such simple, unalloyed, un-cynical joy. Corn kid for world president.
BIRTHDAY CAKE MEMES
Did you know you can custom create your own happy birthday memes on Memix? Choose from hundreds of templates and make your own meme, with your own special message.
It’s a way of showing that special somebody ‘I love you and put loads of effort it’, without you necessarily having to love them, or indeed have put a great deal of effort in.
They’ll be so stoked.
GORDON RAMSAY MEMES
Food is so integral to our culture that the people who make it – like Salt Bae – become major celebrities in their own right.
Like Gordon Ramsay, who used to be a soccer player, before getting rich shouting at blameless American mom-and-pop burger flippers.
Yes Gordon, it is funny to keep saying ‘fuck’ all the time. Keep at it!
FOOD MEME PHILOSOPHY
As meme culture reflects wider trends in society, so we’d expect the latest trending topics, whatever they are, to somehow come back to food.
It’s so fundamental to our existence it almost barely needs stating. Consuming calories is basically the only thing we have in common with literally every other living thing. It’s profoundly important.
Although I daresay the tens of billions of creatures we share this planet with, from the blue whale hoovering up tons of krill to the benign parasites living in your upper intestine right now chowing down on your lunch don’t use food as an excuse to make puerile jokes. That’s just people.
Hey, IS STEALING MEMES ILLEGAL?
While we’re here, does anybody know IS IT PRONOUNCED GIF OR JIF?