![Photo shows customers queuing for food in a restaurant in London](https://dl6pgk4f88hky.cloudfront.net/2025/01/29/GettyImages-1238021574.jpg)
In 2019 London welcomed its first branch of the LA food chain Eggslut, a casual sandwich spot “inspired by a true love for eggs”. In 2012 the suggestively named Bone Daddies ramen bar opened its first location in Soho. Recently Naked Soho, “London’s first sex-themed restaurant”, shut down, pending relocation. Before that, however, you could order a C*ckprese Salad or a Busty Burrata, surrounded by explicit images on the walls. Welcome to Uncouth Britain – you may not leave.
You might call it playful innuendo. But this obvious degradation of the public realm was inevitable in the era of the internet economy. The great democratising effects of social media – and with it, the emergence of the so-called citizen journalist and critic – have been celebrated as barrier smashing: now anyone can perform in roles once reserved for the elite. Traditional advertising models – legacy media reviews, word of mouth – are challenged by the feted endorsement of the influencer, the hit video clip, the viral tweet. Today, the food stars of Instagram and TikTok wield great power: Keith Lee, an American “critic”, with nearly 17m followers, who conducts food reviews in his car, can change the fortunes of a restaurant overnight. Joy Burgers in Las Vegas is just one among many that claims to have been saved by the deus ex machina hand of Lee.
But this Faustian pact between vendor and influencer has corrupted the UK food scene. The “foodie” (bleurgh) movement’s patron saint is @EatingWithTod, with 1.6m Instagram followers. Last December, he posted an archetypal review: Killa Waffles serves fried chicken and macaroni cheese ensconced in a waffle cone. “An eye-dropping mouth wobbler,” he says – as though we are meant to know what that means – as he eats it with the fervour of a snake dislocating its jaw to swallow an entire deer. “SO CHEESY,” he declares, as he rips apart the chimeric monster with his hands. Tod’s world is binary: good/bad, tasty/not-tasty, viral-hit/embarrassing flop. The lip-smacking, greasy-fingered brashness of it all is haunting. But the lack of real criticism is what sticks: nothing is ever bad, everything renders him speechless, and he never tells us what anything tastes like.
But fair enough. It is hard to be noticed in the morass of the internet, as it groans under the weight of aspirational influencers and needy businesses. And so the absurd is rewarded over the refined, gluttonous attention-seeking triumphs over taste, the gimmick lords over the familiar. In this hedonistic race to the bottom, the viral food scene aspires to base stunts (sex-themed restaurants, for example) and desperate concoctions. Judgement is sacrificed at the altar of fleeting fame and footfall. Why else would the Philippe Conticini café in north London sell croissants larger than a cinder-block? It makes for, in the very least, an interesting photograph.
What started in the 2010s with punk-aspiring franchises (the self-consciously masculine BrewDog and MeatLiquor, for example) has been turbo-charged. The kitsch souks of Camden – once fairly punk – are now free floating, unmoored from the demands of style and aesthetic sense. Food stalls sell different variations of salty mush designed to appeal to the TikTok brain: the Yorkshire Burrito Company aims to “take the classic roast out of its comfort zone” (a roast dinner wrapped, impiously, in a giant Yorkshire pudding); Uh K-Dogs N Juicy strives for “something special” (a battered hotdog dipped in crisps, anyone?). Another goes by “Metre Long Sausages, Enough Said”. (Enough said!) Tourists flock because the internet tells them to. Businesses – not merely content with corrupting our arteries but souls too – thrive.
The result is one of the world’s great food cities flogging culinary tat, treating the consumer like a calorie-starved, indiscriminately carnivorous pervert. We should blame the internet entirely, the increasingly porous boundary between material reality and online culture. The food of viral fame is a product of the mindless content cycle, and the Yorkshire burrito becomes no different to the doomscroll: slop for the brain, slop for the tastebuds.
The problem with such iconoclastically bad taste is that personally rejecting it is insufficient – everyone can be sucked into its orbit. Theodor Adorno contended that easily consumed mass culture rendered people passive, docile and disconnected from their material circumstances: bad popular culture renders worse societies.
At the end of last year, Oxford University Press named “brain rot” its word of the year: “The supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging.” We have long been aware of the deleterious effects of the internet on our capacity for serious intellectual engagement. Last year the Atlantic suggested that reading a text in its entirety was no longer required for a new generation of American university students, who opt instead for extracts and summaries of the literary greats. Social media was identified as the culprit, as it ransacked attention spans and spoon fed malleable brains with visual carrion.
Palates and criticism have suffered at its hands too. Competing in the attention economy, outside the traditional restaurant scene, the capital’s culinary aspirants pursue ever more desperate antics. Never has the need for thoughtful tastemakers been more apparent than on a meander through the influencer realm. But for now, eat up – that slop won’t consume itself!
[See also: The left after Trump]
This article appears in the 29 Jan 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Class War