Many of us are familiar with the experience of being chaotic in the kitchen. Trying to chop up too many ingredients at once, cooking a pasta sauce that splatters all over the walls or accidentally allowing those blueberry muffins your kid requested to blacken in the oven. But the chaos that’s featured on the Chaotic Foods Instagram account is often intentional. Using an entire onion as a “roll” for a sandwich, creating Deviled eggs that look like little babies, and putting a stencil of a cockroach on top of a cappuccino… There are no limits to what this unhinged page will share.
But clearly, Chaotic Foods is doing well, as it has managed to amass an impressive 119k followers through sharing 488 hilarious and confusing photos. Instagram users have a huge appetite for bizarre and disturbing pics, and what better place to find them than right here? Gross dishes, cigarettes on hot dog buns, cereal made of coins, and dino nuggets being wiped out by baked bean meteors certainly aren't’ images I was expecting to witness today. But here we are! Food has the power to captivate us, entrance us, bring us incredible joy and, of course, bring us great confusion.
Food has a huge audience on Instagram, but most of the people who use the Gram to look at images of meals want to see the most enticing pics possible. Huge, creamy bowls of pasta, mouth-watering milkshakes, and vibrant smoothie bowls come to mind. I personally love viewing photos of aspirational food that I’d like to make myself or would love to order from a restaurant if given the opportunity. However, there’s an interesting niche of people who enjoy looking at chaotic, strange and disturbing food pics as well.
Some common themes in the cursed food category are disgusting-looking meat, beans in places where they shouldn’t be, foods that appear to have faces, and anything that simply looks unappetizing. We seem to be captivated by the extremes, when it comes to food. Anything that immediately triggers our appetites and anything that instantly sends our appetites flying out the window seems to become a hit online.
Although the photos on this list may be objectively bizarre and unsettling, food preferences in general are subjective. If you love pineapple on pizza, you may be considered a criminal to some of your loved ones. And if you’ve ever enjoyed a peanut butter and pickle sandwich, well, please wait here while I call the cops. But according to scientists at the University of Edinburgh, our appetites for weird foods might be written in our DNA. One 2022 study testing 150,000 participants’ taste, or distaste, for 137 various foods and beverages found 401 genetic variants that influenced which tastes individuals preferred. “Many of these variants affected more than one food-liking trait and some only one particular food,” the researchers at the University of Edinburgh explained. “For example, some genetic variants were linked with an enjoyment for only salmon, while other groups of variants increased a liking for oily fish or all fish in general.”
The study also found three primary clusters of food which share a similar genetic component: “high-calorie and highly palatable foods such as meat, dairy and desserts; another group consists of strong-tasting foods that are known as ‘acquired’, including alcohol and pungent vegetables; and a third group contains low-calorie foods such as fruit and vegetables,” the researchers noted. Unsurprisingly, these three food profiles were also found to be linked to specific health traits. A preference for fruits and vegetables is influenced by the same variants that are associated with higher levels of physical activity, and the appetite for “highly palatable foods” is influenced by the same genetic traits that are linked to obesity and lower levels of physical activity.
The researchers went on to note that the variations in taste preferences weren’t necessarily what many readers may have anticipated. “[An] important observation is that the main division of preferences is not between savory and sweet foods, as might have been expected, but between highly pleasurable and high calorie foods and those for which taste needs to be learned,” Dr Nicola Pirastu, Senior Manager Biostatistics Unit, Human Technopole, Milan, said. “This difference is reflected in the regions of the brain involved in their liking, and it strongly points to an underlying biological mechanism.”
I don’t think enjoying cursed food images has anything to do with our genes, but it may have something to do with our simple obsession with all things bizarre. Perhaps, we enjoy an occasional break from the filtered and perfectly posed photos that fill most of our Instagram feeds. Or maybe, we just get a kick out of seeing something completely unexpected, whether that’s a charcuterie board built to look like a football field or a steak that looks like the bottom of someone’s shoe. We wouldn’t necessarily want to find these things on the menu of a restaurant we visit, but we’re happy to come across them when scrolling through Instagram!
