What's more interesting is that professional chefs and food writers love Lee's content. Helen Rosner, an award-winning food journalist for The New Yorker, told Bon Appetit: "He knows how to make something beautiful and delicious, but he's just doing it with wackadoo ingredients. It's almost performance art."
And Lee's not alone in his gross kitchen escapades. The creator behind the social media channel Dr Ding's Molecular Cuisine is the Internet's mad scientist of food. With over 1.3M followers on TikTok, he produces similar content, but he veers more towards molecular gastronomy. He terrifies and impresses his audience with things like making butter from breastmilk or a knife out of tofu.
Yet neither creator aims to produce useful recipes for their audience. It's all irony and nonsense, just for laughs and giggles. In a piece where she tries to make sense of absurdist food content, Sarah Maxwell writes that this is one way people deal with the fact that the world ultimately makes no sense.
"It's not clear that this kind of content is meant to have any deeper meaning than evoking feelings of humor, disgust, and morbid fascination," Maxwell wrote. "It seems like nothing in the world makes sense anymore, so naturally, untethered humor, humor without a meaning, has its appeal, and food provides a perfect canvas for the culinarily inclined artist."