The disgusting food of TikTok: is it designed to eat, provoke - or arouse?

I have just ironed my husband a toasted sandwich like some kind of tradwife and to be honest, I'm disappointed with his reaction. Admittedly, there were a few issues. The steam didn't help, plus I wrapped it in too much tinfoil, so the heat couldn't penetrate. The main problem, though, was that holding an iron meant I automatically started ironing the package, pressing hard and going to and fro industriously. The result is flat, very flat. "We have a sandwich toaster," my husband points out, holding the crepe-thin delicacy between finger and thumb. He should be thrilled: this is the closest I've come to cooking for him in months. He tries it, reluctantly. "It's very soft. Did you put mustard in it?"

"I thought it would help," I say.

"It doesn't."

Unless you are a particularly online person, you are probably asking why, at this point. It's a question I have asked myself repeatedly, in a rising pitch of incredulity and distress as I dived deep into TikTok food - or FoodTok, if you will. Because that is where the ironed toastie comes from: it's part of a new generation of TikTok recipe hacks that embody a provocative, frankly deranged "why not?" philosophy. We've come a long, wrong way since 2021's viral feta pasta. Now, in addition to ironed toasties, you can enjoy a beatifically smiling blonde putting dried pasta in a blender to create an approximation of flour, then adding an egg to create a sort of dough. She then fashions lumpy, fat noodles, which she boils, tops with tomato sauce and declares "exactly like fresh pasta". Comments include the likes of "YOU VIOLATED THE PASTA", "Ma'am, blink twice if someone is holding you hostage" and many irate Italians.

At the risk of sounding like Grampa Simpson yelling at clouds - which is exactly how I feel exploring FoodTok - what is going on? "There's a long and storied history of gross-out food on social media," says Chris Stokel-Walker, social media expert and the author of TikTok Boom. Twisted, the social media food brand that just announced a collaboration with Iceland, started out in 2016 and dared us to make the likes of deep-fried barbecue chicken-stuffed pizzadilla. Now, says Stokel-Walker, "It's been supercharged by the arrival of TikTok." The app is designed and engineered to "capture people's attention as they are scrolling through that endless feed of content" and one good way to do it is precisely "the outlandish, the gross-out". It is a notion echoed by Jonah Berger, professor at the Wharton school in Pennsylvania and bestselling author of Contagious, a study of social transmission and virality, who notes that these videos combine surprise and often disgust. "The more surprising something is, the more likely we are to share it with others. And disgust is a high arousal emotion that also causes us to pass things on."

So is this content engineered to provoke? Some of it, definitely. "I never work to appear genuine," says Eli Betchik of @elis_kitchen, the self-proclaimed "most evil chef on TikTok". "If anyone asks, I say: 'Yeah, I do this for attention.' I think it's pretty obvious I do." It is a mark of Betchik's evil genius that every video of theirs makes me shout "No!" in genuine anger at some point. Betchik was behind the much-reviled potato crisp mash, and a horrifying sandwich made of blended peas, pineapple, cheese and nuts, with the bread coated with mayo, then fried, among other outrages.

Betchik is a fine art jeweller, who started their channel after discovering TikTok at jewellery school. "I thought, I already love experimenting with food and trying new things - I could probably take that a few steps further and use it for some good old-fashioned shock-value entertainment." Their first video was fried mayonnaise. I make a strangled noise hearing this. "Yeah, it was horrible," confirms Betchik. Another early favourite was meatballs boiled in lime juice "until the juice was a thick syrup. I'm salivating because I can still taste the sourness. It was the most violent flavour I've ever had."