Someone terrible, who should know shame for all their days and never know the taste of good food again, posted the worst video ever perpetrated on humanity yesterday. I might be being slightly hyperbolic. But after living in a basement and hiding from a virus for a year, my only real connection the dribs and drabs of electrons or photons or whateverons that trickle down my wires to give me the internet, I’d kill to go to restaurant again. And I’m a really good cook. I just want someone else to make me a damned burger at this point. And yet, what does an account called Food Insider, with hundreds of thousands of followers and access to actual restaurants give us yesterday, the day of horror?

This abomination:

These dishes take pasta to the next level 🍝 pic.twitter.com/clbVXGzaJI

— Food Insider (@FoodInsider) April 21, 2021

Twelve ruinations of pasta. Twelve annihilations of the flickering hopes we had for food again. Twelve cylons.

Look into the abyss with me, all twelve of them, and see it look back at you:

1. A sandwich stuffed with pasta: inaccuracy on top of horror since all they did was put the roll vertical and dumped pasta in it without actually eating it like a sandwich. So it’s just a bread bowl. A terrible bread bowl.
2. A donut made of spaghetti: breading and deep frying pasta is a thing. The fact that you made it in a circle doesn’t mean it’s a donut, it means it’s a circular parmesan you geometrically illiterate culinary wastrel.
3. A mac and cheese sandwich: What are you? A toddler? Because that’s what we call people who put mac and cheese on everything.
4. Okay FINE. the giant ravioli is kind of cool, but that’s because it actually accomplishes something by being giant, i.e. containing the egg that’s effectively poached by being in there. Sort of like a Toad in the Hole Carbonara Ravioli.
5. 30 foot noodle: I guess if you swallow it whole, your tapeworm will have a body pillow. But you don’t need to cut it with scissors, because otherwise you wouldn’t be able to chew it.
6. Calzone stuffed with 10lbs of pasta: just what I wanted, a way to make pasta and calzones shitty simultaneously. Ben Wyatt wept.
7. A burger bun made of mac and cheese: because what you really want out of a bun is for it to disintegrate into cheesy grease as you try to grip it.
8. Rainbow pasta: all pasta is the same color when it’s covered in sauce, so this just seems like an enormous waste of effort
9. A pizza burrito stuffed with pasta: rolling a pizza up around cheap pasta just ruins the pizza and the pasta. Just eat bacon grease if you need the heart attack without flavor that badly.
10. Mac and cheese in a cone: has anyone in history ever been happy to be handed an ice cream cone and told that the surprise is there is no ice cream? Further, see #3
11. 30 layers of lasagna: this is like the pasta version of those nerds that claim katanas are super awesome because they were folded a thousand times in the forging and the real historic reason is that Japanese steel was low quality so they had to do that. The metaphor here is that they had to make thirty layers because lasagna sucks with any number of layers.
12. Penne on top of pizza: pizza hasn’t been disrespected like this since pineapple

I’m going to go watch Chopped on a loop to purge my mind’s eye of these insults to pasta.