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Food Rage Bait Banner.jpg

Why is There So Much Rage Bait Food Content Online?

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Social Media | April 9, 2024 |

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Social Media | April 9, 2024 |

Food Rage Bait Banner.jpg

There are many easy ways to get the internet to be mad at you: Talk about politics, mention the existence of queer people in pop culture, drop an obviously loaded hot take on Twitter and let the madness roll in… It’s an entire cottage industry, the stuff of clickbait dreams that fuels this hellish landscape far more thoroughly than anything of true substance. Stick around online long enough, and you get used to it, or at least figure out the warning signs of what to avoid. You know you’re not supposed to fall for it. You’re painfully aware that you’re giving them exactly what you want if you respond. So you don’t. And then you see a video of someone ‘cooking’ a dinner where they cut a hole in the middle of a steak, put an uncooked egg, shell and all, into it, then smear the meat with Vegemite and cheese crisps, and suddenly you need to scream into the void until the rest of the planet responds to your cries.

Social media is overwhelmed with rage bait cooking. You’ve probably seen it and widened your eyes in horror at the sight of these grotesqueries. Maybe you’ve seen reactions to them and shared in the fury of the experience. It’s the Upside Down version of Food Network, the over-the-top blending of bad recipes, inconceivable ingredient mixes, and pure visual panic. It’s mashed potatoes made from Lay’s chips boiled in water or making mole by dipping a raw chicken drumstick into a tub of chocolate malt powder. Accounts like Jane Brain, who has over 475,000 TikTok followers and does paid sponsorships for various brands, cook dishes designed to infuriate. In one video, she cuts up Krispy Kreme donuts to make pumpkin pie, blending ingredients with her bare fingers and bragging that the ‘hack’ is a favourite among New Yorkers. Barfly7777 cooks in motel bathrooms, pouring raw chicken juices over countertops and using the sink as a mixing bowl. The salmonella warnings write themselves.


The warning signs are all there, with every detail designed to aggravate as many unwitting viewers as possible. There’s the overuse of processed food, including full-on meal deals from McDonald’s or other fast food chains. The caption claims they learned this ‘trick’ from another country or a popular chef. Many simple words are mispronounced, more so if they’re rooted in another country’s culinary culture. Things are thrown into pans without being cleaned or unwrapped and mixed together with bare hands. Pringle’s cans are used as pots. The dishwasher is the cooker. Crucially, every end result is ugly as all hell and the person creating it will declare that it looks and tastes delicious. If you actually see them eat the dish on-camera, that’s the exception, not the rule.


Influencer culture is built on the proud nature of overconsumption. It’s hordes of near-identical white women in leggings with seventeen Stanley Cups showing off their Shein hauls. It’s Amazon affiliate pages shilling the same products over and over again. It’s entire freezers full of fancy ice cubes that will be thrown out unused when it’s time to make a new batch for TikTok. Capitalism is everything and everything is a product to be sold and discarded. We’ve talked about this so many times before that I feel like I’m reciting a speech from memory at this point. Food has always been a part of this nonsense, from technicolour Starbucks ‘secret menu’ drinks to Saltbae’s restaurant to Girl Dinners. You need to buy everything, show it off, then move onto the next hot product once the algorithm demands it.

But culinary rage bait isn’t rooted in aspiration. You’re not meant to actually cook any of this crap. Nobody in their right mind expects you to try and turn cheese puffs into a macaroni dish, or drink hot dog water hot chocolate. These recipes, if we can even call them that, are about the voyeuristic fury of human stupidity. There’s a weird strain of curiosity in there too, akin to when you were a child and you mixed together all your mum’s perfumes and shampoos like they were magical elixirs. These are train wrecks, simply and proudly, and the results are always the same. Ooh, what will it look like? Sh*t. It’ll look like sh*t. Why wouldn’t they try this out when the payoff is so large?

Hate gets more engagement than love. Alas, it always has. A bad review of a film will garner far more views than one of something the critic loved. Bravo shows see their ratings go through the roof when their cast members fight and verbally abuse one another. The reaction vloggers, even the most low-effort ones, see greater engagement on rage bait dishes than a beautifully prepared cake by someone who knows what they’re doing. Check out the comments section of any of these creators and the anger is evident.

Food is a highly political issue. We’re in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis where everyday ingredients have trebled in price. Many international dishes have been appropriated and colonized into unrecognizable states. When you’re struggling to feed your family, it’s hard not to be rendered speechless by the sight of someone wasting bags of vegetables and expensive slabs of beef on a deliberately inedible concoction. Food waste, particularly when it’s this shameless and for such pointless purposes, ends up being a crime against everyone.

So, why is this stuff so unavoidable, and why is it suddenly so profitable? JaneBrain bragged to The Verge that her brand of rage bait was an excellent way to make as much money as possible. It’s clearly a professional set-up, as her camera and lighting, plus an expensive-looking home kitchen, prove. It’s also clearly futile to demand that capitalistic-driven urges and social media platforms focused on engagement try to prize quality over all else. Do we really just need something to react to, and this is probably less mentally crushing than politics or yet another fake culture war over lady Ghostbusters? There’s certainly a case for that, which is made in The Verge piece linked above.



But I don’t think it’s that simple. Polluting an already overwhelmed internet with deliberately low-quality content with no purpose beyond baiting your audience cannot help but bleed over into other areas of life. We’ve seen how my field, cultural criticism, has been weakened by CEOs and tech bros who prefer bot engagement and mindless AI plagiarism over the hard work and eloquence of humans who give a damn, and it’s decimating our industry. Art sites are engulfed by AI-generated crap, and so is Amazon’s Kindle section. At least food rage bait isn’t made by robots, but it’s not created for the benefit or nourishment of anyone. There’s just something about this trend that gets to me more than, say, your typical so-bad-it’s-good style of foolish entertainment. Perhaps it’s in how its very literal waste exemplifies the more metaphorical excess of such #content. We like to pretend that all those Shein clothes and plastic toys from Amazon won’t end up in the landfill, but food rage bait is unignorably on a one-way trip to the bin.