There's Something Unsavory Happening on Foodie TikTok. I'm Afraid It's Coming for Us All.

"Somewhere around Hour 4 of a daylong dive into TikTok and Instagram restaurant reviews for a piece I was researching a few months back, I clocked the 200 th use of the adjective fire, as an influencer in a Jacksonville Jaguars shirt sucked crispy-fried chicken wing meat from the bone in his car outside a restaurant. He declared the wings "perfection"—one of several vague, hyperbolic descriptors that loomed large in the FoodTok word cloud I had created, alongside game changer, to die for, incredible, and vibe."

"As the day wore on, the descriptors lost all meaning; I found myself paying far more attention to the sound effects. The guttural crackle of candied duck skin between some guy's teeth versus the open-mawed crunch of chicharró n that sounds like shuffling a deck of cards. One woman smacked her lips between eye-rolling murmurs of "Wow" for her first "life-changing" bite of toro nigiri in Tokyo. And I believed her, mainly because I could see that glistening heap of fatty tuna too."

"Amid the cultural shift away from longer-form food writing and criticism toward stylized, 30-second reaction videos on FoodTok, does carefully composed, sense-based storytelling still matter? What do we collectively lose, and maybe gain, as sound effects and hyperbole subsume rich, descriptive text with phrases like really delicious and stanning for this burger, utterances that don't exactly kindle the imagination?"

Food reaction videos frequently rely on vague, hyperbolic descriptors such as “fire,” “perfection,” and “game changer,” which can lose meaning after repeated exposure. Attention shifts from language to sensory audio, including crackling duck skin, crunchy chicharrón, and lip-smacking reactions. Viewers may still believe claims when visual cues show glistening food, such as fatty tuna. The move toward short, stylized clips raises questions about whether carefully composed, sense-based storytelling still matters. It also considers what is lost when rich descriptive text is replaced by brief phrases like “really delicious” and enthusiastic stanning, and what might be gained through faster, more immediate presentation.

Read at Slate Magazine