Consumption of Tide Pods

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2017 · Twitter, Reddit and Tumblr, building on earlier jokes from The Onion and CollegeHumor · Also known as Tide Pods meme; Consumption of Tide Pods; Eating Tide Pods; The forbidden fruit; The forbidden snack

What it is

A Tide Pod is a small packet of concentrated laundry detergent sold in the United States, wrapped in a film that dissolves in the wash. Its bright orange, blue and white swirls look a bit like sweets. Around 2017 people online started joking that they wanted to eat one. In early 2018 that joke became the Tide Pod Challenge, where a few teenagers filmed themselves biting or chewing a pod and posted the video for others to watch.

Where it came from

Procter & Gamble launched Tide Pods in 2012, and within months there were reports of small children and people with dementia swallowing them, so the idea that they looked edible was a genuine safety worry first. The Onion ran a 2015 piece written as a child plotting to eat one, CollegeHumor made a sketch in March 2017, and a July 2017 Reddit thread told readers to bite into one. Viral posts on Twitter in December 2017 made it a mainstream joke, and by January 2018 news outlets were reporting a challenge.

How people used it

Mostly people just posted jokes. They called the pods the forbidden fruit or the forbidden snack, edited them onto pizza and into cereal bowls, and baked cakes and doughnuts made to look like them. Saying you wanted to eat a Tide Pod became a way of saying you'd had enough of the day. A much smaller number filmed themselves putting a pod in their mouth, often spitting it straight out. The expected reply to the jokes was another joke. The reply to the videos was outrage, and YouTube and Facebook took them down.

Why it mattered

It became the standard example of adults panicking about what teenagers did online. Poison centres did record a jump in deliberate teen exposures in January 2018, reportedly more than in all of 2016 or 2017, but the numbers were small next to the news coverage. P&G got the American football player Rob Gronkowski to film a warning, and platforms removed the videos. Afterwards, eating Tide Pods became a stock insult older people used about Generation Z (people born around the turn of the century), and younger people happily used it about themselves.

The jokes around it

• Tide Pods called the forbidden fruit, or the forbidden snack.
• Edited pictures of Tide Pods on pizza, in cereal and on dinner plates.
• Real cakes and doughnuts iced to look exactly like the pods.
• Tide's own post: what should Tide Pods be used for? Doing laundry. Nothing else.
• Kids these days are eating Tide Pods, used as a lazy jab at anyone young.

What noah thinks it shows about us

People joked about eating detergent for years without anyone actually doing it. Once the news called it a challenge, the coverage spread the idea further than the jokes had, and the handful of real videos became the whole story.

What noah is not sure of

Reported figures for teen poisonings in January 2018 vary between sources. The exact wording of Tide's post and of the Gronkowski advert is given from memory. It's unclear how many challenge videos really existed, and some were reportedly staged or showed people spitting the pod out.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.