Food influencers are… well let’s face it, kind of annoying. On the one hand, every person who loves food naturally loves seeing food porn on their social media timelines. If you live for good eats, you’re always on the hunt for new things to try and social media and food influencers in particular are really good at showcasing that. On the other hand, if most ordinary humans were inside of a place while a food influencer was doing their thing, they’d be absolutely enraged.
Social media is a performative platform, and watching people perform in public as obnoxiously enthusiastically as food influencers can be downright cringe-inducing, especially if it’s distracting you from your lunch break. Saturday Night Live’s Please Don’t Destroy team understands this, which is why their latest sketch is being passed around the internet and has already been hailed as the group’s masterpiece. In a piece titled “Street Eats,” the PDD team, consisting of Ben Marshall, John Higgins, and Martin Herlihy, hit up NYC as a trio of food influencers, and from the first shot which shows an Applebees, a Chase bank, and a suspiciously well-kept trash can over the words “this… is New York,” and in which they identify the three cultures of NYC as Mexicans, Italians, and College Students, you know it’s a sketch written to make New Yorkers blood boil. Even as a West Coaster, my blood pressure was rising as the group ordered jerk chicken from a Jamaica Queens spot with no cayenne pepper, cumin, salt, or pepper.
In just three minutes, PDD manages to capture all of the obnoxious touchstones of a modern food influencer: from being a public nuisance to an overbearing use of puns, a total misunderstanding of well-known and established neighborhoods, fumbling easy-to-pronounce words like “bodega,” exoticizing communities of color, and a misplaced obsession with authenticity and “the right way to order.”
Lorne, I know you’re reading, give these guys more screen time. Watch the clip above and let us know your least favorite food influencer behavior.
