Social Media: Enjoy the food, not the Twitter feed

Sriracha, for the uninitiated, is a chilli sauce, thicker and sweeter than Tabasco, with a garlicky tang. They eat it in Thailand and Vietnam, though the world’s top brand is made in California with a distinctive rooster on the bottle. Once you have Sriracha in the fridge, you find yourself adding it to many ad hoc meals: fried eggs, falafel, corn fritters. It’s ketchup for grown-ups: a comforting dab of something sweet and spicy that makes everything taste familiar.

I’m fond enough of Sriracha, as mass-market condiments go. But mere fondness does not cut it in this age of social media. Sriracha is one of many foods — see also pulled pork, avocado toast, popcorn, kale, and custard doughnuts — that are now the objects of lunatic devotion on Twitter. It has become a fetish and a cult. Worshippers say it makes ‘everything’ taste better or that they’d like to be buried with a bottle when they die. In December, it was announced that Sriracha powder was coming to the UK. Twitter was abuzz, imagining all the things that could be doused in this magical red dust. No one seemed to notice that chilli powder has been around for centuries or that what makes Sriracha good is that it is a sauce.

Sriracha exemplifies the problem with food on social media in general. These new global forms of communication should be widening our culinary horizons. Often, however, they only reinforce us in our limited tastes through a kind of faddish group hysteria. Spiralised courgettes or grain bowls will briefly ‘trend’ and then suffer a vicious backlash. Food becomes polarised into the indulgent and the ‘clean’. There is group-salivation over fried chicken and you feel bullied to take a stand on such pressing matters as paleo diets or cupcakes versus macarons.