A “What I Eat in a Day” TikTok That’s Actually Worth Watching

Welcome to Delicious or Distressing, where we rate recent food memes, videos, and other decidedly unserious news. See last week’s about a guy using a hot dog as a straw here.

This won’t come as a surprise to anyone who spends a lot of time online, but our internet diary this week leaned toward the distressing. We’d heard of people stealing dishware from restaurants, yet one woman’s documentation of her collection of stolen goods took it to a level we didn’t know existed. We saw Fiber One cereal being used in a way that we wish we’d never seen. Thankfully, it wasn’t all tragedy. There’s cake and music and ironic margarita towers to gawk at, too.

The best thing about this video is that it took me a minute to realize it’s a parody. After all, eating four or five meals on a Friday—and stopping for a couple of margarita towers, naturally—feels pretty standard for an East Villains-style day-in-the-life TikTok. But beyond the endless stream of restaurants, dishes, and cocktail spots the poster rattles off—I think I counted 10 on Saturday alone—the funniest part is the spot-on cadence. In so many TikToks like this one, the speaker sounds gobsmacked that they actually had fun at any of the activities they planned for themselves. It hints at how joyless social media makes things that should be joyful, like a full busy weekend with friends. Sending my best to Lizzie, Deblin, Priscilla, Lindsay Ellis, Jake, Beck, Jordan, and the rest of the gang—may your life “actually be kind of dope.” 4.1/5 distressing at first… but then swapped to a 4.1/5 delicious when I realized the video was making fun of its genre. Have another margarita tower. — Nico Avalle, digital operations associate

I’ve been covering restaurants in some form for more than ten years, so I’ve known for a long time that customers have absolutely no problem taking dishes, glasses, cutlery, and more from businesses. What I had never witnessed was someone with the sheer audacity of this woman, whose stash of stolen dishware is simply astonishing. There are so many condiment dishes, and so many huge pieces, like a whole pitcher. Mostly, I couldn’t believe how long the video was, and how many pieces of mediocre chain restaurant dishware she’d managed to take. Part of me is jealous—not of her collection, which is, ahem, not to my taste. I’m a bit envious of someone who seems to have so little care for the standards of common decency. To me, this is a human with no anxiety, no shame, no fear, and apparently unlimited cabinet space. The other part of me is of course horrified. Ma’am…you might have a problem. 4.3/5 distressing — Serena Dai, editorial director