Welcome to Delicious or Distressing, where we rate recent food memes, videos, and other decidedly unserious news. Last week we discussed KFC bringing back the Double Down.
One could only expect, given ample evidence at our disposal, that Ina Garten would’ve had a martini by now. She’s singularly the most prolific hostess of our generation, and the record reflects that she loves a cosmo sipped out of a comically massive martini glass (a COVID bright spot, if you recall). But up until a fateful mixology session with another host of note, Stanley Tucci, she hadn’t. The martini in question, anointed with the Tucci touch, appears dry, adorned with a fatty olive—as it should be. In Ina’s words: “Gorgeous.”
Sorry to divert your attention away from perfect Ina toward something grimmer, but MrBeast, an extremely rich man, is calling upon his online following to tidy up his chocolate bar displays at Walmart. The worst part? People are actually doing it. Society, this week, also bastardized two wholesome childhood fixtures, SunnyD and Girl Scout Cookies. Look out for spiked SunnyD at your grocery store, a product that feels inexplicably blasphemous to me. As for Girl Scout Cookies, your best bet for finding its newest Raspberry Rally flavor is eBay, unfortunately. For $100.
The internet’s favorite bartender, Stanley Tucci, made the internet’s favorite everything, Ina Garten, her first ever martini—for a taping of the third season of her new show, Be My Guest, which premiered March 5. Tucc’ is partial to a very dry martini, he tells Garten, stirring a smidgen of vermouth with gin, sensually rubbing a glass rim with lemon peel, and plopping in a thicc green olive. The whole bit was camp. It was flirty. It gave me feverish levels of FOMO. It (the martini) was “totally gorgeous,” said Garten, after taking her first sip. Everyone is shocked that Garten, a bonafide Food Person, hadn’t had a martini before. Shocked! But c’mon, we’re talking about the gal who unironically loves an enormous cosmo and doesn’t believe in bedtimes. Being like, “Martini, never met her,” is absolutely true to form for our ever-relatable queen. Personally? I prefer a dirtier martini but that’s not the point. 5.7/5 delicious (✨🍸) for this iconic duo. —Ali Francis, staff writer
MrBeast is the most confusing person I have never met. I wrote a whole story about the viral YouTuber (real name: Jimmy Donaldson) and all I can tell you is that he makes stunt videos, donates a lot of stuff, owns a pretty terrible-sounding burger chain, and… sells chocolate? Last week, he asked his perplexingly large fan base to help organize the Walmart displays of his Feastables bars: “If you could clean up the presentation and make it look better that’d make me very happy,” he wrote on Twitter, promising to eventually hire people for the job. Some were mad as hell that a dude worth $500 million would ask for unpaid labor: “God, if I had 14 million every time a rich person asked poor people to do free labor,” one person tweeted. But the darkest bit about this whole stunt was the slew of irrationally loyal followers who actually did it, posting pictures of their work to the thread. It’s official: We’ve entered the 10th circle of capitalistic hell, where people’s parasocial brand relationships have gone so far they’d fully chill in a fluorescent Walmart tidying up a bunch of extremely average chocolate bars because some voice on the internet tells them to. We’re doomed. 4.7/5 distressing. —Ali Francis, staff writer
