Welcome to Delicious or Distressing, where we rate recent food memes, videos, and other decidedly unserious news. See last week’s about McDonald’s adult Happy Meals.
Remember when former New York City mayor Bill de Blasio ate pizza with a fork and knife, inflaming the pizza-loving masses who cried sacrilege and unfit leadership? Somehow, a TikTok of a man rolling up an entire pie into a drippy cone before shoving it less than elegantly into his mouth feels worse. “Would you eat a pizza like this?” Reads the on-screen text. No. I wouldn’t.
Thankfully, the internet repented by elevating corn yet again to the pop culture canon by way of Emma Chamberlain’s cob-shaped pool deck decor, by turning a bag of Lays chips into a leather accessory fit for the Balenciaga runway, and by sprinkling Lactaid cinematically onto a sundae.
In the span of my lifetime I have seen some upsetting things. I’ve seen the rise of influencer culture, I’ve seen the slow death of the middle class, I have seen the entirety of HBO’s Looking. But never before, dear reader, have I been so fundamentally incensed as I was when I scrolled upon this video of a guy shotgunning a pizza à la Liz Lemon. To take a perfectly good margherita pizza—with real basil leaves no less—and willingly roll it into a cone so that all you taste is crust is purely demonic. 4.8/5 deeply, deeply distressing. —Sam Stone, staff writer
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Balenciaga’s SS23 Paris Fashion Week show had everything—a mud pit, Kanye West in SWAT couture, fake babies in front packs, and, most importantly, calfskin clutches that looked like bags of Lay’s potato chips. Creative director Demna auditioned the look back in June, where he was spotted in Antwerp holding an empty sack of Lay’s (Wavy, Original, not made of leather) perpetually under his arm. I fantasize about owning one, ideally in the salt-and-vinegar colorway, and using it to carry a stash of snack-sized Lay’s bags. 4.4/5 finger-licking delicious. —MacKenzie Chung Fegan, senior commerce editor
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A few things gave me pause in Emma Chamberlain’s Architectural Digest house tour. Her green-tinted, sun-soaked kitchen? Magnificent. Her bedroom-turned-walk-in-closet (featuring a clothing rack dedicated solely to her knit vests) that’s bigger than my entire apartment? Vaguely upsetting for personal reasons, but also visually pleasing. But her hyperrealistic corn-shaped stools took the cob for me. Yes, corn is still having a moment, thanks to Chamberlain, influencer extraordinaire and once-in-a-generation tastemaker. Situated between plush chaise loungers on her pool deck, these bright yellow hand-painted stools look like gigantic cobs of corn with a big chomp taken out of them. I can’t speak to their comfort. Nonetheless, they’re deliciously campy and sculptural. 4.8/5 delicious. —Li Goldstein, digital production assistant
