I Watched The 1975’s Matty Healy Eat a Raw Steak Onstage and It Was Distressing

Welcome to Delicious or Distressing, where we rate recent food memes, videos, and other decidedly unserious news. Last week, we looked into Chrissy Teigen allegedly plagiarizing a fancy boxed cake mix.

If you’ve gone through life thinking that the anthropomorphic salt and pepper shakers from Blue’s Clues weren’t worth your brain space, think again. The valiant TikToker @munchy_monk has provided us with a shockingly convincing retrospective analysis of Mr. Salt and Mrs. Pepper’s ethnic origins, and it’s as much a refresher in basic genomics as it is a gripping tale of infidelity and marital woes. How could salt and pepper together produce baby paprika, he posits, if not for an extramarital affair? The twists and turns (not to mention the breadth of Mr. Salt and Mrs. Pepper’s extended family tree) may shock you.

In food happenings beyond children’s television of the early aughts, The 1975’s Matty Healy chomped down on a hunk of raw meat (or so he’d like you to think) onstage at a concert. Equally notable: a candle that looks and smells like a jar of pickles and pie dough shaped in the likeness of a skinned human face.

You know when you see something and are so caught off guard by it, you’re not really sure how to feel? That was how I, along with everyone else at Madison Square Garden this past Monday, felt as we watched The 1975’s Matty Healy kneel shirtless on the stage and gnaw at a hunk of raw steak midway through the band’s concert. Was it actually raw meat?! (For what it’s worth: No, I don’t think so…he was biting into it with way too much ease.) What was the intent here? Was it a jump scare? Was it meant to trigger some deep, primal attraction? The whole thing felt feral in its rawest form—unhinged in a vaguely sexy way. And, once people got over the shock factor, some audience members found Healy eating the (not-)raw meat as positively delicious as Healy seemed to find the meat itself. Sadly, this writer and 1975 fan was not (entirely) one of them. My unsolicited verdict? Slightly delicious, mostly distressing. 3.5/5 distressing —Megan Wahn, associate commerce editor

Food-scented candles are a hot marketing gimmick right now. The latest: a lifelike pickle jar from the 80-year-old supermarket brand Vlasic, made in partnership with candle maker Candier. Most food companies playing the scented candle game tend to disguise their eau de Swedish meatballs or burger-and-fries duo inside the kinds of boho-looking jars you’d expect to find in a bougie Montauk boutique. So I respect that Vlasic has really leaned into the whole pickle thing; its candle jar is filled with realistic looking whole dills floating in a clear wax brine. Unfortunately, the smell is allegedly just as accurate. Anyone who’s burned their nostrils after shoving them inside a vinegary jar of pickles knows that those pungent boys are for eating, not sniffing. 2.5/5 distressing. —Ali Francis, staff writer

Have you ever looked down at your baked Brie and wondered, “I wish this was a more haunting experience?” Allow me to introduce you to baby baked Brie. The humanoid crust on this appetizer—with eyes that stare deep into your soul and a mouth lined with dough teeth that could maybe take a bite out of you—is one of the many terrifying pie crusts that occupies a very specific corner of TikTok: #facepie. Here, you’ll find fruit pies (usually cherry or mixed berry) bleeding red from every orifice as they emerge hot and bubbling from the oven. They appeared in large numbers on my For You page in October, but home bakers make them year-round. Considering my last five-star read was Tender Is My Flesh and I’m still holding out for a fourth season of Hannibal, I can stomach these creepy pies, but I understand why some of the videos come with trigger warnings. 5/5 distressing. —Esra Erol, senior social media manager

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Stefon voice: This video has everything. Anthropomorphism of spices. A shocking cheating allegation for otherwise feel-good, wholesome characters in a beloved TV show. A dive into the history and origin of various spices, along with a punnett square. Then, finally, catharsis: TikToker @munchy_monk convincingly argues that Blue’s Clues’s Mr. Salt and Mrs. Pepper could indeed give birth, without involving infidelity, to differently colored spices such as Sage and Ginger. I hate to even spoil it because the journey was worth watching a particularly long TikTok, something I say approximately never. This is internet culture at its best. 5/5 delicious — Serena Dai, editorial director

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