Quinoa, North Korea Tok, and Uncanny Content
Virality, in all its bizarre Variety...
This week we’re diving deep into our internet obsessions. Cass covers a salad that has been making it’s rounds in the Zeitgeist since 2010ish and Babz gets served TikToks from what might be the North Korean government. Please enjoy!
Good Taste, Bad Content: the Jennifer Aniston Salad
By Cassidy Dawn Graves
In a way, the internet is just a bunch of people copying each other. Everyone is striving to have the most nuanced take, the most popular meme, the most clicks on an article, the most likes and subscribes.
The content is constant, and the pressure to churn out Stuff all the live long day is only getting stronger. Editing and fact-checking? I guess, if you can do it quickly. High-quality writing? We’ll try to squeeze it in. And don’t even get me started on videos — that’s a whole other can of worms.
When every site is competing for clicks and regurgitating the same takes on the same topics at the same time, something like a weird, depressing online game of Telephone can happen.
This brings me to Jennifer Aniston and her so-called salad. The “Jennifer Aniston Salad” went viral earlier this year. I’m not sure when, but there’s a New York Post article about it from February. I think I first saw it during one of the very rare times I look at TikTok? It’s hard to say.
Today, “Jennifer Aniston salad” has over 14 million Google results, and #jenniferanistonsalad has 23 million “views” on TikTok.
The signs of Content Telephone were there from the start. “Because the original recipe has since disappeared, it’s difficult to confirm the provenance of the current recipe gone viral, a thread which only traces back to 2021,” the Post writes. But in a world of quantity over quality, that didn’t matter.
It was apparently first mentioned in a 2010 LA Times interview where Courteney Cox called it “a Cobb salad that Jennifer doctored up with turkey bacon and garbanzo beans and I don’t know what,” claiming that they ate it on the Friends set daily for a whole decade.
The actual viral recipe has more tabbouleh vibes; chickpeas are the only common factor. Several outlets including the Post connect this 2010 Cobb mention to a 2015 Insta takeover Aniston did for a hair company, but a People article reveals that Aniston merely talked about her “perfect salad,” which features the same ingredients as the dish that later went viral.
Aniston’s posts for the hair brand are no longer available, but even if they were, it seems odd to claim a “doctored up” Cobb is the same dish as an herby bulgur/cucumber/chickpea concoction with no lettuce. It’s almost like the push to publish posts as fast as possible results in assumptions being made and information slipping through the cracks…
Earlier this year, Aniston sounded off on the matter in an interview with Shape. “I feel like I'm disappointing everybody, but that's not my salad,” Aniston told the outlet. Though there seems to be a record of the actress discussing the tabbouleh-ish creation, Shape curiously adds that Aniston “doesn't know where the bulgar-based recipe came from.” Uncanny!
What was the result of this mix-up? More content, of course! Sites like Allrecipes, Page Six, Today, and Cosmo all published posts about how that salad that went viral actually wasn’t what you think. Read on for the true truth! Click on my links! Scroll forever!
In a way, cooking is like content. You start with one idea — usually someone else’s idea — and you put your own spin on it, whether you meant to or not. Someone else sees that, and does the same thing. Rinse, repeat, and eventually it takes on a life of its own, whether you meant to or not, then maybe that new thing gets so popular it overshadows all of its predecessors and the whole cycle starts again.
Of course, I made the salad. It sounded good, and I had cucumbers to use. The recipe I used was from the website Eating Bird Food, which was just one of the top results when you google “Jennifer Aniston salad,” which you hope means it’s good, but often just means the site has good SEO.
I meant to make the recipe as-is, but found myself doubling the mint and parsley, increasing the lemon, and adding a mix of sunflower seeds, pine nuts, and roasted cashews instead of pistachios, which we recently ran out of. I also threw in za’atar, garlic powder, MSG, chili flakes, and cooked the quinoa with chicken bouillon powder and bay leaves.
Confusing celebrity associations aside, this salad (or uh, at least what I made) honestly rules. The mix of nuts and herbs reminded me of the Little Gem salad from Queen in Bushwick, and the seasoning additions took the bright, punchy flavors to the next level. Babz and I ate it a lot, and I would gladly make it again.
Something I didn’t notice til right now is that Eating Bird Food actually got the facts right: “Some sources say she ate the salad every day for 10 years while filming the show Friends, but after a little research I found that this is actually a salad she shared while doing an Instagram takeover for the Living Proof brand.”
Ultimately, this is a low-stakes example. A recipe that’s been endlessly riffed on still usually ends up being something edible, and mistakes in some viral posts about celebrity salad is not so big a deal. Even so, it doesn’t sit well with me — these sites are making money off their plentiful, often garish ads, and usually not paying their writers very well — and it’s not like digital misinformation isn’t happening constantly in all sorts of bigger, insidious ways.
Is there much we can do to stop it? Honestly, I wish I knew. But at least I got a nice lunch out of it.
“Please Follow Me…”
By Babz
If you’ve hung out with me in the last few years, you already know I have an unhealthy addiction to TikTok. It’s a little disconcerting. The way it tickles my ADHD-addled brain can sometimes cause me to get stuck there for hours a day, cackling to myself over a glowing screen until the sun goes down.
Maybe you’ve been there too. If you have, you’re probably familiar with just how weird and invasive the algorithm that serves up your daily content can be. There’s plenty of info out there about just how much of your data TikTok scrapes out of your phone to get that kind of insight into your interests.
But sometimes I wonder — ever since research revealed that Cambridge Analytica was able to scrape upwards of 5,000 data points from each voter it caught with its personality quizzes — if I really care that one more tech company is building an online profile based on a deconstructed version of my thought processes.
It’s not all bad. Honestly, I’ve learned a whole lot from the devil’s app. Sometimes it can be creepily specific, like the fact that I have a rare neuro-ophthalmological disorder known as Visual Snow Syndrome. Other times it’s delightful tidbits about Muslim culture through the daily adventures of a Cat in a Hijab interspersed with heartfelt videos of her owner, a Muslim woman who’s father, an Imam, recently died of cancer. She too now has been diagnosed with a brain tumor. I am now irrevocably invested in her life. Get your cat a prayer rug if you want to avoid Iblis possession.
Recently, though, I started encountering videos from an account that really threw me for a loop.
The first to show up on my FYP started Bold. “In North Korea, You will not see homeless people,” the video proclaims, in what seems to be a pleasant, algorithmically generated female voice.
The video itself is of a North Korean high-rise apartment building in a mountainous town on the Chinese-Korean border. Through the windows you can see folding tables and chairs, rooms entirely dedicated to firewood, and sporadically disbursed solar panels. The Pleasant Voice explains the panels are owned by wealthier citizens, as the state cuts power to all residential buildings at night due to shortages. BUT you’ll never see a homeless person because housing is allocated by the government. This strikes me as oddly transparent for propaganda?
To be clear, I understand that because of government mismanagement and international sanctions, North Koreans have to live with regular food shortages, power cuts, and often lack modern technology. This was a window into that harsh reality, however, that I’ve never been able to look through before.
I watched the three times because, admittedly, I was enthralled. Footage like this is never typically presented to American audiences. Our entire understanding of what life is like in North Korea comes from CIA analysis (an agency plagued by examples about how they’re notably Bad at their Jobs) or proclamations from North Korean defectors and our own politicians, which tend to be politically-charged descriptions intent on ginning up patriotic feelings of anti-communism.
This is not to say I don’t realize what I’m seeing is almost certainly Party propaganda, either from the Chinese or North Korean states. It had to be, right? This is why I didn’t immediately click on the account, entitled North Korea Today, at the bottom of the screen.
I figured it would send me to a page filled with similar videos extolling the virtues of a proud, resilient people who have resisted the evils of Western imperialism. I write it off as a brief-but-fascinating window in the mindset of people living under repressive regimes.
This wouldn’t be the last time my FYP would beam these videos down to me. The next one I get is truly Wild. It’s titled “Women North Korea” and the caption reads “Look at North Korea through a telescope.” The voice is still (probably) AI generated and pleasant, but this time it’s decidedly masculine.
Over a montage of people walking through muddy, unpaved streets and female soldiers performing manual labor, the Voice explains that North Korea is known as “the land of daughters” due to unequal gender distribution. My internet searching has verified this to be true with caveats — for instance, this gender imbalance was especially true in the decades following the Korean war, but has since evened out in more recent decades.
You can apply this same logic to basically every numerically measurable fact in these videos: ostensibly true, with caveats.
When we get into more subjective information, things get a bit uh… well. This same TikTok then goes on to explain what dating culture is like, claiming North Korean women are desired by men all over the world due to the fact that “first she is very thin, second she is very pure, and third she is particularly suited to living at home.” The footage provided actually gives very little evidence to this strange blanket claim, seeing as none of the women pictured are particularly thin or in homes.
The video then explains that unfortunately, these women don’t marry people who aren’t North Korean nationals, and that all we can do is look from afar and envy North Korean men. “Please follow me,” the man’s voice says, presumably so we can continue participating in this lustful envy.
At this point, I am utterly confused by this account’s content, and what they aim to achieve by producing it. My curiosity can’t be contained. I click through and watch every single video. Here’s what I found.
The account handle is @hangirls2022 which is definitely NOT the same as its title, NK Today. The earliest videos do include windows into the lifestyle and culture of North Koreans, covering topics like food systems, population growth programs, and how you’re only allowed to get one of 28 government-approved haircuts (this video has since been deleted from the feed but here's and article in Time if you want to see the haircuts.) But even those are interspersed with videos about how beautiful North Korean women are and how you could potentially marry one by becoming an NK national. There are also more than a few videos about how women choose the hardest jobs because Gender Equality?
At this point my brain is running wild. WHOMST is making these, and WHY? The answer seems to be a little more complicated than a government agency.
The more videos I watch, the more clues I notice. For instance, these videos are getting flagged left and right by the viewers whose feeds they reach. There’s even a video addressing how different videos are viewed as propaganda depending on which side of the world you view it from, east vs. west.
The Pleasant Voices seem to claim that they live in border towns and capture all their footage from across the Yalu River. However, other videos have been forced to take on the label of “paid partnership,” which means someone is paying for this content… but would the government of North Korea pay for a video about how many people die due to their timber industry’s lack of modern machinery? Or about how people have to keep smiling in order to endure their harsh lives?
It opens up a ton of questions about how TikTok works, who can make content, and how creators can mask their true identities. So consider this the start of a series in our Newsletter. I’ve reached out to @hangirls2022 in order to ask them directly about their identity and motives. Maybe we’ll get an interview?
Much love, and until then :)
absolutely loved this edition 🥳🥳🥳