Our Macabre Fascination with Ugly Food

Making a mess in the kitchen is exactly how culinary innovation begins

By Kacey Joslin

Like a bad train wreck, it’s hard to look away when a friend is choking down a particularly awful looking food combination, whether it be a huge, greasy burger their lips barely fit around, or trying some questionable foreign candy. Humans like to push boundaries and test their limits, especially with things that bring them pleasure—such as food. It wasn’t always this way.

In the time of hunting and gathering, self-preservation dictated that humans stick with what they knew. It was dangerous to experiment with food, especially when it came to foraging. To survive, humans had to guess what foods were safe based on their senses: smell, color, texture, and taste. Humans knew to avoid foods that were unfamiliar or unsettling in their appearance. Nowadays? People try bad food recipes for fun, and sweet, blue frosting the color of spoilage is slopped atop birthday cakes sold at your local Cub Foods. It’s fascinating how humans openly contradict the laws of visual appeal, but learning why requires special insight into how our minds work and knowledge of what we can do to avoid inadvertently poisoning our bodies in search of a cheap thrill.

From an outsider’s point of view, it seems awfully masochistic; humans are poisoning their bodies for just a hint of pleasure, a hint of what’s popular. 

In 2014, Japan’s Burger King branch unveiled an all-black burger. The burger resembled burnt leftovers, fit with poisonous-looking black cheese and tar-like sauce. The buns were dyed with bamboo charcoal, the burgers with black pepper, and the sauce with squid ink. Yes, squid ink. The restaurant labeled it a “gothic burger,” and it reportedly received a “favorable reception” in Japan.

In America, however, the burger was treated like an anathema. Social media compared the color and texture of the burger to the fabric used in bondage and other fetish communities. 

But who are we to judge? Flash forward to Halloween 2019 and Burger King has released the “Ghost Whopper.” It’s an exclusive menu item only available in 10 stores in the United States for the Halloween season, fit with bleached white cheddar-infused buns. The promotion was hilariously cringey, with a psychic medium and a self-titled “trans-channel” allowing spirits to take over his body to taste-test the new Ghost Whopper. However, the reception fell flat. “Flat and dry,” one reviewer said. 

Our macabre attraction to terrible-looking and terrible-tasting foods isn’t a phenomenon monopolized by millennials in the 21st century. There are dozens of online collections that showcase disgusting recipes from old cookbooks, as well as bloggers that attempt to recreate these vintage recipes with varying results. Irina Dumitrescu covered “The Curious Appeal of ‘Bad’ Food,” in her 2017 Atlantic article. “Often, the more stomach-turning the dish, the more gleeful the prose about it, as if making terrible food somehow maintained the noble tradition of human ingenuity and experimentation,” she wrote.

“Noble tradition”, indeed. Human experimentation with food is an ongoing phenomenon that existed as early as the 14th century. Food producers, for example, have been artificially dying and manipulating their foods to appeal to consumers since medieval butter-churning, in which European dairy farmers added dyes to make their butter more yellow. Joe Pinkser from “The Atlantic” investigated this phenomenon, commenting on “Americans' Bizarre Relationship with the Color of Their Food.” 

Pinsker wrote that during the 19th century, “Bakers would whiten bread with chalk, dairy farmers would add a lead compound to milk to make it seem thicker, and, later in the century, meatpackers began to inject red dye into cuts to make them look fresher.” Vivid magenta dye was also added to more mass-produced foods, and dyes have only become brighter since. It’s been proven time and time again that color is a powerful tool when it comes to manipulating the appeal of food.

In South Korea, a study was conducted that found consumers preferred foods with bright, saturated colors and tend to avoid duller colors or colors associated with rot. Marketers know this, and they use it to their advantage. Companies have tried to make their foods more natural-looking, such as greener pickles, or less natural, like the man-made “blue raspberry” flavoring. This phenomenon has baffled researchers, because in nature, bright colors are associated with spoilage and mold. 

As foods became safer to eat and more accessible, curiosity and a sort of macabre fascination with ugly foods began to override what was once common sense. Our predecessors were thrilled by the array of brightly colored food, most of which they had never seen in food production before. Nowadays, artificial coloring is old news, but its response varies between cultures. 

Cultural factors played a huge part in why Japan found the black burger tasteful and why Americans found it—to be frank—revolting. And yet, as the wave of social media responses imply, Americans are intrigued by the idea. Tiffanie Wen from The Atlantic wrote that “Food Color Trumps Flavor.” Wen found the concept of a black burger fascinating, simply because of its novelty. “It gives us a window into another culture, even if we ourselves won’t be trying them anytime soon,” Wen wrote. “Black in the U.S. simply doesn’t convey a favorable food meaning. It means charred or burnt or moldy or spoiled or inedible,” Lawrence Garber Jr., a marketing professor at Elon University, said.

In Japanese culture, however, consumers are exposed to foods like seaweed, bean paste, squid ink, and black walnuts that convey a more positive association with the color black. “Bright colors are associated with foreign or Western food packaging, which might be considered too brash or loud,” Wen wrote.

Pinsker interviewed Ai Hisano, a business historian at Harvard Law School. Originally from Japan, Hisano commented on this phenomenon. “When I first came to the United States, the very bright, vivid colors of cake frosting and cupcakes were really shocking to me. It was more than 10 years ago. And still I don't quite understand why that brightness makes people hungry. Maybe it’s primarily for eye appeal rather than for taste.” 

Color, and how different cultures view it, has a large effect on how humans react to foods. Americans have a distaste for dull colors, leading to a surge in food companies and marketers taking “eating in a more visually thrilling (if a little disorienting direction),” Pinkser said. 

It’s also disorienting that artificial dye has resulted in a plethora of negative effects. In recent years, companies such as M&Ms and Kraft Mac & Cheese have taken the route of natural dyes, Pinsker found. The chemicals used in artificial food coloring have been under the microscope for decades. The ingredients used in the past to artificially dye foods have been substituted with safer ones, with a few exceptions. Some of those supposedly “safe” substitutes were deadly (looking at you, red dye number 40), linked with cancer, allergies, learning impairment, and other symptoms. 

Nowadays, artificial dyes are a part of the “norm.” Consumers aren’t asking to have these dyes removed—simply replaced with healthier versions. How these foods are marketed also plays a large part in consumer selection, whether it be subliminal messages popping up at the side of our computer screens, or ads as we scroll through Instagram. With the advent of social media, it’s become all too common for food lovers to be tricked by false advertising.

“It’s one thing for magazines and cookbooks to have polished photography and food styling. They are professional productions, and most reasonable people do not expect what they cook in their home kitchen to turn out looking exactly like it did in Bon Appetit. But food blogs, Instagram, and Pinterest are also filled with glossy, sunlit photos of organic mason-jar meals and caramel-drizzled cupcakes. Theirs is a dark beauty. They suggest that home-cooked food could look that luscious, that perfect, given a little care and knowledge,” Dumitrescu wrote. 

Our obsession with ugly foods is particularly odd, considering we are in an era of “Instagram-perfect” meals. But social media’s portrayal of food is anything but accurate. There’s a subculture of “expectations versus reality” when it comes to recreating gourmet foods in the comfort of your kitchen, often with some gruesome, horrific results. Making a mess in the kitchen, however, is exactly how culinary innovation begins.

No matter how disgusting bacon ice cream, deep-fried Oreos, dyed hamburgers, or Tuna and Jell-O Pie might seem, their ingenuity has to be commended.

Our society’s fascination with bad foods has deep-seated roots in the purpose of food. Nutrition is one factor, of course, but food is also known to strengthen communities and portray class, race, personality, and preferences. Food, as Dumitrescu concluded, “offers ways of telling stories about who we are and where we come from.” 

Bad food, “whether it’s unhealthy, inelegant, unpopular or just plain ugly,” tells the story of our culture and others. Centuries from now, when Soylent is pumped through our veins with an IV, our children’s children will laugh at our food blogs and maybe even try a few recipes of their own. The experiment could be a disaster, or it could be a step towards a revolution. How they tell that story is what matters.