Health officials are urging the public not to eat laundry detergent packets amid an uptick in intentional exposures and ingestions among teenagers, and we can thank a running online joke for it.
The so-called “Tide Pod Challenge” is currently one of the leading memes on social media, where people joke of feasting on the colorful capsules and ― yes ― others actually post videos of themselves chowing down on them.
Though the slathering of memes is a running joke, the shared idea of intentionally eating the pods online goes back to at least 2013, when it was discussed in an online forum, according to website, KnowYourMeme.com.That was one year after company Procter & Gamble introduced the liquid laundry packets and two years before satirical website, The Onion, published a column about a toddler confessing his plans to eat “those delicious-looking little pods,” “come hell or high water.” College Humor also posted a YouTube video in March 2017 that shows a man struggling to not eat a bowl full of them.
Today, a quick search on social media will reveal never-ending jokes about eating the pods, from photos of people pouring bleach into a cereal bowl of the liquid-filled packets to the pods referred to as the “forbidden fruit.”