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What Makes a Food Go Viral? Inside the Explosive Popularity of TikTok’s Feta Pasta

Jenni Häyrinen’s feta pasta.Photo: Courtesy of Jenni Häyrinen/@liemessa

During the second week of February, Instacart started to notice something strange. Sales for block feta had skyrocketed 117%, and the cheese was now the top-trending search term on its website. Cherry tomatoes and basil were not far behind. What on earth, the company wondered, was causing this random spike?

Meanwhile, US supermarkets from Charlotte, North Carolina, to Jersey City to Sydney couldn’t keep the salty Greek cheese in stock. Harris Teeter, a popular southern grocery chain, said demand for feta was up 200% across its 230 locations. On social media, users spewed frustration about empty shelves at Whole Foods.

If you’re under, say, 30, you know exactly what was the cause behind all of this: the TikTok pasta.

Oh, yes. The ooey-gooey dish—roughly composed of whole cherry tomatoes, a short noodle, garlic, basil, and a big ol’ block of cheese—has been blasted all over the For You pages of millennials and Gen Z’ers for weeks now. As of March 1, #fetapasta has more than 661.7 million views on TikTok. The similar yet more specific #bakedfetapasta has more than 86.7 million. Between the two hashtags, there are more than 45,000 videos of the feta pasta circulating around the app’s ether. It has evolved forms too: There’s now also vegan feta pasta. A feta pasta with shrimp. A feta pasta that doesn’t use feta at all but Boursin yet is still widely considered part of the feta-pasta canon despite not having any feta. An ASMR pasta that has more than 15 million views and counting. It feels like everyone is making the pasta—because, well, millions of people really are making the pasta.

Brand consultant Zach Weiss was in bed, scrolling through TikTok, when he saw a #fetapasta video for the umpteenth time. “It got to the point of saturation where I just had to try it out of curiosity,” he says. “The visual just draws you in—the top-down shot of this big brick of oven-melted cheese and colorful tomatoes.” He saved it to his Favorites page. The next day, Weiss went to his local grocery store and headed towards the dairy aisle. There were only two containers of feta left.

That evening, he and a few friends whipped up the pasta for dinner. A friend posted it on her Instagram story, and they dug in. It was what they expected: easy to make and gluttonous.

Like for Weiss, it took several viewings of several different videos for McArthur Joseph to finally fall into the pasta’s cheesy clutches. On February 9, after a Zoom-packed day at work, he made it for dinner. “There’s something so visceral and visually intriguing about squishing cheese and cherry tomatoes in a pulp, and instead of a mess, there’s a product you can have for dinner,” he says. “To me, it breaks down into a couple of things: (1) an easy recipe, (2) inexpensive/accessible ingredients, and (3) instructions that feel like an art-and-crafts project.”

Joseph, a senior social-media manager for digital marketing agency Beekman Social, also found the feta-pasta content on his feed rather refreshing. Sure, there were some stylized versions from full-time food bloggers. But many of the videos he scrolled past were by amateurs, cooking it up in a normal kitchen with Pyrex baking dishes. “TikTok, at its core, feels like the most democratized platform right now. You don’t have to have a million followers for your content to go viral. There’s also way less pretense on that platform and more room for creativity, whereas on Instagram it feels like every influencer/brand is trying their best to beat the algorithm,” he says. (Joseph is onto something. A TikTok spokesperson told Vogue that they believe the pasta’s power lies in its unpretentiousness: “It’s a trend that is easy to enjoy and take part in.” Quoting another TikTok icon from Ratatouille, Chef Gusteau, they added, “Anyone can cook.”)

Weiss and Joseph can’t remember what video, exactly, they made the pasta from, but there’s a good chance it was from Yumna Jaward, or @feelgoodfoodie. Jaward posted her feta-pasta rendition on January 28. Since then, it’s racked up a staggering 11.2 million views.

Jaward has gone viral plenty of times. But nothing, she says, compares to the feta pasta’s reaction: “The views, likes, and comments are always a huge indicator that something is going viral, but this one felt different than everything else that had gone viral before because of the number of people remaking the recipe,” she says. “In my eight years of food blogging, I’ve never seen one recipe remade as much in such a short amount of time.”

A day later, on January 29, Australian blogger @cookingwithayeh decided to give the pasta a go. Her video’s reach outpaced her predecessors’ with more than 12.7 million views and is TikTok’s most-watched feta-pasta instructional (but not video overall—that honor goes to the ASMR version, which has more than 15 million views).

@cookingwithayeh

Baked Feta Pasta is def worth all the hype!! Inspired by the lovely @feelgoodfoodie 💗 #fyp #foodtiktok #bakedfeta #pasta #foryou #foryoupage

♬ Taste It – Ikson

Whereas @cookingwithayen credits Jaward, Jaward gives a nod to another food blogger in her caption: MacKenzie Smith, or @grilledcheesesocial. Smith’s version, posted on January 28, has around three million views.

So, if you’re looking for TikTok zero in the global feta-pasta phenomenon, it’s Smith’s. She first posted the recipe to her blog in 2019. “It was pretty popular,” she says, “but it only really took off at the beginning of quarantine.” Soon enough, it was her most-viewed blog post. So when Smith joined TikTok in January 2021, doing a feta-pasta video was a no-brainer. Within 24 hours, it had a million views. Over the next few days, Smith’s 200 followers turned into 40,000.

However, despite her social-media mastery, Smith isn’t the original creator of the pasta. If you look at her video, she tags two Finnish food bloggers: @liemessa, or Jenni Häyrinen, and @tiupiret, or Tiiu Puranen.

Two years ago, in the midst of a brutal Finnish winter, Häyrinen was hungry. She craved some cozy baked feta, but a straight block of cheese wasn’t exactly a balanced meal. So she added some tomatoes, made it into a pasta sauce, and mixed in some noodles. Afterward, Häyrinen posted her creation to her blog and her Instagram with the hashtag #uunifetapasta. “Right away it started to go viral,” she says. “Within a few weeks, everyone in Finland was cooking it.” (That’s only a slight exaggeration—Häyrinen says the original blog post got more than three million views. Finland’s population is 5.5 million.) Unifetapasta was not without its creator controversy. The recipe was similar to a spaghetti made in 2018 by Puranen, who maintains hers is the original feta-pasta recipe (hence the dual tag in @grilledcheesesocial’s posts).

Smith found out about the #uunifetapasta from a Finnish friend—and, after some translation help, posted it to her own blog in June 2019 while linking back to Häyrinen’s.

How does Häyrinen feel about her creation going crazy again two years later—but this time not from her own account? “I feel like I do get credit, although not all the time,” she says. But she realizes how the origins of a thing can get lost when it’s shared and reshared millions of times. “I understand if people see the recipe on TikTok, they tag the person they are following.”

Häyrinen joined TikTok herself on January 31, after she heard the pasta was going viral in the States. She uploaded her own version, hoping to capitalize on the buzz—“the original viral #uunifetapasta,” the caption reads. The video has only around 900,000 views. The feta pasta, it seems, had already reached the end of its social-media minute.

@liemessa

Baked feta pasta – the original viral #Uunifetapasta 🍝🔥#bakedfetapasta #tiktokfood #fetapasta #foodtiktok

♬ Feel It Still – Portugal. The Man

That’s the tricky thing about TikTok. It’s an app that thrives on trends: not just starting them but joining them. Everyone does the same dance, spoofs the same song, stitches the same clip—What’s a video that lives in your head rent free? And that’s precisely what makes it so fun; it can feel like a giant inside joke you’re in on (which is saying something because most social media makes us feel like shit). But as ideas amplify, sometimes their origins fall into anonymity—even if creators do their best to tag the original maker. When there are thousands of spin-off videos floating around, it can be hard to find which one was the exact For You page powder keg. (Taylor Lorenz of The New York Times notably explored this concept when she tracked down Jalaiah Harmon, the 14-year-old creator of TikTok’s famous Renegade dance, who was overshadowed by the trend’s more high-profile performers.)

Häyrinen has accepted that her #uunifetapasta is now the #fetapasta. “The phenomenon has grown so big that it’s out of my hands, really,” she says. But, if you scroll past the #fetapasta and decide to make it for yourself, she does have one request. “The most common version is pretty close to the original but is missing chili. I think some chili makes a difference, and I recommend to use it.”

And, if you’re interested—here’s Häyrinen’s original recipe.

Read Next: Vogue.me Investigates: Are You a Food Racist?

Originally published on Vogue.com

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