There are a lot of things that become popular on the internet these days: challenges, beauty trends, memes, etc., There are some great trends, and then there are those that should have never been created. That’s right, I’m talking about the Tide Pod Challenge.
[Photo courtesy of: dank_memer.v2/Instagram]
Isn’t it weird that a laundry detergent pod, which was made to make washing clothes easier, suddenly is the center of the weird epidemic?
The origin of eating Tide Pods began centered around the idea of ingesting them since they are often compared to fruit snacks due to their packaging and appearance. This trend started as a joke, a mock-suicide meme like drinking bleach or the consuming of other poisonous “snacks”.
The whole actually eating Tide Pods thing didn’t pop up in conversation until the end of 2013. According to KnowYourMeme.com, it began on the online forum, Straight Dope Forums. A member who goes by the name “Silvorange” submitted a post titled “People eating Tide pods” discussing the rumors about people eating the detergent packs.” The trend took off from there and even had popular sites like The Onion and CollegeHumor posting about the forbidden snack. People didn’t start doing this “challenge” until recently. Sadly, teens are the main ones participating in this challenge despite probably already knowing that Tide Pods are poisonous.
The thing is though, this whole Tide Pod situation was supposed to be satirical! This joke, this meme, was never actually supposed to come into fruition. No one was supposed to be stupid enough to eat a Tide Pod. The news even had to come out to tell people not to do it and YouTube took down videos featuring people eating Tide Pods to stop other from doing it.
In all seriousness, it’s a funny meme to make fun of and joke around with but to actually eat a Tide Pod is stupid. You can die if you fully ingest one. This is a serious problem, don’t do it.