In May 2022, Jane and Emma, two Canadian women in their 20s, decided to cook at home and upload videos of their creations to TikTok. His first recipe was a puff pastry filled with cheeseburgers, onions and bacon. The second, in a hypercaloric dessert that included jelly beans, granola, condensed milk, and brownies. They went viral with the fourth, a recipe for chicken seasoned with a kilo of Greek yogurt, seasoned, breaded and fried. At the moment this video collects 31 million views and has more than 36 thousand comments, most of them negative, criticizing the process of preparing the recipe or the poor culinary skills of the protagonist. Since then, the MyJaneBrain account has only grown.
It’s not the messiest, most disastrous, or craziest recipe that MyJaneBrain offers to its 300,000+ followers. The more followers, views, and interactions the account has, the more grotesque and over-the-top its recipes become. Among the most recent videos uploaded to the channel, you can see Jane popping eggs and ground beef straight into a Doritos bag, or Emma making a jello pie with sausage and pickles, which she then wraps in a signature hot -Dog bun sets. This journalist’s favorite recipe deserves a special mention: the satanic hamburger.
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Jane Brain from Ontario (Canada) explains to EL PAÍS, the protagonist of the videos (preferring to introduce herself, she doesn’t want to give her real last name), that her intention at first was to make educational videos recipes: “One of them you save as Favorites, pass it on to your mom and say, ‘Mom, we should do that!’ They also wanted to try all the viral recipes that people at home were afraid to try: “We were curious to try them and see firsthand if they were really tasty.” But after a short time, people started criticizing all the dishes uploaded to the platform and dissecting the videos one by one, laughing at their way of cooking and the choice of ingredients or telling them that what they are cooking won’t be good “We were shocked when we were told we were the worst cooks in the world.”
Jane Brain denies that her account is a spoof: “Everything is real,” she says, “people think we’re fooling them, but we’re just two friends having fun.” Shortly after her videos went viral, she quit her job and is currently exclusively dedicated to maintaining the account. He assures that the TikTok channel has only brought him good things. And by good things he means popularity and profitability. The hatred he receives through social media leaves him untouched: “The internet has never been a friendly place. Anger brings people together on social media. Once they open the comments section and see that the first five are negative, the others join in the criticism. Everyone hates the creators, but deep down for me it’s a form of love. You interact with us. They give us visualizations. You share the content. And that’s good”.
Some of its account growth is closely tied to these professional haters: one of TikTok’s most popular features is Duets, a tool that lets you react to another creator’s video on the platform. And MyJaneBrain’s videos are widely shared among other accounts that make fun of their content using this formula.
MyJaneBrain is just one of many TikTok accounts that could be attributed to the rage-bait genre. According to the Urban Dictionary — the site that brings together millions of definitions extracted from the latest Anglo-Saxon slang — rage-bait (first cousin of clickbait) is any social media post explicitly designed to attract as many people as possible outrage to generate interaction. Other accounts of this style that are very popular on TikTok are that of Sylvia Ferreira, with a million followers, or The Shaba Kitchen, with almost three million followers.
In an attention-based economy, content that elicits anger and outrage from viewers helps capture it: “People stop and stare at this type of content like someone would stop and stare at a traffic accident; There’s something that keeps us searching,” Scott Lamb, current vice president of content at Medium and former director of expansion at Buzzfeed, the American media company focused on monitoring and creating viral content, told EL PAÍS, which is based in the In 2015, launched the gastronomy-focused channel Tasty, the seed that helped dirty recipes thrive.
Tasty has more than 96 million followers on Facebook. On Instagram more than 44 million. And on YouTube, he has more than 21 million subscribers. Anyone who has been surfing the internet since 2015 is very likely to have come across one of his videos. Maybe with the 100-layer lasagna or the 30-pound hamburger. You may have seen how to make eight different desserts on one tray (including apple pie, carrot cake, brownie, fudge cookie, M&M’s cookie, chocolate cracker, banana cake and cheesecake) or the world’s fluffiest pancakes ever. Maybe you’re a hands-on person and you’ve learned how to make one of the 21 recipes that use just one container or a recipe that uses just two ingredients.
“If you look back at the first Tasty videos, you realize they’re a disaster on many levels: ingredients were often spilled on the table, spilled out of their containers, or dropped on the floor. The videos weren’t shot with a professional camera or had the right lighting,” Lamb recalls, “but that made them more realistic and accessible. People would see them and think, ‘I can cook this.’ A similar thing happens in the videos we now find on TikTok, which remind Lamb of “fun culinary disasters a kid could pull off.” One of the most surprising details of Tasty’s growth is that it took place on a global scale, being consumed in different parts of the planet with vastly different gastronomic cultures. “The content wasn’t perceived in the same way, a macaroni cheese burger recipe in the United States received comments like ‘I have to try this,’ while people in Spain were like, ‘Who’s going to eat this crap?'” he explained. However, there is a common thread: People, for whatever reason, like to watch others cook. “The reason is so simple, we all end up eating. And even if you don’t understand the context or the language, you can see the ingredients and fully understand the process,” adds Lamb.
“If you’re operating on an algorithm-driven platform like Facebook or TikTok, where the videos appear in the newsfeed through an external selection and not a personal selection, those videos need to grab attention and if they do what they’re looking to do, go viral, they need one Provide an overdose of visual stimulation because what you’re looking for is to grab attention in under 15 seconds,” explains New York-based journalist Ryan Broderick, specialist in digital culture and author of the Garbage Day newsletter. “What happened that we see a woman washing a chicken breast with Fairy and then wrapping it in a Doritos pouch? That since the first video he uploaded and made it viral until now he has received positive affirmation for a specific behavior in the form of views, comments and interactions,” he says. According to Broderick, what goes viral for the 20th time is an exaggerated, expanded and distorted version of what went viral the first time: “And this, with food, translate to literally disgusting food.”
On TikTok, the gap between new and old content is getting smaller. A video that caused a stir on a Monday will be replicated everywhere on Friday and will likely be out of style by Sunday. A clear example was the viral Baked Feta and Cherry recipe, which could already be considered ancient food. TikTok content creators are constantly replicating themselves, copying recipes and formulas, and learning from the successes and failures of other content creators. This leads to an ever faster competition for attention with ever more compelling content.
Broderick finds another common element in accounts like those of My Jane Brain or Sylvia Ferreira: “All videos, or the vast majority, are made by white women under 35, as if they fit the stereotype of a somewhat dumb millennial who doesn’t cook They are canonically attractive women with simple, almost childlike humor and girlish voices. There is no trace of irony or sarcasm in them. Comedy, when it appears, is not intended. They are also somewhat clumsy at cooking, one might even say that they are careless and disastrous.The digital culture expert does not doubt that there is a clear gender component to generate more hate and visits: “It’s the archetype that the Internet likes to hate and insult.” Component to improve the Rage Bait.
What does the rise of these accounts say about viewers? Tasty’s track record may shed some light as it became the Facebook page with the highest daily growth. “People responded well to weirdness, so soon we had to up our own weirdness level: cheese, bacon, giant recipes… you name it. Then many recipes began to have negative comments, with users saying they were very unhealthy, and in some cases downright horrible,” explains Scott Lamb. Listening to the crowd from Buzzfeed, they decided to open up Tasty’s little brother, which focused on healthy eating: “It wasn’t half as successful as the original Tasty,” he says. People wanted to see dirty.
“All content shaped by algorithms ends up being ridiculous. You enter a clone loop, a degradation of the previous content and in the end it even seems parodic, an absurd copy of the original. It even happens with what Netflix suggests that we watch after watching a certain type of content for a long time,” explains Ryan Broderick to EL PAÍS. “The problem is that we’ve been conditioned by the algorithm for too long,” he warns. Are we lost, destined for a future sailing in a sea of digital garbage? “There’s a spectrum where videos of women washing chickens with Fairy exist alongside Chef’s Table. We have beautiful and lavish productions along with the worst content we can imagine,” recalls Broderick. You must choose what type of content to display. And not give in to the dark desires of the algorithm.
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