‘Dry yoghurt’ is proof we should all stop playing with our food

The latest food frenzy – which involves shaping and colouring strained yoghurt – is a viral trend too far, says Charlotte Lytton

For food that has been mangled beyond all recognition, look no further than TikTok.

The brains that gave us the sleepy-girl mocktail, cloud bread and a disturbing number of ventures in cottage cheese have returned with “dry yoghurt” – a trend that has already racked up tens of millions of views on the platform.

As food fads go, it’s fairly low-key – a process that involves adding colouring to yoghurt, straining it for 48 hours through a cheesecloth to remove moisture, and later smearing the now clay-like texture into novelty shapes, before sprinkling it with biscuits or banana slices.

In one video – which has been favourited over 1.5 million times – the modern-day babushka opines: “It sticks to every part of your mouth” (yum!), adding that “the taste hasn’t really changed that much. I think it would be really good with some fruit and granola on it.” Kind of like the yoghurt you started manhandling 48 hours ago?

Given labneh has become the small plates dip du jour, there’s no doubt that moisture-free yoghurt is having a moment. But there’s something tragic about these posts and the frenzy they whip up among users who just have to replicate what is “all over their feed”, where food is not about looking or – heaven forfend – tasting good, just appearing odd enough to jack up the algorithm and further populate the echo chamber.

The words “why is this happening?” feel like they apply to every viral TikTok food trend, from pasta chips (cooked pasta covered in oil, then dumped in the air fryer); butter boards (a bread board smeared with butter); charfruiterie (a bread board covered in sliced fruit); or scrambled pancake batter (I give up).

Some creators now purposely make gag-inducing cookery content for rage bait – in one case so successfully that a raw chicken being shoved into a pumpkin was decried as “Halloween salmonella” by Gordon Ramsay.

The confusing part here is not (only) why people are so intent on wasting food, but the circle-jerk of pointlessness that trends of this kind fuel. I can only assume that the people posting these things aren’t interested in food, but community – the deep-rooted need that we all have to feel a part of something. Unfortunately, for society’s youngest adults, that is often found on the end of the phones that studies show are making them miserable - and #foodTok doesn’t exactly appear to be helping.

While food is perhaps the oldest means of sharing – bringing people together to break bread, exchange tips and nourish one another – viral trends seem to have no interest in any of the above. Dinnertime has instead become an exercise in creating monstrous concoctions for clicks, to appear in the feeds of other young people doomscrolling at (presumably their parents’) home, who then replicate those same monstrosities for more clicks. They arrive, dominate the culture and disappear into oblivion; the goal isn’t food, but faddishness, to be in on a meaningless moment in time that no one will remember.

While much of social media runs on the same nonsense, that the most enduring form of togetherness has been reduced to tie-dying breakfast and reviving maligned diet snacks from the Seventies feels especially bleak.

Still, it’s become so pervasive that supermarkets are now trying to get in on the act. The doors of my nearest Waitrose this morning excitedly shared that the branch is now on TikTok (videos presumably won’t feature the rampant shoplifting and broken coffee machine); in the summer, Iceland ran out of cucumbers after a viral salad led to its shelves being cleared.

I’d take continued shortages if it meant that some actual sharing was coming out of the online kind. Otherwise our fatuous, faddish food age will only rumble on.