hmmm, googled out of curiosity and found this... I only know my grandmother uses Tide Pods because she suggested them to me. But I'd never heard anything about them looking like candy.
The Strange Story Of How Tide Pod Eating Went Viral
https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2.../#5f3118914932
Quote:
The Strange Story Of How Tide Pod Eating Went Viral
This story is long and very weird.
In 2012, P&G released a new product, Tide Pods, that were meant to make doing laundry easier. Following the launch of the product, poison control saw an increase in calls by children eating Tide Pods [1]. This should make us confront two truths about the world:
Tide Pods look like candy (delicious candy at that). The bright colors, shapes, texture and weight all resemble that of a ‘bite-sized’ snack. It’s weird to say this all but it’s the truth. It’s why kids ate this and why many people I know (myself included) joked about eating these when they first came out - something in the human brain makes Tide Pods look enticing.
Tide Pods are poisonous and you definitely should not eat them.
When in 2012 Tide Pods launched, these jokes about people eating them existed - but in small niches and never spoken about publicly because admittedly it is very weird. For a few years this persisted until the Onion wrote a piece in late 2015 about a child vowing to eat Tide Pods, titled: So Help Me God, I’m Going To Eat One Of Those Multicolored Detergent Pods. This, as far as I can tell, was the first major public point of acknowledgment that Tide Pod eating is a thought in many people’s minds.
This allowed the idea to kind of come alive on the internet and many small groups started joking about eating Tide Pods, particularly on Twitter and Tumblr. In mid 2017 CollegeHumor made a video about the same topic [2].
I’m not sure where the actual inflection point was, but at some point this joke started becoming super mainstream. It happened sometime in December of 2017 where the biggest accounts from ‘weird twitter’ joked about the meme, tan being one of the biggest ones.
At some point this joke bled over from weird twitter to mainstream twitter, with people joking about eating Tide Pods (sometime in late December).
This bled over into YouTube, where challenge videos have become a weird trope of doing the craziest thing to get views. A small YouTuber realized that there was an opportunity to capitalize on this trend by actually eating Tide Pods (though I think this was ironically) and on January 7th, 2018 TheAaronSwan669 [3] made the first version of the Tide Pod Challenge. This gained a bit of traction and other YouTubers started joining the trend and doing the Tide Pod Challenge. Many of these YouTubers have audiences that are kids/teenagers who I think did not get the ironic nature of this trend and the fact that YouTubers were doing this for views - and decided to do the Tide Pod Challenge themselves at home. This was where the challenge really went mainstream when news outlets were picking up on the trend (as some kids did go to the hospital because of this, though I’m pretty sure the number is not as large as morning shows make it out to be).
The next iteration of this, which we’re currently in the middle of, is making foods look like Tide Pods. Some examples of which are a pizzeria in in Brooklyn (of course).
As far as I can tell this trend is on the downwards slope right now, the peak being the media’s coverage of it.
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2015 The Onion
Quote:
So Help Me God, I’m Going To Eat One Of Those Multicolored Detergent Pods
Dylan DelMonico
4-5 minutes
Anybody who knows me will tell you the same thing: I get what I want. Whether it’s food, being held, my binky, you name it—if I decide I’d like it, you damn well better believe I don’t rest until I get it, one way or another. And from the very second I saw those blue and red detergent pods come out of that shopping bag last week, I knew immediately that, come hell or high water, I would eat one of those things.
So with God as my witness, I swear to you: I’m going to find that container of multicolored pods, I’m going to take one out, I’m going to shove it in my mouth, and I’m going to chew it up and swallow it down, and nothing and no one is going to stand in my way.
You can’t be expected to keep an eye on me 24/7, and of course, you have to sleep at some point.
Oh, but please don’t let me stop you—by all means, go and hide those delicious-looking little pods wherever you think they’ll be safe from me. You can put them on a high shelf or in the back of a cabinet, or even out in the garage; it makes no difference to me. You can tell me over and over again that they’re not food, but just know that the moment I get my little fist around one, it’s food now.
If we’re being frank, though, you might as well just set a whole tub of those things down right inside my playpen. Or hell, just place one directly into my mouth, because guess what? That’s exactly where it’s going to end up sooner or later anyway.
But I know you people well enough by now to understand you’d never give in that easily, despite the complete futility of it. No matter how hard you try to play this pointless little game of keep-away, it’s not going to change a thing. Mark my words: One of these days, you’re going to badly underestimate me. “Oh,” you’ll say, “he can only really walk a couple steps at a time.” Or, “Oh, he’s only got four teeth.” Or, “Oh, we were able to stop him right before he drank that bright-colored antifreeze that one time, so this will be easy.” Please! Without even knowing it, you’re playing right into my hands! Because the instant you let your guard down for even a split second—BOOM!—it’s a detergent pod right down the hatch.
And you will let your guard down. You’re being pulled in so many different directions—cooking dinner, running errands, making phone calls—whereas I’ve only got one thing on my mind: those big, beautiful pods. You’re so very busy, aren’t you? You can’t be expected to keep an eye on me 24/7, and of course, you have to sleep at some point. Bingo! That’s prime detergent-eating time!
You see, every single time you look away is another chance for me to cram as many of those colorful little things as I can into my mouth. And it’s during any of these moments, when you’re occupied by one of a million little daily distractions, that you’ll look down and I’ll be forearm-deep in the tub of pods with a whole slick of blue goo all over my chubby face.
So allow me to reiterate: This is 100 percent going to happen. The sealed plastic bucket that holds the detergent pods is a welcome challenge to me. I’ll make short work of the lid and the inner zip-lock bag, and then all that stands between me and slurping down that glorious, vibrant liquid is a thin film of rapidly dissolving plastic that will melt away on my tongue like so much dust scattered by the wind. And at last, I will have what I want more than anything in this world.
Then, and only then, will I finally be free to eat out of the cat box.
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Uh oh lawsuit
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