I would consider it a submeme of Crying While Eating.
Although a major difference is that CWE was a participatory meme where people could submit their own videos.
The woman in the salad photos were not aware that they were contributing to a meme, but the photographers and the clients that would eventually use the photos were creating a genre of stock photography.
Because there are all sorts of purposes and uses for stock photography there are also a lot of specific types. It's almost more pure to the concept of memetics than memes that people contribute to just for the sake of "playing along with the meme."
So it began as a collection put together by someone at thehairpin. Then other bloggers at blameitonthevoices, guyism, mentalfloss, noticed it, liked it, and posted about it, linking back to thehairpin to give them credit.
At BuzzFeed we did the same thing as other blogs, but the whole purpose of the site is to not just track these things, but amplify them. Check out the viral dashboard on this post:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/dashboard/awesomer/women-laughing-alone-with-salad#sort=views&user=awesomer&uri=women-laughing-alone-with-salad&time=2d
I'll admit, I didn't know much about the dashboard until I started working at BuzzFeed, but it's pretty damn sweet.
So far, about 4,369 people have viewed it on our site. 3,399 of them viewed it because they were already browsing the site, 970 viewed it through referrers: links, likes, stumbles, other forms of sharing and search. You can see from the point that it first was submitted to BuzzFeed all the way up to when it was posted here on KYM. Unfortunately I can't account for the views of sites it ended up on before today, which is where Neuro Aster did excellent work.
PS: there's also "women resisting delicious cakes and pies" just started to get seeded. Might want to keep an eye on it and see if it becomes worthwhile for creating another submeme entry or footnote.
