The meme "It ain't much, but it's honest work" captures a wholesome, salt-of-the-earth kind of feeling: after you do your best, fulfill your duty, cross all your Ts and dot all your Is, you can say with pride that even though it might not seem like a lot, it was sincerely and effectively done.

The meme, created from a photograph by the USDA taken in 2014, started to trend in 2018 and soon became a common reaction image. But like all memes, once the exploitable format became established, meme creators began to tweak and revise it, pushing at its boundaries, and making it increasingly abstract. The journey of this meme demonstrates the fact that what might begin its life as a photo that “ain’t much” can turn into a fertile field for experimentation and artistic expression.