Spaghetti 'Life Hack', Like Many Recent Food 'Life Hacks', Is A Giant Mess

Evidently, the content creators of weird internet cannot stop dumping food on their countertops. Several months ago, an Ultimate Nacho Hack went viral after a woman just dumped a whole bunch of nacho ingredients on her countertop and then mashed it all together with her hands. Now, another woman has done essentially the same thing, this time with spaghetti and meatballs.

what a normal and ultimate spaghetti hack! pic.twitter.com/UAc0rjRqmV

— jarvis johnson (@jarvis) May 10, 2021

If you've seen any of these recent viral food abomination videos, you know what the video above entails: a woman dumps a whole bunch of ingredients on her counter. "It's much easier this way!" she says, as she unloads a whole jar of prego sauce. Next come the meatballs, dumped on the bed of sauce, followed by cheese, and finally, steaming hot spaghetti. "No mess!" she says while hyping up this sin before God and man.

Like other recent food videos—the toilet ice cream, the Spaghetti-O Pie, countertop Mac and Cheese, etc—it went viral as people questioned whether God stays in heaven for fear of what he created.

I sure as hell didn’t survive a pandemic just to risk it all for Prego sauce on someone’s nasty ass counter https://t.co/AsapydpL1A

— Ryan Marino (@RyanMarino) May 11, 2021

I'm very tolerant of other people's food takes, but if you pour jarred Prego on my kitchen counter your family will forever wonder what happened to you.

— Andrew Donaldson (@four4thefire) May 11, 2021

The mere fact that they’re using prego raw so told me all I needed to know https://t.co/rux6tCHVd3

— Ilsa Faust🦋 (@ShaeTatiannaa) May 11, 2021

However, a general reaction of disgust is not the only thing these videos have in common: an investigation by Eater discovered that they come from a network of Rick Lax, a magician and content creator who has been making popular, clickbait-y videos on Facebook for years. Lax tells Eater he insists the videos aren't intended to be gross or go viral for being disgusting. Rather, he contends they're somewhat practical, albeit ridiculous. Eater writer Ryan Broderick theorizes the videos are like prank videos that tend to do well on the platform.

"Videos that do well on Facebook tend to have some kind of payoff… There’s a recipe that’s easy to follow, and you know that at the end you’ll see whatever’s been cooked. Prank videos work the same way. The prank is established, and then you wait to see what happens when it’s finally triggered. Lax and his collaborators have combined a prank video and a cooking video into something that people really can’t look away from, the culinary equivalent of a zit extraction."