This Online Group Shames Overly Pretentious Dishes And Here’s 50 Of The Most Hilarious Ones

Redditor Clackpot, who founded the r/StupidFood subreddit, went into detail about the community with Bored Panda. They noted that the pretentiousness in food lies in the chef, not the actual dish itself.

"It's not a binary choice," Clackpot said when I asked where the line between pretentious and fancy food lies. "Supremely wonderful food can also be sphincter-tighteningly precious, and I will cheerfully deride the pretension whilst also applauding the skill and imagination required. And really the pretension in food is about the creator, not the food itself nor the outcome. Consequently, although it is very difficult to define what makes food stupid, it's actually very easy to decide whether it is stupid or not, it's a subjective call which we are all equipped to make," they told Bored Panda.

The founder also told us a bit about how they founded the subreddit in the first place (you can find the full story on their wiki!). "In a nutshell, I was bored and hungover one Saturday morning five years ago and I knocked it together and forgot about for more than a year until it started to gain a little traction," they shared with Bored Panda.

The 'Stupid Food' community has changed "immensely" over the 6-and-a-bit years since being founded. Instead of trying to control it with an iron fist, Clackpot let it grow naturally. "Stupid Food is an entirely different creature to what I originally envisaged, but I've allowed it to grow in its own way and here we are. To be honest, I don't like the modern Stupid Food nearly as much as the thing I conceived but it has been fascinating to watch it grow and mature," they opened up.

Moderating the actual community is a fairly easy task, however. Something that many of us Pandas probably didn't expect to hear. "You might think that a sub racking up millions of pageviews per month would be infested with the worst of humanity but it's actually amazingly easy to handle with just two main moderators, myself and /u/VodkaBarf. I seriously hope that it never gets toxic because I fear it could get out of hand very quickly. But I feel that by allowing the sub to grow into its own thing without too much steering or interference, it has developed an identity of sorts and maybe that encourages mostly tolerable behavior."

Clackpot added that making any 'absolute' statements about cooking or food would be "unmitigated piffle." For them, food is extremely subjective, while pretending that we've found some objective truth is "completely meaningless, and indeed approaching Stupid Food level of pretension. "Food is a highly subjective thing which each of us experiences individually/ Literally every human being consumes food and we each have our own view, some of which will differ wildly from one another," they said.