Tide Pods contain detergent. For washing your clothes and your sheets. Not for eating. Doesn’t matter how much they look like a snack, or a candy, or an oversize Gushers. You shouldn’t eat them unless you’d like to, well, potentially die. A child might not know better, so you should probably keep them out of reach of little hands — these things have killed before — for safety. (Or just buy some boring, cheaper, non-pod detergent. It works better anyway.) If you, after all of this, are still looking at a Tide Pod and thinking, Maybe just a little bit … you definitely shouldn’t go on Twitter today. Tide Pod–eating, a long-running internet joke, has reached something of a fever pitch this December.
The earliest origins of the Tide Pods–as–food bit date back to an internet forum in 2013, according to Know Your Meme. The topic of said forum, however, was less about Tide Pods as a delicious snack and more about old people and kids accidentally eating them. In the years following, sites like CollegeHumor and the Onion both created content around the idea of edible laundry pods. See here: “Don’t Eat the Laundry Pods” from last March. Communities of people — on Twitter and Reddit — have since become very into talking about eating, or how badly they want to eat, Tide Pods. (I’m assuming that very few to none make good on these conversations, given the whole Tide Pods are poison thing.)
This December, there have been a number of viral tweets about Tide Pod–consumption that seem likely to have been the impetus for the detergent renaissance this week. The most important being a person who tweeted at Gushers on the day after Christmas with something “very important” to tell them. They sent a DM asking if Gushers would consider making a fruit snack shaped like a Tide Pod — which is a great idea if you ask me — so all of the would-be Tide Pod–munchers could satisfy their pod hunger. Gushers blocked the user after receiving the DM.
If anybody knows a gummy company looking for a hot new product, I think we might be onto something here. And again … don’t eat the dang Tide Pods. Though if you do, please have somebody film you and send us the video.
