Best Of 2014: How We Pissed You Off This Year

This year, we hope that most of our stories made you happy in one way or another. We tried to provide our audience with a mix of the eclectic, the intriguing, the exciting, the disturbing, and the curious … but at times, we definitely made you angry. There were certain days sprinkled throughout the year when the soundtrack to the site seemed to the aggressive clicks of irate comment-typing.

That's right—we've crawled back into the fetid, clusterfucky comments landfill to pay remembrance to our most-loathed and most-controversial content. Let's revisit some of the times that the response to our stories descended into a bona fide shitstorm of reader backlash.

Well, for starters, we couldn't create this list without mentioning "Why I Hate Pizza," the much-despised editorial from Sara Rocco—the sole pizza-hater that we could find to provide a cultural counterpoint on National Pizza Day (who was also willing to speak publicly and endure death threats from the pizza-loving populace).

Here are some of the choice comments that readers chose to leave on Sara's piece:

"Fuck you." –Gregory Chalance Ryan

"I hate you more than you hate pizza. Go back to SF you fucking cunt." –Guest (naturally)

"Oh Jesus Christ just go slam your forehead repeatedly onto a curb you fucking re-re." –browntrout

"Satan?" –ChazzleDazzle

The 'za-lovers community was rocked by Sara's commentary about pizza's banality and the oversaturation of pizza in internet culture. Once her opinion piece was released into the world, there was no going back from the subsequent maelstrom. (For the record, the MUNCHIES editorial staff loves pizza. And so does this guy.)

Next up in the haters parade was Scotty Smalls' eloquently titled piece about the mania centered around wildly popular seasonal flavoring: "Fuck Pumpkin Spice." In 782 words, Scotty described his distaste for the artificial cinnamon and nutmeg cheer instilled in virtually all food and beverage products between the months of September and December. While some empathized, others were less than enthused with his attitude. Commenter Jonathan Elmquist shared, "Man, I've never seen someone with such a petty hatred for spices. What a bitch," while fellow internet human "Wuffy" remarked, "If you are SO angry and uptight about a flavored beverage, you KNOW your priorities in life are screwed up." But in the spirit of fairness, we later published Camille Goldberg's retaliatory piece "In Defense of Pumpkin Spice." Is all well that ends well in the world of pumpkin spice syrup? Maybe not, but at least both factions of thought had an opportunity to self-express.

All of this talk of pizza and pumpkin spice may have been, at the end of the day, all in good fun—as they say—but there was one piece that was really the clear forerunner for the highly coveted Amount of Hate Mail Received Award. And that distinction belongs to Alison Stevenson's "Will Food Allergy Hysteria Destroy Halloween?" People take their allergies very seriously—deadly seriously—and not all parents of peanut-averse children were thrilled with Alison's assertion that giving out non-candy items on Halloween with the intent of sparing allergy-stricken children shame, embarrassment, or possible endangerment is, in a word, lame.

Of the 142 comments on Alison's piece, most are somewhat to very displeased that Alison did not take the concerns of allergic children more seriously. Commenter "2 old crabs" writes: "You mock allergic symptoms and show little graciousness toward children who never asked to be allergic. Although your next to last paragraph seems to offer some support of the occasion, your ignorance and intolerance regarding food allergies is deplorable."

Let it be known that parents of children who could literally die from eating treenuts are not exactly humored by Halloween nostalgia.

Ditto flyers who don't want to feel judged for downing a few cocktails in the sky, as evidenced by our readers' take on our recent Restaurant Confessionals piece "I'm Your Flight Attendant and I Think You're All a Bunch of Drunks." Some readers were upset by our anonymous flight attendant's eye rolls over the difference between sparkling water and club soda, while others saw the article as an opportunity to take to their laptops and air any assorted grievances about air travel.

"Of course passengers in coach drink more," writes commenter "flybynight13." "It's the only way to dull the pain of being crammed into midget sized seat [sic] while you wait for the attendant to finish flogging food, headphones or booze. Ambien should be included with each ticket."

The comments section took even stranger turns that peaked with a freaky flame war between "Kent" and "Max_Taffey". The bickering between the two—primarily about to what degrees flight attendants should be formerly educated—escalated to such an extent that it took an article about people drinking too many Bloody Marys in coach and somehow steered it into this variety of next-level insane 9/11 conspiracy comment: "K12 (5-17/18 year olds) education is financed via property taxes and they call it a meritocracy. Goes to show it is not good for your perception to take a nation's political rhetoric seriously. We have a corporate profits tax of up to 35% Federal and 12% local, meaning every corporation in the U.S. is effectively nationalized up to 47% and they blow the money on Pleasing the AARP with BS social Security payments to already rich geezers, A sprawling prison system and getting sucked into horseshit foreign wars (Bin Laden's strategy w/911 was to lure the US into unnecessary and ultimately hurtful counterattacks in Southwest Asia, No?)."

Kent, Max_Taffey, we don't know what went wrong here but we hope that you both worked it out.

Rounding out our list is another installment of Restaurant Confessionals, this one coming from the back of house. In "As a Chef, I Wish Yelp Didn't Exist," an acclaimed chef shared his personal thoughts on why the popular business-rating site is no clear winner from a business's perspective. Namely, he objected to users of Yelp failing to understand basic restaurant etiquette and doing things like reducing his Maldon sea salt to the term "big ass salt chunks."

Though many readers who work in the industry commiserated, there were others who only like ranting when it's coming from Yelp users.

A guest user in the comments section writes, "That is one thing the interwebs has done—let us know how much folks in the food service industry hate us and want to poison us. Nothing like being served food by folks who, you can be assured from their blogs, actively want you dead."

User "Wilson" argues in favor of the term "big ass salt chunks," claiming: "Regarding the 'big ass salt chunks' bit, sure, that sounds pretty crass to someone who is technically well-versed in the ingredients they are using, but 99.9% of the people eating at your restaurant are not chefs and have no idea what the fuck "Maldon sea salt" is. Sure, you may get a smug satisfaction out of being a stuck-up elitist who can wow his restaurant friends with a deconstructed kale foam salad in the shape of Namibia, but being arrogant about your own knowledge and abilities in the face of criticism isn't going to do your business any favors."

Yelp or not, there's no shortage of people in the world who want to share their opinions on the internet—for better or for worse.

Of course, we appreciated all of your feedback—it's what helps us keep fun, fascinating, and angry fervor-inspiring writing in the food world coming your way. But like most lengthy visits into the murky depths of the comments swamp, we and you alike had to eventually close our laptops at the end of 2014 and think to ourselves, Maybe that's enough internet for today.