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Food

The Internet's Tide Pod-Eating Obsession Was Predicted in a 1981 BBC Miniseries

Keep in mind that 'The Day of the Triffids' is literally about an apocalypse.
Screengrab via YouTube

One of the more stunningly idiotic trends 2017 gave us was the Tide Pod-eating meme, which then bled over into 2018, when it basically exploded. Great!

Depressingly, there's a startling number of people who've engaged in the twisted gastronomic fantasy of ingesting laundry detergent, workarounds—recipes for edible Tide Pods in lieu of the actual product, attempts at legislation to get people not to eat them—be damned.

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There is really no conceivable scenario in which a human should eat these tiny plastic cysts full of chemicals. But, if they must consider it, it’s only in the event of absolute scarcity of actual food. Say, the kind that’s spurred by an apocalyptic event. Like a meteor shower.

Turns out a 1981 BBC miniseries presaged this exact scenario, providing further irrefutable proof that we do really live in the sickest kind of dystopia.

On Tuesday, Gizmodo’s Matt Novak unearthed a clip from The Day of the Triffids , a televised adaptation of John Wyndham's 1951 novel of the same name.

It’s a great find: The video shows a woman sitting on a street corner, cradling a box of Tide. She is ravenous, furiously trying to open a box of Tide detergent that she intends to consume. A grocery store’s shelves have been emptied of actual food in the meteor shower's aftermath. Others around her frantically swarm for food, anything that will give them sustenance. (She then, uh, falls over. Easy there!)

The box of powder is, notably, not a Pod, for this series was created in that blissful era before Tide Pods even existed.

Novak did the lord’s work and uploaded the clip to YouTube, so you can watch it above in full. May it go viral and become a meme of its own!