Opinion: Why On Earth Is Everyone Obsessed With The Unicorn Food Trend?

If you’re like me, AKA, a social media addict and can barely keep your hands off your phone for a minute then you’ll no doubt have seen your social media inundated with the unicorn craze. Every other post and every other word seems to involve the word ‘unicorn’ and copious amounts of color. Call me old fashioned, or a Scrooge, but I’m definitely more prone to the black food trend (charcoal ice cream – gimme!).

Not too long ago, I came across a disturbing sight on Buzzfeed India, unicorn colored idlies, and it left me far from impressed. Is it so unreasonable to prefer my idlies the way that God intended? Why must everything be transfigured into something colorful and instagrammable? Has the social media craze taken us to the extent where we can’t just enjoy a nice meal without needing a deluge of reactions?

Even with the Unicorn Frappuccino, there was a divided consensus on whether or not it even tasted good, to begin with. Anthony Bourdain called it horrific (literally, no one else’s opinion matters to me). Are we ready to pay for a product that we don’t even enjoy just to have the satisfaction of posting it on social media? Do likes translate into money well spent?

As the Business Insider so aptly summed it up “It is highly doubtful that hordes of people would have waited in hour-long lines to eat mediocre food, no matter how aesthetically-pleasing, in the pre-Instagram era. But in this day and age, people seem to garner more satisfaction from racking up likes on a photo of a crazy dish than from savoring the taste of something that won’t look so good on a screen.”

Give me a good old white idly or a brown coffee any day. I know I would prefer to eat something that tastes just as good as it looks. Come on millennials, we seriously can’t be this superficial. Please, let’s hope that this too shall pass. Otherwise, future generations may punish us with a bleak, colorless, dystopian future and your Instagram feed sure wouldn’t like that.