I have a wagon. It’s very big. I think I drank too much coffee. I was trying to time it right. I didn’t time it right. I feel like I’m like dry and wet at the same time. Does anyone else get that? Yeah. Like a dry wetness or like a wet dryness on ya? No, just me. Just me. That’s okay. This is a story about SpaghettiO pie. Well, more accurately, it’s a story about us, about you and me and everyone we’ve ever known and how the entire world reacted to a simple video of canned pasta being dumped into a pre-made pastry crust. I used to think that you could tell everything you needed to know about a person by seeing them interact with a restaurant server. But now I fully believe in my heart of hearts that you can tell everything you need to know about someone by showing them a video of SpaghettiO pie mom. So I first saw this video pop up on Twitter. It was from user @E2TheBam on January 21st. But now the video has been posted freaking everywhere. It’s racked up 50 million views on Facebook. It’s got a couple mil on TikTok. It’s got 5 million on Twitter. And let me tell you the comment section on every one of those mediums is a freaking wild ride, man. But before we get into that, let’s watch the video together to give you a little bit of context, if you haven’t seen it yet. All right, so right off the bat, we get the violent dumping of a can of SpaghettiOs with meatballs, mind you, into a pre-made pie crust. I imagine most people saw this and they were like, what a weird, strange thing to do. But I saw this and said, wow, what a clever homespun American version of a classic timpano siciliano, AKA Timpano as made famous by Binging with Babish and the 1996 movie, “Big Night”. I saw this and I was like, that is a very clever recipe. This is a strong, ambitious start to a recipes. [SpaghettiO Pie Mom] Spread it around, make sure the chunks are all spread equally. You gotta make sure the chunks are spread equally. You can’t make a timpano siciliano without making sure the chunks are spread evenly. Also I will add the SpaghettiO with meatballs for me was like a treat growing up. That was our special occasion meal because it costs like 20 cents extra. And like now I don’t know if the meatballs would hold up but back then, those little mini chunks. A Chef Boyardee. SpaghettiOs aren’t Chef Boyardee, did you guys know that? Franco American. [SpaghettiO Pie Mom] This is the fastest family recipe for dinner Okay, so it’s a family recipe, right? Like this is just a mom out here trying to feed her kids. She’s taking canned and pre-made ingredients, a money saving tip and hack, which is something like, how could you possibly disagree with that? [SpaghettiO Pie Mom] And all the kids will love it because honestly who doesn’t like spaghetti and Italian? Those are my two favorite food groups: spaghetti and Italian. [SpaghettiO Pie Mom] Garlic. So now she comes in with like an unholy dumping of garlic salt onto buttered white sandwich bread. And maybe some people would see this and say that’s weird, but this is how I grew up making garlic bread. We take like the old hot dog buns, literally whatever bread we had, and we take the giant country crock thing of margarine, because it’s like an eighth the price of real butter. And we’d whip that up, spread it on and just throw some garlic on there, pop it in the toaster oven and that’s good eating. So I got nothing wrong with this. If you just kind of flatten them out, like… Here’s where the video gets a little bit weird. At first I saw this and I was like, she is obviously a busy person. She wants to create content and maybe inspire people, but she ain’t got time to wash a rolling pin to roll this out. Now, after looking at her TikTok, it turns out she is a troll who makes troll videos. But the fact is people reacted to this video thinking they were just shaming a mother for feeding her children. [SpaghettiO Pie Mom] Punch. Perfect. MMA fighters use this video to train. I swear, that’s all they do. [SpaghettiO Pie Mom] Layer them. Grab your knife. No child wants to eat crusts. No child wants to eat crusts. Come on, like there is not a more loving, motherly gesture. And if food is about nourishment and bringing joy to people, cutting off the crust of your bread, like this little symbol of I don’t want you to be inconvenienced by the slightly burnt bits at the edge of the bread. I only want you to have the finest, even if it is just pre-made sandwich bread, doused in garlic salt. To me, it’s kind of beautiful. Also I ate a lot of crust, only bread growing up cause my brother would always just hollow out the inside bread meats from the 99 cent French bread loaf from Ralph’s. Thanks, John. I don’t have a complex about it or anything. [SpaghettiO Pie Mom] You’ve got cheese. I prefer the mozzarella. The cheese here makes a lot of sense. So you have all the sugars in that SpaghettiO sauce and you have all the proteins from this low moisture shredded mozzarella, and that’s all going to cook in the oven when she finally bakes this pie. To me, I’m watching this video and I can not find any actual cookery faults in it. Say what you want about SpaghettiOs, this to me, absolutely works. [SpaghettiO Pie Mom] More garlic, ’cause who doesn’t want more garlic? Anyone who’s criticizing her use of garlic powder here, they’re the same people who go on Twitter and say like recipe calls for three cloves of garlic, me: did you say 38? And there’s nothing wrong with dehydrated garlic. In fact, I use both in a lot of recipes because you do get a different flavor profile from granulated garlic, as opposed to fresh. Fresh is not necessarily always better. There’s a huge difference say between fresh mint in a recipe and the dried mint that goes on top of Ayran and doogh. Just a small dash of milk, just enough to get it kind of juicy. Adding milk here, you could maybe, did I say hair? Did I say milk hair? I started growing milk hairs recently, like in my old age, I used to not have any body hair and then the little milk hairs started sprouting up and now it’s a perfect circle of milk hairs around each usually just a little milk button. Chris, don’t laugh, you’ve got milk hairs, you know it. This is the part of the recipe that I don’t know if I can necessarily defend. I will right now because I do think the milk will combine with the tomato sauce and the cheese to create almost a sort of bootleg vodka sauce. But her deliberate use of the term juicy kind of indicated to me that she was a troll. However, this is a family recipe. Come on. She said it was a family recipe. Like there’s nothing wrong with it. [SpaghettiO Pie Mom] It’s all gonna cook right in here. We’re almost there. I’m gonna finish it off with one more can. Another one. That’s DJ Khaled. I realize, I don’t know how he says another one, but I had intended to say it like him. I’ll try it again. Another one. Sorry. I’ll stop. [SpaghettiO Pie Mom] The more cheese, the better. More garlic salt. This is the correct amount of garlic salt to add this recipe. I would just like to say that on the record. [SpaghettiO Pie Mom] This is the important part, layer. If you wondered where those hand-rolled garlic bread pieces were from before, like Chekhov’s gun, they come hurdling back into the picture. I think this is maybe the smartest part of the recipe. When you bake this all together, like it’s all going to get nice and crusty. All that milk’s going to evaporate. It’s going to turn nice and creamy on the inside. And that bread is just going to turn brown. To me, there’s nothing wrong with this. That is your crust. Now you’re going to come and put it in the oven. It looks good. It looks so good. This is my best one yet. Oh my gosh. It does look pretty good. I mean, I look at this and I see a dinner that I would proudly eat or serve to my family. But like I said earlier, this story is not about the SpaghettiO pie. No, no, this is about the reaction to the SpaghettiO pie. I want to read you a short selection of comments. So of course he had the classics, right? “This is the grossest thing I’ve ever seen.” “That should be considered a war crime.” One person said “using your arms to flatten American bread “is the most disgusting thing I’ve seen in a long time. “And I’m a nurse.” First off, no. Any medical procedure is infinitely grosser than that. And anyone who had to watch a video of a live of episiotomy being done for a college course called human sexuality can tell you that. Don’t google episiotomy. Brutal, man. Yeah. I failed that class. Didn’t show up to the final. I was scarred. Does that make me a bad feminist? Then there’s a whole other section of comments that bummed me out on like a much deeper level than I thought it would. Let’s get to one. “Why would you feed that crap to your kids or family? “That is so unhealthy. “It’s not that hard to fix a decent meal. “I had five kids and worked 40 hours and more “I would never do that. “Make better choices out there.” What, what, I mean what an overreaction for a video of SpaghettiO pie. And like, it sounds like that person worked really hard to provide for their family, but that doesn’t change the fact that fixing a decent meal really is hard for a lot of people. And the data supports that too. Like this isn’t just me. So as time goes on in America, people have gotten worse at cooking, they have stopped enjoying cooking as much, and their cooking skills have actually deteriorated. There was a 2017 Harvard business review study that polled people, asking them if they enjoyed cooking. 10% of respondents said that they loved it, which is like to me, criminally low. But I mean, I’ve surrounded myself with people who love cooking. However, 15 years ago, the answer was 15%. So in only a 15-year period of time, that amount of cooking enjoyment has dropped 33%, which to me is crazy. And the data goes deeper, right? There was a study done by a company called One Poll that found that 37% of people have felt judged by others for their cooking competency and it has discouraged them from getting in the kitchen because of it. And that to me is where this all comes full circle with people shaming others on the internet for their food regardless of whether it’s troll or not. Because like I said, this isn’t about SpaghettiO pie mom, this is how the world reacted to her. You may not like SpaghettiOs, and you may not think that there are nutritious choice, but if you were doing something that might influence someone to stop cooking, to stop getting in the kitchen, to stop experimenting and to associate food with shame, then you are doing like an actively bad thing. Stop it, bad. No. That’s how I talk to my cat. I go no, Pippin, no. And the other thing about shaming people about food is that it does not work. Like you can’t simply shame someone into having the time, the money, the resources or the cooking knowledge to make their kid like a, I don’t know, a farmer’s market Ratatouille every night. And after I read all these comments that were just taking absolute dookie bombs on the SpaghettiO pie, I started thinking about my own journey. So I came from a single parent household where 90% of our meals were either from the microwave or a fast food value menu. But I was also a latchkey kid, which meant that I sat in front of the TV for five hours every single day before my dad came home from work and I thank God for the one day that I flipped on the Food Network never flipped off. “Semi-Homemade” and “30 Minute Meals” were the best introduction I ever could have gotten to cooking because they both relied heavily on pre-made ingredients. Like canned beans, frozen French fries, tubes of pastry dough, shout out to Crescent rolls, because God they’re good. Because those are the types of things that just like matched my skill level at the time. And I mean, you look at Crescent rolls, right? Like they’re cheap, they’re delicious, they save you a heck of a lot of time, and they can probably make the cooking process easy enough to the point where you may even enjoy it. In an ideal world, we’d all be eating locally and sustainably and organically and baking our own beautiful long fermented sourdough loaves. And I truly hope that one day we can get there, but for now, the easiest thing you can do is not cast a burden of shame on someone who is simply doing the best with the tools that they’re given. I’m preachy. Am I always this preachy? Yeah? Good. All right, so I had a signature dish when I was 12 years old and calling it a signature dish is like a bit of an overstatement for what it is, but I called it mushroom risotto with spiced crepes. What I would do is I would take like a cup of minute rice and I’d microwave it, but here’s the trick, with a little bit of extra water, so that way you get a little bit of liquid pooling at the bottom, and then you take about a half brick of cream cheese and you throw that in there while it’s still hot and you mix it up, and you drain a can of mushrooms and you get that in there. Now for the spiced crepes. What I would do is I would take Bisquick pancake mix, but then I would add about a quarter cup of like a Louisiana hot sauce. And then I would simply shove my mushroom risotto in there and fold it up like a burrito. And I think about how, if I would have made a recipe video of that dish without any additional context I would have just been like shamed by thousands of internet trolls. I guess I count myself lucky that the only social media shaming I had to deal with in 2005 was being taken off someone’s MySpace top eight. Yeah. Ricky, I still remember that. Still hurts, man. And I also count myself very lucky that I had people around me encouraging me to keep going. Gnarly as the dish may have been, I should recreate this dish. Why are we not doing that at the end of this video? YouTube shorts, baby. And frankly, it was encouragement like that that led me to refine my craft because I began to associate cooking with pride instead of shame. And it made me look forward to every single day that I had the privilege of stepping foot in a kitchen, because I knew that meant that I could become a better cook than I was the day before. And I still try and bring that energy every single day. I get the pleasure of making myself a meal whether it’s at work or at home. And now I have a cookbook and I make menthol flavored Cheetos for all of you. You’re welcome. Like I know the cooking can be hard and stressful and I know it takes time and resources and knowledge and I wish it took a lot less of those things. But if your skill level is currently microwaving chicken nuggets, or dumping SpaghettiOs into a pie crust, there is nothing to be ashamed of. And that is the way the cookie crumbles. ADD working overdrive today, boys. Anyways, the point is just don’t be an A-hole to people on the internet. Also watching am episiotomy video. You’ll learn a lot. You’ll never want to have kids. To people who had kids, what a scary thought, I’m sorry. Anyways, that’s all I have to say about that. I reckon I drank me about 16 Dr. Peppers. Mama said they was my magic shoes. I was supposed to connect that to the outro, wasn’t I? Instead I started doing Forrest Gump. Thanks so much for stopping by the Mythical Kitchen. We’ve got new episodes for you every week. We’ve got new episodes of our podcast, A Hotdog is a Sandwich out wherever you get your podcasts. Hit us up on Instagram @MythicalKitchen with pictures of your mythical dishes. And no one will shame you for them under #dreamsbecomefood. See y’all next time. Yeah, I really did fail that class because I didn’t show up to the final because I wanted to watch a college basketball game instead. Not even in person, just like on TV. The team I was rooting for lost by 46 points. I was pretty sure we were going to get them with the upset, though. I failed human sexuality. The class was called human sexuality and I failed it. So now I have to go my whole life saying I failed human sexuality. In more ways than one. That got weird. See you. You can cook up your own feast while wearing the Mythical Kitchen apron, available now mythical.com.