I think some chili makes a difference, and I recommend to use it.”Īnd, if you’re interested-here’s Häyrinen’s original recipe.I try to avoid social media food trends, but my spouse, recovering from cancer, has a lot of time on his hands. “The most common version is pretty close to the original but is missing chili. But, if you scroll past the #fetapasta and decide to make it for yourself, she does have one request. “The phenomenon has grown so big that it’s out of my hands, really,” she says. Häyrinen has accepted that her #uunifetapasta is now the #fetapasta. (Taylor Lorenz of The New York Times notably explored this concept when she tracked down Jalaiah Harmon, the 14-year-old creator of TikTok’s famous Renegade dance, who was overshadowed by the trend’s more high-profile performers.) When there are thousands of spin-off videos floating around, it can be hard to find which one was the exact For You page powder keg. But as ideas amplify, sometimes their origins fall into anonymity-even if creators do their best to tag the original maker. Everyone does the same dance, spoofs the same song, stitches the same clip- What’s a video that lives in your head rent free? And that’s precisely what makes it so fun it can feel like a giant inside joke you’re in on (which is saying something because most social media makes us feel like shit).

It’s an app that thrives on trends: not just starting them but joining them. The recipe was similar to a spaghetti made in 2018 by Puranen, who maintains hers is the original feta-pasta recipe (hence the dual tag in posts). Finland’s population is 5.5 million.) Unifetapasta was not without its creator controversy. “Within a few weeks, everyone in Finland was cooking it.” (That’s only a slight exaggeration-Häyrinen says the original blog post got more than three million views. “Right away it started to go viral,” she says. Afterward, Häyrinen posted her creation to her blog and her Instagram with the hashtag #uunifetapasta. So she added some tomatoes, made it into a pasta sauce, and mixed in some noodles.

She craved some cozy baked feta, but a straight block of cheese wasn’t exactly a balanced meal. Two years ago, in the midst of a brutal Finnish winter, Häyrinen was hungry. If you look at her video, she tags two Finnish food bloggers: or Jenni Häyrinen, and or Tiiu Puranen. However, despite her social-media mastery, Smith isn’t the original creator of the pasta. Over the next few days, Smith’s 200 followers turned into 40,000. So when Smith joined TikTok in January 2021, doing a feta-pasta video was a no-brainer. “It was pretty popular,” she says, “but it only really took off at the beginning of quarantine.” Soon enough, it was her most-viewed blog post. She first posted the recipe to her blog in 2019. So, if you’re looking for TikTok zero in the global feta-pasta phenomenon, it’s Smith’s. Whereas credits Jawad, Jawad gives a nod to another food blogger in her caption: MacKenzie Smith, or Smith’s version, posted on January 28, has around three million views. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from. “In my eight years of food blogging, I’ve never seen one recipe remade as much in such a short amount of time.”

But nothing, she says, compares to the feta pasta’s reaction: “The views, likes, and comments are always a huge indicator that something is going viral, but this one felt different than everything else that had gone viral before because of the number of people remaking the recipe,” she says. Since then, it’s racked up a staggering 11.2 million views. Weiss and Joseph can’t remember what video, exactly, they made the pasta from, but there’s a good chance it was from Yumna Jawad, or Jawad posted her feta-pasta rendition on January 28. A TikTok spokesperson told Vogue that they believe the pasta’s power lies in its unpretentiousness: “It’s a trend that is easy to enjoy and take part in.” Quoting another TikTok icon from Ratatouille, Chef Gusteau, they added, “Anyone can cook.”) There’s also way less pretense on that platform and more room for creativity, whereas on Instagram it feels like every influencer/brand is trying their best to beat the algorithm,” he says. You don’t have to have a million followers for your content to go viral. “TikTok, at its core, feels like the most democratized platform right now. But many of the videos he scrolled past were by amateurs, cooking it up in a normal kitchen with Pyrex baking dishes. Sure, there were some stylized versions from full-time food bloggers. Joseph, a senior social-media manager for digital marketing agency Beekman Social, also found the feta-pasta content on his feed rather refreshing.

Tik tok feta pasta trend