The Mouth rages against viral TikTok butter board food trend

Why do seemingly functional adults spread butter all over things and then put it on social media? The Mouth rages against the viral butter board trend with a simple plea: Don’t. Do. It.

No restaurant this week, dear reader, because frankly as food-loving people we all need to be sent to our rooms and have a good hard think about what we’ve done.

I know this smacks of collective punishment, like when the whisky-soaked Jesuit disciplinarian at our high school would give the whole school detention whenever he found cigarette butts in the girls’ locker room.

What he was doing in the girls’ locker room may be a question for another time.

But seriously, people, it has come to our attention that some of you – not all, I know, but some – have been dabbling in “butter boards”.

Look, we thought this was a piss-take when one first showed up in our social media feeds.

Yet it seems that it is now a verified “thing” among young rising professionals to daub globs of softened butter all over a cutting board or a slab of rock or a paving brick, and then top it with all sorts of other nonsense.

Butter boards. Stop this, now.

And here’s the kicker: People who engage in this perversion then invite their friends around to eat this muck, presumably by dragging their fingers or hunks of bread through it.

We wish we were making this up but the “trend” (Lord help us) has been covered by no less an august institution as The New York Times, which must make it official.

Yet another version of a butter board on TikTok.

The butter board trend needs to stop. Picture: TikTok

As if to prove that TikTok’s Chinese owners really are conspiring to dumb the West down and out of any rivalry for the 21st century, the social media service’s algorithms are pumping out videos of people engaging in this behaviour all over the internet.

One of the worst versions of this we saw involved not butter but cream cheese, which was smeared all over some surface and topped with smoked salmon and capers and red onions and all that sort of gear.

Hello? Why not just put this all on a damn bagel in the first place.

As they say in Yiddish, meshugenah.

A couple of thoughts on this.

One, this is just a continuation of the similarly hellacious practice – at least a decade old – of restaurants forgoing plates for various flat surfaces and novelty baskets and the like.

And two, the whole idea strikes this column as infantile in the extreme.

Smearing food all over your eating surface is what toddlers do in high chairs, not what we do when we are adults with leases and mortgages and jobs and poodle crosses.

It is ironic that a culture that keeps trying to introduce sex and sexuality to kids at ever-younger ages in the name of “inclusion” is also encouraging grown-ups to eat like children.

Stop it.

Class dismissed.