Controversial food trend: milk tea mixed with shrimp paste, pearl beef noodles

Toxic in both nutrition and culinary culture, the horrifying combinations of shrimp paste milk tea, fish sauce coffee, beef noodles with tapioca pearls... take people back to the time of eating hair and living in caves.

No matter how creative and unique, culinary culture must always aim for harmony in both flavor and nutrition, meaning it must always satisfy two factors: delicious and good for health. However, recently, the strange combination of foods to create dishes that "just hearing the name makes you want to get sick" has become a trend.

Shrimp paste milk tea, fish sauce coffee, pork leg lemon tea, seafood instant noodle milk tea, fresh cream beef noodle soup, dried fish milk tea, beef pearl milk tea noodles, century egg coffee... This series of bizarre recipes was once a popular keyword on social networks with a series of videos following.

Especially the beef pearl milk tea noodles, inspired by the famous milk hotpot of Taiwan (China), beef pearl milk tea noodles have a broth made from stewed bones and fresh milk, combined with black tea. When enjoying, diners will find the broth has a tea aroma, rich and fatty.

Many young people, especially Gen Z (those born between 1997 and 2012), came to experience the new noodle dish because they found it strange and curious. Netizens were discussing it, some praised it as having a strange taste, others said it was hard to swallow, making her even more curious.

"The broth is rich, more sweet than salty, the tapioca pearls are chewy and bland, the beef is soft, and the noodles are a bit hard. When eaten together, the ingredients of the bowl of noodles do not blend together and are hard to swallow, but because I feel sorry for the money, I tried my best to finish half the bowl," a diner shared.

Even the most crazy trend followers know that no one can tolerate those dishes; but the fact is that the more horrifying the dish, the more bizarre the combination, the more likely it is to go viral and become a "hot trend". When they become hot keywords, Youtubers and TikTokers will compete to film clips to try them so as not to be considered behind the times.

In the past, the online community has experienced countless "fever" that blooms and fades quickly. Everyone understands that it is just a trick of brands, restaurants, cafes, and "content creators" who take advantage of netizens' tendency to follow suit to attract views or promote their establishments. Many Youtubers and TikTokers know that it is nonsense content but still follow it because they do not want to miss the opportunity to gain views.

Unpalatable dishes like milk tea with shrimp paste do not meet any of these criteria. This is even an intentional attempt to drag human culinary level back to the cave-dwelling era, intentionally distorting tastes, promoting harmful eating habits that not only affect health but also damage people's aesthetic thinking and ability to perceive healthily.

Civilized and knowledgeable internet users, please do not turn yourself into sheep led by such nonsense "trends". Do not make useless clips that you yourself see as bringing no benefit to yourself or society just because it is a "trend". As long as each internet user is aware of their responsibility in creating clean content, nonsense will not have the chance to become a trend.

And we cannot ignore the responsibility of managers for the formation and development of useless and toxic trends on social networking platforms.

The "rise" of dishes like shrimp paste combined with milk tea, even if it is fleeting, is a manifestation of unhealthiness not only in terms of food safety, culinary culture but also in terms of aesthetics, lifestyle, and the way people accept new values... This should not happen in a society with a high level of civilization.