It's time to retire the cheese pull

Mashable bites into a creamy, nutty, gooey, and sometimes stinky world during our first-ever Cheese Week.

Cheese, in all its melty, salty, indigestion-inducing goodness, will probably always be a mainstay online. Lactose intolerance memes alone will make sure of that. But the kind of cheese that rules the internet is changing. And the cheese pull's gotta go.

Even if you don't know the term, you've definitely seen a cheese pull at some point. It's that mouthwatering string of mozzarella that stretches from a slice of pizza when you pull it from the pie, or the gooey strands between two separating halves of a grilled cheese sandwich. It's the star of every single Domino's commercial, thousands of Instagram posts, and quite a few of BuzzFeed's Tasty videos. But here's the trouble with cheese pulls: They're not grounded in reality.

While it's long been an effective advertising tool, the cheese pull rose to internet ubiquity in the mid 2010s — a particularly cheesy era for viral food. At the time, mainstream food content was focused firmly on the larger-than-life: the bigger, gooier, and more colorful, the better. (Think rainbow grilled cheese, pizza cake, bacon-cheddar-ranch everything.) This genre is connected to what The Hairpin termed snackwave: the internet phenomenon through which liking junk food became, particularly for women, a common online personality.

Gaining steam on Tumblr and spurred by (conventionally attractive) junk food lovers like Rory Gilmore and Liz Lemon, the internet's snack obsession was eventually co-opted by brands and viral media companies, who then filled our feeds with increasingly over-the-top, often shoehorned-in "food trends." That's how we got unicorn food. Rainbow food. That grotesque cheese-filled bun that seems designed to blister the roof of your mouth. And, from the seemingly never-ending stream of Tasty videos to the #cheesepull hashtag on Instagram, the cheese pull became part of the internet's daily diet.

But like a wheel of Double Gloucester rolling down Cooper's Hill, the cheese pull got away from us. As more cheese pull videos appeared, the landscape became increasingly saturated, with publishers competing to publish the gooiest, greasiest cheese pulls out there. Today, a previously appetizing genre has morphed into a disturbingly exaggerated version of itself, one that doesn't reflect food that's even appealing to eat. 

Is it nice to eat a salty, cheesy slice of pizza? Yes. Would it be nice to eat a damp, soft slice of pizza groaning under the weight of its own enormous, slick, and rapidly congealing slab of three-cheese blend? No. Would you even be able to pick up that slice of pizza? No. Would you be forced to eat the pizza with a knife and fork, thereby breaking the only important pizza rule? Yes. What a mess this would be! And yet it's this very type of cheese excess that defines the current cheese pull landscape. It's not about how delicious cheese can be — it's all about aesthetics.

Journalist Bettina Makalintal spoke to this problem in a story for Vice earlier this year. "Cheese pulls are active acts of manipulation trying to sucker your neurons into wanting something that probably won’t taste as good as it looks," she wrote. "And now we’ve taken that concept so far past the point of diminishing returns that even the visuals are, frankly, kind of gross."

It's true. Taken to the extreme, cheese pulls can be really gross. And — for some people, at least — they're divorced from the idea of edible cheese almost entirely. When I look at a cheese pull on Instagram, I don't really think of cheese. I think of creaminess, thickness, heat: ideas that are associated with cheese, but not necessarily vital to the cheese experience. 

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I spoke with several cheese aficionados who expressed similar sentiments. Writer Hayley Schueneman, who is a self-proclaimed cheese lover, described extreme cheese pull videos as "weird" and "twisted." 

"It's a reminder that maybe we shouldn't be eating something that stretches like that," she said.

Journalist Maya Kosoff has a similar opinion of the cheese pull genre. She explained via Twitter DM that while she "unequivocally love[s] cheese" and is not lactose intolerant, she finds cheese pulls nearly impossible to look at. 

"Honestly before Viral Food Video was a thing, cheese pulls didn't even initially bother me! HOWEVER, in 2017 I saw a video that changed my life forever," she said.

This video featured a classic of the grotesque cheese pull genre: New Jersey restaurant Tony Boloney's rainbow mozzarella sticks. The appetizers, which were originally called "unicorn blood" mozzarella sticks (remember the bizarre unicorn trend of 2017?), are filled with cheese dyed with "dehydrated fruits like beets, carrots, strawberries, spinach, and blueberries," according to an INSIDER video. The results are tubes of bright red, blue, green, and yellow mozzarella that, while ostensibly unaltered in flavor, do not look like cheese at all.

"Something about the way the colored cheese looked oozing out of a deep-fried crust, all of these unnatural colors, made my stomach turn, and it totally colored how I think about cheese pulls now," Kosoff said.

Of course, keeping a restaurant afloat is no easy feat, and it's understandable that businesses capitalize on viral trends in order to strengthen their online footprint. But cheese pulls aren't marketing a food; they're marketing the idea that being visually overwhelmed is inherently positive. As Makalintal pointed out, "the problem with Big Cheese Pull is that it's just bait to make you buy things."

But if not the cheese pull, what does the next wave of online cheese look like? For one thing, it'll probably be more cooking-focused. Many millennials, in particular, aren't just looking for outright decadence in their food content. Burned out and searching for meaning and stability in life, it makes sense they'd be interested in making things. 

And Gen Z is showing more than a passing interest in cooking their own food, or at least an interest in wholesome, balanced eating. According to one study from the NPD Group, a market research company, Gen Z's top source for recipes is social media.

There's plenty to find. Homemade cheese plates, for instance, are becoming increasingly common on Instagram, with influencers like Marissa Mullen providing guidance for the masses. In an interview with Vox's The Goods, Mullen said she considers making cheese plates a form of self care: "[It's] therapeutic; you have to be in a calm space, put on music, have some natural light in your apartment. It’s like painting: You’re building a cheese plate, and it comes together, and it’s so bright and beautiful," she said.

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Artistry? Process? The thrill of sharing one's creation? A cheese pull could never.

Christina Orlando, a publicity coordinator and writer who makes cheese plates as a hobby, appreciates the activity as both a creative outlet and an opportunity to learn.

"I’m very attracted to the art of the cheese board — fruit, nut, and wine pairings, how the cheese selections balance each other, and of course the aesthetic aspect of it," they explained via Twitter DM. "I’ve always loved cheese. I’m always trying new varieties, but I also love the way a cheese board acts as part of the meal or event. It’s a great way of bringing people around a table."

"I'm always saving photos from Instagram for new ideas," they added.

Also on the rise: viral recipes, which inspire hundreds of users to make a dish and share what they've made on Instagram. Recipes like Alison Roman's chickpea stew ("The Stew") or her chocolate chunk shortbread cookies ("The Cookies") permeate Instagram Stories for days, even weeks, after they go viral. Roman herself will often repost people's creations to her own account, and it's always a nice moment of community online: Disparate people gleefully sharing their own variations on a recipe.

It's rare for cheesy recipes to go viral in this way (though I did see a whole lot of people post Bon Appétit's adult mac and cheese). If and when we do see more of them, I suspect we won't see a grid full of exaggerated cheese pulls. After all, people are actually going to eat these dishes themselves — probably in normal-sized servings and for multiple meals. They spent time, energy, and brainpower making them. They don't just need them to look good; they need them to taste good, and to be nourishing. Maybe they'll even be a dish to gather around with friends. 

You know, all the things that are wonderful about food.

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