Cheese Puff Culture

By Sammi Gale

I like eating all kinds of cheese puffs. They don’t pique my loathsomeness much as they’re just aerated packing material, a deniable foodstuff at the far end of edible. I eat cheese puffs with an urgency that from the outside looks like mechanical efficiency but isn’t it’s just noise in me, it’s squirming almost nothing perhaps pleasure’s dust there’s nothing to it.

— Ed Atkins, Flowers (2025)

When did culture get so cheese puff?

Pouring into our social media troughs – I mean feeds – are cats playing violins, erotic tractors, Lord of the Rings disco mash ups, Trump in the Star Wars universe, wolves in hoodies staring moodily at neon moons, babies with adult eyes laughing at salads. Slop – crowned 2025’s Word of the Year by Merriam-Webster – is everywhere. Defined as 'digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence', a recent study from Kapwing found that more than 20% of videos shown to new YouTube users are slop. What’s more, the popularity of slop channels – such as South Korea’s Three Minutes Wisdom and India’s Bandar Apna Dost, which have each reached over 2 billion views – prove that we’re more than happy to roll around in the muck.

Of course, this process of ‘enshittification’ (Macquarie Dictionary's 2024 Word of the Year, no less) has been going on for some time. Big tech monopolies have always incentivised shiny but soft-rotting content in pursuit of profit, but with the AI boom, content creators are turning into mass engagement farmers. Ick. Never before have we devoured so much culture, nor has it left us feeling so empty.

This feeling of excess and depletion is something Atkins has been circling for years. His Tate Britain retrospective last year included a Whopper-ad style sandwich assembly: digitally rendered lettuce, ham, tomato tumbles in slo-mo between pieces of white plastic bread, followed by some rubber baby dolls, brown slop, a union jack, more slop. The slop has a sheen to it, a food porn trope designed to make a product look irresistible, only here it screams Uncanny Valley.

That delicious, depressing feeling is becoming all too familiar. As slop becomes normalised, sloshing around in ever greater quantities, we face a choice: sink narcotised into the enshitocene, or learn to swim — alongside a million blonde Jesuses fused with crustaceans. True to form, artists are some of the first to get their beaks wet on the subject; whether it is possible to ‘détourne’ – reroute, criticise – slop without simply reproducing it is debatable. Nonetheless, critics Brian Droitcour and Aimee Walleston both list digital artists running up that sloppery slope. Meanwhile, paintings in the mode of Thomas Harker, Chloe Wise, Issy Wood seem to be everywhere: the mood is: loose post-consumerist gothic obsessed with simulation, gloss, and exhaustion: who cares if the big tech overlords are mining us for our attention, we’re painting our nails and disassociating so there’s none left. At the same time, other creatives in their hundreds are signing open letters against AI theft. Though I fear where theft is concerned the toothpaste is already out of the tube.

Not everyone is feeling so doom and gloom: Mr Wonderful, of America’s Shark Tank, is positively sloptimistic, insisting we are living through ‘a global renaissance’: ‘art, music, storytelling, filmmaking, and editing are thriving like never before', he tweeted. 'Why? Social media has made creativity the most valuable currency for businesses of all sizes. If you’re an artist, this is your moment.' 

Trend forecaster Sean Monahan checks our moral panic too, reminding us that Socrates once worried writing itself would implant forgetfulness into the soul. He also quotes the inventor of Corn Flakes, Dr John Harvey Kellogg, who insisted that reading fiction was ‘one of the most pernicious habits,’ as addictive as liquor or opium.

But as much as fears of cultural decline have always been with us, this particular moment leaves an especially cesspitty taste. Beyond the profits flowing to our feudal tech overlords, slop has a distinct ideological flavour. Even without the actual White House dropping it – the ‘King Trump’ propaganda of October 2025, anyone? – as Brian Phillips has written, ‘Slop is the house style of both right-wing populism and tech oligarchy.’ It thrives on flattening, on exhaustion, on reducing complexity to vibes and sheen.

Indeed, beyond the algorithm and the gallery, there are signs that more and more of daily life itself has been enshittified. Fast-fashion brands systematically use data to dupe designs from independent makers. Much reality TV feels like watching people soft-launch influencer careers. St George’s Crosses and Union Jacks flutter limply across British streets under 'Operation Raise the Colours,' like an ugly Facebook comments argument fly-posted onto public infrastructure. A recent BBC documentary on the manosphere found men coaching other men on how to coach men: a multi-level-marketing scheme of masculinity. Meanwhile, Britain ranks among the poorest countries for 'human flourishing.'

Forget the metaphors, slop is literally what we feed our children. Supermarkets are full of ultra-processed, dissolve-in-the-mouth snack foods that mimic Cheetos while claiming to be healthy. Some infants are now reported not to have learned how to chew properly, thanks to this early diet of dissolving puffs and pap, with speech delays linked to those under-developed muscles. Into the mouths of babes, and their eyes too: if we’re not careful, a slop-fed generation will rise up with no experience of chewing at all.

Adorno and Horkheimer thought films and TV would stupefy us into submission; while the jury’s still out there, it’s hard to shake the suspicion that AI slop is here to fulfil their lofty prophecy once and for all. As we mukbang ourselves into sloppy oblivion, there’s a risk that we forget how to bite—intellectually speaking. Anyway, that’s enough to chew on for now – pass the Christ scampi.