In just two months, the Twitter account Gripping Food With Force has joined the hallowed ranks of the internet's greats, with its constant barrage of before-and-after photos of food being squeezed into an absurdist mess.
The premise is simple: in one picture, a pristine food; in the next, that same food gripped using a single hand, resulting in abject horror. Blue "Mermaid Sparkle" ice cream, for example, turns into a sticky-looking dribble inside a closed fist, while a steak cooked medium becomes a juicy, bovine stress ball. The photos are haunting, grotesque—and yet, somehow satisfying, like a manifestation of frustration being squeezed out.
Corey Mckittrick created the Twitter page in July with the goal of entertaining people.Two months and thousands of followers later, fans of the format now send Mckittrick more than 400 image submissions a day."I was very surprised when people started actually sending in their own," Mckittrick said. He likes having people submit their own work because it gives a peek into their world with every picture—and it ups the ante. "Then people started trying to out-do each other, adding to the creativity."
Gripping Food has been an undeniably quick hit, with at least 338,000 Twitter followers as of this writing.Each post generally earns between 10,000 and 30,000 likes—though some particularly visceral ones, like a bottle of chocolate milk that's been gripped so hard it sprays a stream of brown liquid, get likes in the hundreds of thousands. On Facebook, Gripping Food now has upwards of 283,000 followers, and on Instagram—where users often also rate the images on a scale of 1-10—it has more than 75,000. Mckittrick describes his pages as the "worst account" on these platforms.
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