A day later, on January 29, Australian blogger @cookingwithayeh decided to give the pasta a go. Her video’s reach outpaced her predecessors’ with more than 12.7 million views and is TikTok’s most-watched feta-pasta instructional (but not video overall—that honor goes to the ASMR version, which has more than 15 million views).
Whereas @cookingwithayen credits Jaward, Jaward gives a nod to another food blogger in her caption: MacKenzie Smith, or @grilledcheesesocial. Smith’s version, posted on January 28, has around three million views.
So, if you’re looking for TikTok zero in the global feta-pasta phenomenon, it’s Smith’s. She first posted the recipe to her blog in 2019. “It was pretty popular,” she says, “but it only really took off at the beginning of quarantine.” Soon enough, it was her most-viewed blog post. So when Smith joined TikTok in January 2021, doing a feta-pasta video was a no-brainer. Within 24 hours, it had a million views. Over the next few days, Smith’s 200 followers turned into 40,000.
However, despite her social-media mastery, Smith isn’t the original creator of the pasta. If you look at her video, she tags two Finnish food bloggers: @liemessa, or Jenni Häyrinen, and @tiupiret, or Tiiu Puranen.
Two years ago, in the midst of a brutal Finnish winter, Häyrinen was hungry. She craved some cozy baked feta, but a straight block of cheese wasn’t exactly a balanced meal. So she added some tomatoes, made it into a pasta sauce, and mixed in some noodles. Afterward, Häyrinen posted her creation to her blog and her Instagram with the hashtag #uunifetapasta. “Right away it started to go viral,” she says. “Within a few weeks, everyone in Finland was cooking it.” (That’s only a slight exaggeration—Häyrinen says the original blog post got more than three million views. Finland’s population is 5.5 million.) Unifetapasta was not without its creator controversy. The recipe was similar to a spaghetti made in 2018 by Puranen, who maintains hers is the original feta-pasta recipe (hence the dual tag in @grilledcheesesocial’s posts).
Smith found out about the #uunifetapasta from a Finnish friend—and, after some translation help, posted it to her own blog in June 2019 while linking back to Häyrinen’s.
How does Häyrinen feel about her creation going crazy again two years later—but this time not from her own account? “I feel like I do get credit, although not all the time,” she says. But she realizes how the origins of a thing can get lost when it’s shared and reshared millions of times. “I understand if people see the recipe on TikTok, they tag the person they are following.”
The Link LonkMarch 02, 2021 at 04:16AM
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What Makes a Food Go Viral? Inside the Explosive Popularity of TikTok’s Feta Pasta - Vogue
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