Created back in early 2018, the ‘Cursed Food’ page currently boasts 427k followers and 333k likes on Facebook. We’ve reached out to the team running the page for comment, and we’ll update the article as soon as we hear back from them.

If you want your content and jokes to go viral, a good rule of thumb is to make what you share as relatable as possible. And humor helps, too! Something that resonates with your audience—to a greater or lesser degree—is going to fare far better than content that is too niche. And memes, by definition, are meant to go viral. So, you have to look for ways to stand out and connect with the people on the other side of the screen, who are flooded with information and have diminished attention spans.

Some topics are so fundamental that they’re easier for internet users to relate to than others, like food, work, relationships, parenting, animals, etc. However, if you try to cover too many different types of memes all at once, you might alienate some people because they don’t know what to expect from you.

On the other hand, when you carve out a niche for your content and stick to it, most people then know what they’re in for. With a name like ‘Cursed Food,’ you pretty much know that you’ll get bizarre (and potentially slightly disturbing) posts.

Another core part of virality lies in your strategy when it comes to posting your content. Sure, you can share them whenever you feel like it, but when your page starts growing and you suddenly have hundreds of thousands and even millions of fans, you might need to reconsider your approach.

To put it simply, consistency, predictability, and reliability are good things.

Whether you’re posting your content a few times each hour, once a day, or once a week doesn’t matter as much as the fact that you stick to your schedule. This way, you show you’re trustworthy. And your fans know when to check in for your latest posts.

When your social media project gets big, you may want to consider putting together a team to help you manage everything. And you should also invest some time in interacting with your followers to build a genuine community.

Whether you’re resharing memes you found elsewhere on the internet or cooking up your own original content, you really need to think about how they look in the context of all the other talented social media creators out there. How exactly are you standing out from the crowd?

Ideally, you want the format of your posts to match the content. For example, many meme pages should focus on using high-quality images, easily readable fonts, and snappy, to-the-point captions.

But, for instance, if you focus on bizarre and slightly random content, you can let the format of your memes be a bit weirder, wilder, and more experimental. It just fits the theme.

As we’ve mentioned before, food is a core part of human life. But it’s not definitely clear when exactly our ancestors started deliberately cooking food.

Reporting on a recent study published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, CNN notes that the shift from “eating raw to cooked food was a dramatic turning point in human evolution.” Prehistoric humans were able to deliberately make fires to cook food at least 780,000 years ago.

Dr. Irit Zohar, from Tell Aviv University’s Steinhardt Museum of Natural History, said that the detailed study of fish teeth unearthed on the edge of Lake Hula at the Gesher Benot Ya’aqov site suggests that (likely) Homo erectus were able to cook fish.

“This is an incredibly important discovery. Evidence for the controlled use of fire in the (early Stone Age) … is ephemeral at best, and as such, the evidence of anthropogenically (because of human activity) accumulated and cooked fish remains described here will undoubtedly have a wide impact on the research community” archaeological geochemist Dr. Bethan Linscott from the University of Oxford commented on the findings.

“Diet has had a big impact on the evolution of our species. It has been suggested that the consumption of meat in particular contributed to the increase in relative brain size of our early Homo ancestors—but pathogenic bacteria make the consumption of uncooked meat a risky business,” Linscott explained.

“Cooking, however, kills bacteria and increases the energetic value of meat—thereby creating a new, reliable food source for early hominins. Understanding when this happened is therefore a topic of great interest because it might help to explain why our hominin ancestors evolved the way that they did.”

Meanwhile, John McNabb, a professor at the Centre for the Archaeology of Human Origins at the University of Southampton, told CNN that “When and where deliberately set and controlled fire first appeared, and when we began to cook our food, are two of the really big questions that researchers into human origins have long sought answers for.”

“Fire is not just about safety and protection. It prolongs the working day and provides a really important mechanism for social bonding—we literally built our societies around our fires. Cooking opens up new dietary opportunities and brings new foodstuffs online, as well as increasing the nutritious potential of what we eat. Cooking was the reason Homo erectus was able to move into strange new territories,” McNabb said.

What’s your relationship with food-related online content like? Do food memes make you hungry, and if so, what snacks do you usually go for? How much weirdness do you usually prefer in your memes?

If you have a spare moment, we’d love to hear from you. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.