The Stupid Food group was created all the way back in April 2015. In the nearly decade since then, the community has grown to a jaw-dropping 2.4 million food critics from all around the globe. The subreddit presents itself as a “place to lambast idiotic methods of serving food, or any other epicurean inanity worthy of ridicule.”

The group continues to be extremely popular to this very day and ranks among the top 1% of all subreddits by size. After all, who doesn’t enjoy being an armchair critic?

Food, aesthetics, and taste are all potentially very divisive topics. The moderators who are in charge of keeping the community running smoothly point out that Stupid Food is primarily meant for ridicule.

They do not care about how creative and artful the images are. “We're here to poke gentle fun at other people's creativity, and we do not care whether it is just or reasonable.”

When you’re not physically there at the table, eating the food, a huge part of the experience is missing. Namely, the taste, smell, texture, and mouthfeel.

You’re also missing out on the ambiance of the restaurant or fast-food place, which can affect your mood and expectations a lot. As can the staff and how they talk and serve you. When you post on Stupid Food, all you have to go by are the aesthetics, the plating, and the idea behind the dish.

A big reason why Stupid Food continues to be so active to this day is the level of quality everyone brings to the content. The moderators warn that you should stay on topic while posting photos.

For example, you shouldn’t be sharing images “featuring anything featuring idiotic, dangerous, and pointless eating ‘challenges’ such as the Tide Pod Challenge.” As a rule of thumb, photos related to these sorts of challenges are usually disliked, so they’re downvoted or ignored. Meanwhile, when it comes to recipes, you should only share them with the group if they’re actually stupid. In short, they need to stand out.

Redditor u/Clackpot, the founder of Stupid Food, previously told Bored Panda all about the community and shared their thoughts on pretentiousness and cooking. According to them, pretentious cooking and fancy food are not actually a binary choice. “Supremely wonderful food can also be sphincter-tighteningly precious, and I will cheerfully deride the pretension whilst also applauding the skill and imagination required,” they said.

“And really the pretension in food is about the creator, not the food itself nor the outcome. Consequently, although it is very difficult to define what makes food stupid, it's actually very easy to decide whether it is stupid or not, it's a subjective call which we are all equipped to make," the founder of the community told us earlier.

The founder revealed that they allowed the community to grow naturally. “Stupid Food is an entirely different creature to what I originally envisaged, but I've allowed it to grow in its own way and here we are. To be honest, I don't like the modern Stupid Food nearly as much as the thing I conceived but it has been fascinating to watch it grow and mature," they said about their perspective at the time.

For u/Clackpot, food is “highly subjective,” so making any absolute statements about it would be “unmitigated piffle.” They said that “literally every human being consumes food and we each have our own view, some of which will differ wildly from one another.”

From the founder’s perspective, pretentiousness ought to be confronted head-on and should “have its feet held to the fire of ridicule, it needs us to laugh in its face.” However, the customers are partly to blame for so many chefs going bonkers with their creations, too.

“For culinary pretension to work requires credulous individuals to buy into the conceit that, for example, dropping salt onto your steak via your elbow—lookin' atchoo Salt Bae—is somehow an improvement over a salt cellar or a grinder; that serving dishes directly onto tabletops and worktops gives them an indefinable je ne sais quoi which is simply not available from common-or-garden crockery; or that adding gold leaf to excessively expensive liquor effects some great improvement which is too subtle for the hoi polloi to understand. It is essentially a confidence trick,” they said.