A kid reaches for a Tide Pod. Photo: Tide

Tide Pods contain detergent. For washing your clothes and your sheets. Not for eating. Doesn’t matter how much they look like a snack, or a candy, or an oversize Gushers. You shouldn’t eat them unless you’d like to, well, potentially die. A child might not know better, so you should probably keep them out of reach of little hands — these things have killed before — for safety. (Or just buy some boring, cheaper, non-pod detergent. It works better anyway.) If you, after all of this, are still looking at a Tide Pod and thinking, Maybe just a little bit … you definitely shouldn’t go on Twitter today. Tide Pod–eating, a long-running internet joke, has reached something of a fever pitch this December.

someone: were you just eating a tide pod ?

me: pic.twitter.com/SOLTaegBnx — fat bully (@ricardojkay) December 25, 2017

I thought y’all were so weird for talking about eating Tide pods but now I been thinking about how weird it is for so long that now I’m thinking it might not be weird and I wanna eat one too what is this — h (@halsey) December 28, 2017

┏┓

┃┃╱╲ in

┃╱╱╲╲ this

╱╱╭╮╲╲house

▔▏┗┛▕▔ we

╱▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔╲

eat tide pods

╱╱┏┳┓╭╮┏┳┓ ╲╲

▔▏┗┻┛┃┃┗┻┛▕▔ — rosie mcmahon (@rosiemcmahon_) December 27, 2017

Vincent van Gogh used to eat Tide pods because he wanted happiness inside him — salman rushdie (@elkalumpy) December 27, 2017

when the tide pod hits in pic.twitter.com/PgycdouooQ — riley || 46 (@babypetalwt) December 28, 2017

tide pods

-satisfying gush

-amazing mouth feel

-pretty colors

-delicious smell pic.twitter.com/EFlFSnScSq — morg ☂︎ (@fevervinyI) December 28, 2017

The earliest origins of the Tide Pods–as–food bit date back to an internet forum in 2013, according to Know Your Meme. The topic of said forum, however, was less about Tide Pods as a delicious snack and more about old people and kids accidentally eating them. In the years following, sites like CollegeHumor and the Onion both created content around the idea of edible laundry pods. See here: “Don’t Eat the Laundry Pods” from last March. Communities of people — on Twitter and Reddit — have since become very into talking about eating, or how badly they want to eat, Tide Pods. (I’m assuming that very few to none make good on these conversations, given the whole Tide Pods are poison thing.)

This December, there have been a number of viral tweets about Tide Pod–consumption that seem likely to have been the impetus for the detergent renaissance this week. The most important being a person who tweeted at Gushers on the day after Christmas with something “very important” to tell them. They sent a DM asking if Gushers would consider making a fruit snack shaped like a Tide Pod — which is a great idea if you ask me — so all of the would-be Tide Pod–munchers could satisfy their pod hunger. Gushers blocked the user after receiving the DM.

i really tried and died for the cause pic.twitter.com/WxtF27BMjP — ari (@wasteIandbaby) December 27, 2017

me when i see tide pods at my friends house pic.twitter.com/QzqaH8ggE3 — fat bully (@ricardojkay) December 23, 2017

anyone: are u eating those tide pod detergents

me:

https://t.co/NXNQZ4628M — sarah (@artdisease) December 22, 2017

no more eating xanax in 2018 we eating tide pods from now on — alex (@mineifiwildout) December 9, 2017

If anybody knows a gummy company looking for a hot new product, I think we might be onto something here. And again … don’t eat the dang Tide Pods. Though if you do, please have somebody film you and send us the video.