Love Bite: The Lemony Garlicky Miso Gochujang Brown Butter Internet

Words: Lauren O’Neill

Considering that the lemony garlicky miso gochujang brown butter recipe meme has hit the internet harder than a Greggs’ sausage roll colliding with my stomach lining on a hangover, I would be remiss if I didn’t dedicate a Love Bite to it, considering how much it has entertained me over the past few weeks.

For the uninitiated (i.e. those of you who don’t spend your every waking minute looking at and saving Reels of recipes that you will absolutely never make) the lemony garlicky miso brown butter gochujang meme – heretofore: LGMBBGM – is basically a satirisation of a certain strain of online food culture, whereby certain ingredients have become especially hypey among a certain type of person who shops at overpriced delis, uses the NYT Cooking app, and generally lets the internet make their lifestyle decisions. The meme is now so pervasive that the NYT Cooking team actually created a pasta recipe which includes lemon, garlic, miso, brown butter, and gochujang all together, which of course means that very soon, you will barely ever hear of it again. 

Essentially, ingredients like miso (a fermented soybean paste which adds umami flavour, typical in Japanese cooking), gochujang (a Korean chilli paste) and brown butter (literally just butter burned a tiny bit in the pan to give it a deeper, richer flavour) have all been befallen by the same fate, which is basically that they’ve been massively overused in online recipes. This, in fairness, is largely because they’re all delicious, strong flavours which add a lot to dishes. There are other buzzword ingredients like them, too: hot honey, chilli crisp… the list goes on.  
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Overall, this meme is kind of poking at the way that the internet tends to interact with food culture. On one hand, the internet is a great leveller, and it helps us to access cultures – and, in the specific context of food, cuisines, ingredients and recipes – that we would otherwise have no idea about, which is of course a wonderful thing. It’s a big part of how we now discover new flavours: the likely reason for my favourite miso white chocolate cookie at Créme in London, and for the revelation that is gochujang and sausage pasta.

In other ways, however, the internet can be a bit of a flattener, and because of the specific ways in which these items have been repurposed – chilli crisp and gochujang pastas in slick influencer videos about Easy Weeknight Dinners, for example – as I mentioned, they kind of feel like they’ve become trends associated with a certain kind of city-dwelling millennial or gen z person: works in PR or advertising or design, drinks martinis kind of performatively, carries a Baggu, wears Adidas trainers, and maybe has a nervous little dog. Maybe I’m talking about you here, because I’m certainly at least partly talking about myself. 

“We’re so short on subculture that we’re tying our personalities to jars of chilli oil instead of bands or art or whatever, and perhaps the capitalistic internet is now so pervasive that it touches”

I’m not really necessarily saying that any of this is entirely bad. Obviously appropriation without appreciation of context is shit, but in general, new combinations on our plates can be really interesting and exciting. I think what is more especially funny and odd about the the fact that these recipe ingredients have proliferated so hard and at such pace – in the same way that a brand of olives came to define an entire area of east London – is that we’re at a point on the internet that everything is now so commodified and heavy with meaning, that even making some lemony cod for your dinner is, in some ways, part of an entire highly curated lifestyle. 

Why and how has this happened? Maybe it has always been this way – food trends have long been a thing. We’ve all seen the 70s recipe books featuring many obscenities with eggs, and maybe eaten cheese and pineapples on sticks at kids’ parties in the 90s and 2000s (maybe I’m just old though). Maybe it goes deeper, though: perhaps we’re so short on subculture that we’re tying our personalities to jars of chilli oil instead of bands or art or whatever, and perhaps the capitalistic internet is now so pervasive that it touches literally every area of its users’ lives, all the way down to what we cook for our Tuesday depression meals. 

It’s important to remember that media has always influenced what people cook (think about TV chefs, or recipes in newspapers), and that ingredients always go through phases of trendiness, so there’s an element of this that really isn’t that deep. But on the other hand, the lemony garlicky miso gochujang meme is kind of a fascinating window into what the internet deems cool, the way it divorces things from their original contexts and drives them towards new meanings, and, crucially, how it internet entirely now shapes many people’s lifestyles to every degree.