Why is the internet so obsessed with crab rangoon? How and why cyclical food memes will never die
“What is up with the crab rangoon meme?” a Reddit post from 2019 asks. “Everywhere I look there’s a crab rangoon meme.”
Not every meme’s origins can be pinpointed with a neat explanation or storyline, and a lot of memes, frankly, don’t make any sense, but crab rangoon memes have been around for years, and are still evolving into new memes to this day. The prevalence of crab rangoon in internet culture is a sign of a larger, more universal joke than most trends can achieve.
To understand why people are talking about eating crab rangoons to stave off crying episodes or listing them as one of the reasons to be alive, the snack’s weird history and the early internet’s obsession with bacon play a major role.
Where does crab rangoon even come from?
Crab rangoons, sometimes called crab puffs, are a combination of imitation crab meat, cream cheese and seasonings wrapped up in a fried wonton. A reporter for Atlas Obscura ran a poll on X, formerly known as Twitter, and concluded from 650 participants from all over the U.S. that crab rangoon is cooked in such a consistent way throughout Chinese American restaurants that, despite no ties between the local Chinese takeout spots the X users said they ordered from, they all taste and look the same no matter where you go.
The origins of the dish come from multiple cuisines. It’s not necessarily inauthentic Chinese food, although it’s not considered traditional Chinese food either. There are elements from Chinese American cuisine, which was developed in the 1910s, as well as some Polynesian influence from post-World War II America in the 1940s, with a touch of Japanese influence seen in the use of imitation crab.
Why do people think crab rangoon is funny enough to meme?
According to Zach Sweat, the managing editor at Know Your Meme, the internet’s go-to database for meme origins and explanations, there are a couple of reasons why the general internet public would gravitate toward crab rangoons as a joke.
“For one, they’re commonly found at just about any Americanized Chinese restaurant, so most people are familiar with them, which helps them have mass appeal and recognition,” he explained to In The Know by Yahoo. “Second, they kind of have a goofy-sounding name and inherently humorous quality to them, as they’re a bit weird but also well known, similar to something like candied fruitcake in pre-internet humor.”
There is a “timeless” element to the food that Sweat argued is what makes them perfect fodder for evergreen memes or meme cycles — which is when an iteration of a meme gets reworked over and over again.
“When it comes to food, in general, being such a commonly memed topic, it makes sense when you think about the core components of a meme: a conceptual unit for an idea, symbol or practice that spreads from one person to another through human interactions and communications, and most importantly, retention and replication,” he said.
ideal writing conditions or no pic.twitter.com/nchZSNLkwG
— đan (@danqdao) June 26, 2023
The same can be said for other memed foods, like garlic bread or, infamously, bacon in the mid-2000s. For millennials, “epic bacon” was, as Vox put it, “the height of comedy.” It seemed to stem from early internet users who were building internet humor as it is known today and using pretty mundane, commonplace and everyday things as the basis for jokes. “Epic bacon” was an easily understandable bit to anyone who came across it — no matter how deep into the internet they were or what websites they were visiting. That same logic still applies to crab rangoon.
Jamie Cohen, an assistant professor of media studies at CUNY Queens College and the founder of Digital Void, a collective internet literacies project, suggested that there’s a simultaneous “vagueness” and “specificity” when it comes to foods that are meme fodder.
“It’s all like snacks or side foods that seem to be memed a lot,” he argued, adding that bacon and crab rangoon are also the types of dishes that you usually order when you’re dining with a big group and they’re items that are guaranteed to be on the menu. “It can’t be like a main or a portion or a spread. It has to be like something that can be ordered with other food.”
These specifications are what make bacon and crab rangoon memes the rare examples of internet humor that transcends generations. While there is a whole subset of TikTok tagged #millennial making fun of jokes like epic bacon, the format of the original memes is not far off from what’s considered funny now with crab rangoon.
“I also believe that the loops are getting smaller because the generations are getting tighter,” Cohen said, referring to how quickly memes are evolving in the current internet age. “So you’ll see this resurgence probably sooner than a 10-year loop.”
Epic bacon faded out because of oversaturation and overexposure. It’s usually a warning sign when brands or certain public figures start trying to get in on the joke. But as to why crab rangoon seems to have taken its place, Sweat suggested it’s because of nostalgia.
“Nostalgia is also a big factor in whether a meme can make a comeback, and food has a massive nostalgic factor to it for lots of people,” he said. “It’s definitely not an inevitable outcome that a trend or meme is going to come back in a few years. In fact, most of them burn out fairly quickly, but if they continue to evolve and stay fresh, they’ll sometimes see a resurgence years after their peak.”
In addition to comprehensiveness and nostalgia, there is also something inherently positive about food-centric memes, which adds to their ability to feel like an inside joke that anyone can get in on. It also seems to go against the grain of how a lot of trends and memes are formed and used in the 2020s — a time in which people are more willing to be open about mental health and joke about it online.
“Today’s barometer is much more of this willingness to engage with mental health and being OK with crying, or at least the feeling of crying,” Cohen said. “The crab rangoon thing is not [about] putting off the emotion, but finding a source of joy within it, one thing that makes me sparkle and smile inside of this. I don’t see it as a replacement or a Band-Aid for the problem, but rather like, ‘Oh, I don’t worry, I still have my crab rangoon.'”
— Crab Rangoon (@CCrabRangoon) October 24, 2023
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