The Stanley Craze Has Reached Its Hot Pink Peak

Welcome to Delicious or Distressing, where we rate recent food memes, videos, and other entertainment news. Last week we discussed Taylor Swift’s millennial-coded Milk Bar birthday cake.

If 2023 was the year of over overhydration (it was), one receptacle is to thank—or blame, depending on where you stand. The Stanley Quencher, a stylish accessory for millennial and Gen Z women as much as a water bottle, flooded our feeds in a rainbow of colors last year, and the hype has evidently spilled into 2024. Crowds of Stanley stans swarming Target this week to get their hands on one proves as much. TikTokers, like brave Animal Planet documentarians, filmed Target-goers barrelling over one another, and we will be entering said videos into the annals of history to be studied as primary sources in 50 years.

Also this week, Sweethearts pandered to the youths with their “situationship” boxes for Valentine’s Day, adding fuel to an already blazing fire (Gen-Z’s fraught dating culture). The mascot at a recent college football game was a giant Pop Tart that emerged from an equally giant toaster, and it was edible. Lastly, a former congresswoman was found to have posted food photos that she stole from the internet, and her ruse was readily debunked.

Read more below on this week’s food news around the internet.

They say that the Stanley hype is peaking—but, oh, what a peak if so. Stanley lovers this week swarmed their local Targets and essentially leap-frogged off fellow shoppers to grab the latest drop—a hot pink Valentine’s Day collab with Starbucks. Their sheer agility is plainly shocking, but the scale of Stanley’s hype, at this point, is well proven by its sought-after color drops, which cyclically sell out. Helmed by the former CEO of Crocs, Stanley has manufactured a beast of an influencer-endorsed hype machine, morphing their bottles into must-have lifestyle accessories for women. That their latest drop vanished from Target’s shelves as quickly as they appeared is a logical end to lots of marketing calculus. As eyeballs turn away from Stanley and toward other buzzy brands like Owala, it’s hard to envision Stanley spitting out another product to the same level of uproar. Here’s hoping no injuries were sustained in the process. 2/5 distressing. —Li Goldstein, digital production assistant

Capitalizing on the Gen-Z term “situationship”—a vaguely defined, short-term romantic or sexual fling—Sweethearts, makers of those powdery Valentine’s candies with labels like “Be mine” and “Cutie Pie,” is selling boxes of candy hearts with hard-to-read blurbs, under the tagline “messages as blurry as your relationship.”

I have nothing against the concept of a situationship, but I think Sweethearts is showing its age with this one. Your Hinge match isn’t going to consider getting these candies a cute and silly gesture; they’re going to get upset or anxious or start explaining that work has been crazy lately and they only want something chill and low-key right now and how you’re totally awesome but they don’t have time for—you get it. You’re either going to end up together for real or, more likely, spending Valentine’s eating chalky candy by yourself. 1.1/5 distressing. —Alma Avalle, digital operations associate

If you have done something shady, the internet will eventually find out—like thermodynamics, this is a simple law that governs our universe. Unfortunately no one told Maya Flores, former congresswomen and current candidate for US House Texas District 34. What looked like innocent if not questionably framed pictures of meals she shared with her family have turned out to be flagrantly stolen pictures from around the web. It’s one thing to steal content, but Flores really leaned into it, clarifying the names of food items in the comments, and calling herself a “proud Latina who knows how to cook” in captions. Internet sleuths found that the fraud goes back years. Listen, I get it. Being a content creator is creatively exhausting, but the solution is never to plagiarize, especially if you’re, you know, an elected official responsible for keeping our democracy running. If you’re feeling enough pressure to post that you’re prepared to lie online, perhaps it’s time, as the kids say, to touch grass. 4.9/5 distressing —Sam Stone, staff writer

In what I can only imagine was some kind of intricate, public-facing immortality ceremony, a human-sized Pop Tart mascot was slowly lowered into an enormous toaster at last Thursday’s Pop Tarts Bowl—for the uninitiated, a Pop Tarts-sponsored football game between North Carolina State University and Kansas State University.