Sometimes potato salad is just potato salad

Even when it’s $30,000 potato salad

Because I’m an ingrate with a soft spot for 21st century cyber pranksters and mayonnaise-based food stuffs, yesterday set my heart aflutter. Specifically, the chamber of my heart that pumps irony-rich platelets to my funny bone. I was tickled, on this day in particular, because I learned, via my Google newsfeed (where else?), that a man had convinced a few thousand (and counting) Internet users to give him thirty-thousand-plus dollars to make potato salad—which is a lot, just for potato salad.

On July 3rd, a man from Columbus, Ohio kickstarted a Kickstarter campaign with the modest goal of raising $10 to procure the ingredients necessary to make a bowl of potato salad. Less than a week into his quest and he’s banked more than $30,000.

Unsurprisingly, not everyone on the world wide web thought the gravy train to potato town was totally kosher. Almost immediately—as seems to happen with many of the Internet’s more absurd outputs—the phenomenon was cast as the symbol of our crumbling culture and moral dereliction. Or as the A.V. Club—on its way to winning Monday’s race to the top of Hyperbole Mountain—claimed: “the real harbinger of the Fall Of The Ironic Empire.”

I’m not here to defend potato salad as our generation’s unassailable side dish. I think it’s pretty awesome, myself; but I know others prefer baked beans or macaroni salad or corn on the cob. Those are good, too. My philosophy towards BBQ accouterments is much the same as my view on sexual positions and preferences, to each his (or her) own. Also: the more the merrier.

Neither will I necessarily quibble with the notion that our popular culture is slowly rotting from the inside out. Anyone who has seen one of the last dozen or so Grammy’s has seen the writing on the wall. To boot, just a night before this campaign went viral, NBC aired a two-hour special devoted entirely to Miley Cyrus. I repeat: two hours straight of Miley fucking Cyrus.

No, I’m here only to defend a person’s unalienable right to prepare a $30,000 bowl of potato salad without having to bear the emotional baggage of a culture ashamed of itself.

Never mind the fact that the entire starchy scheme has been unfairly characterized as some sort of masturbatory meta-parody signaling the end of days for nihilistic hipsters and their death-grip on Internet culture. Among web journalists and anonymous commenters, the loudest gripe about the $30,000 bowl of potato salad is that it’s a misguided and amoral allocation of the Internet’s (read: lazy, seriousness-resistant millennials) funds. If only the $30,000 could be donated to a soup kitchen, the collective complaint goes.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for soup kitchen donations. I’m not a scrooge. I’d prefer the famished fed and the homeless housed. But if the Internet moaned itself into a tizzy over every $30,000 that isn’t spent on feeding the hungry, we wouldn’t even have time for the Internet, much less to actually feed the hungry.

Please don’t mistake my dissent as a variety of the slippery slope retort, that most ridiculous dialectic strategy that substitutes the hysterical if this, what next? for the logical if this, then that.

Just because the emotio-linguistic association is more easily drawn between the words “potato salad” and “hunger” than say “slip and slide” and “hunger,” that doesn’t make a $30,000 potato salad party any more of a betrayal of those in need than does a $30,000 slip and slide party (both of which, if I’m being honest, sound rather enticing). We’re not talking about chucking a limited supply of AIDS medication off the Golden Gate Bridge and all having a collective chuckle about it. We’re talking about thirty thousand dollar bills, each of which have the same likelihood of (and responsibility to) feed the hungry as every other dollar bill in existence.

What made this story so immediately likable, for me, was the fact that it seemed so spontaneous and sincere. Silly? Sure. Absurd? Even better. But more importantly—at least upon the initial smell test—it didn’t reek of belabored performance art. It seems to me to be about as unaffected as absurdist humor can be. It’s happenstance hilarity.

And because it’s happenstance, it’s unlike the depressingly contrived and cruel farce that was @horse_ebooks and has been the calling card of so many other duplicitous memes. This is all to say, it seems like the kind of preposterous idea that could only be birthed in the loony brain of some clever but unassuming Midwestern dude looking to poke some fun at Kickstarter and grab a few laughs—not the overwrought product of some art school dropout, dreamed up in the Apple-sponsored innovation labs of the New Museum.

So much of the Internet has become a cold and predictable place, populated by and for the most jaded (and data journalists)— all of it moving at an exhausting, dizzying pace. In spite of this, there are still surprises. Like a campaign to make a bowl of potato salad exciting enough people to raise $30,000. For me, that’s a surprise worth celebrating. Eating, even. Not lamenting.

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