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What Does 'Eat Hot Chip And Lie' Mean? The Viral Copypasta And Meme Explained
Were you born after 1993? Do you or a loved one find it difficult to cook and clean, but easy to waste time on your phone and eat too much junk food? If so, you may suffer from a surprisingly common condition that memes and copypastas have diagnosed: you, too, may be unable to do anything but "eat hot chip and lie."
Where Did 'Eat Hot Chip And Lie' Come From?
The original copypasta, which has been changed and altered over the course of many years, reads:
It was posted on Facebook back in 2015, and targeted younger women with criticism. David Jones, author of the post, took the highly specific position of men "31&OVER" who get involved with younger women and feel the generational difference.
The original post became a mild hit on Facebook (1,600 likes in a year) and seemed to point to a true phenomenon: the old heads have difficulty understanding the ways of young people. But the meme really picked up steam in 2018 and 2019, with Twitter reposts that altered and shortened the text of the copypasta.
How Has The Meme Changed Over Time?
The core of the eat hot chip and lie copypasta is a list of behaviors that young women do. Sometimes posters will add or subtract behaviors, but the important ones ("eat hot chip and lie," or "charge they phone") remain the same. The copypasta maintains a dril kind of energy, with purposeful errors in capitalization, grammar, and punctuation. It's also in African-American Vernacular English.
As the copypasta turned more mainstream, posters enjoyed putting it in list form:
But perhaps the most famous iteration of the meme was a 2020 video version, featuring Senator Bernard Sanders of Vermont. In a deepfake-style video, Bernie appeared to pronounce the copypasta phrase.
The meme quickly turned into a vehicle for discussing one narrative around the Sanders campaign in 2020, which was the impression of misogyny surrounding the candidate and his Bernie Bros. The 'eat hot chip and lie' copypasta is giving off misogyny because it makes a gross and demeaning generalization about a whole generation of women, and putting it in Sanders's mouth was a commentary on similar accusations leveled against him.
But the use of the meme here was more ironic: supporters of Sanders wanted to show how ridiculous it was to imagine their candidate as a misogynist, and to make fun of those who might believe he really did say all that.
How Do People Use The Meme?
Like other copypastas, "eat hot chip and lie" can be copied and pasted into a lot of different situations. Often, it is used in a self-deprecating way by people who fit its description (young women who like junk food and the internet). But it is also used to make fun of this group of people and insult them.
Why Do People Use 'Eat Hot Chip And Lie?'
Like other memes that define generations, such as Karens, "eat hot chip and lie" is a way of creating a "type" and criticizing it. If you read the list of behaviors attributed to women born after 1993, there's a critique of bad diet (hot chip), technology use (charge they phone) and sexual promiscuity (twerk). These behaviors are compared to more traditional gender roles like "cook" and "clean."
Many use the meme to criticize people who want women to return to these more traditional gender roles because the copypasta shows how silly and grumpy these complaints against women sound. But at the same time, repeating the meme also gives people a space to play around with suppressed trad feelings, to say we all really should spend less time online and more time cooking vegetables.
For the full history of "Eat Hot Chip and Lie" be sure to check out our entry on the meme here for even more information.