website and a 2015 article from The Onion. Mashable quoted an instance of a tweet regarding this topic from 2012, "Why does a Tide Pod look so good to eat?" The Straight Dope thread's discussion was more centered on children accidentally eating Tide Pods, rather than the meme's iteration popularized in 2017, which portrays pods as a delicious food. In the following years, eating Tide Pods became a popular joke online. In March 2017, CollegeHumor uploaded a sketch video titled "Don't Eat The Laundry Pods". Posts began to prefer "Tide Pods" to more generic terms such as "laundry pods" with a thread posted on Reddit's "intrusivethoughts" subreddit in July 2017. The thread, titled "Bite into one of those Tide Pods. Do it.", was referenced in another Onion article the following day. Posts on Tumblr contributed to the meme's rise, but in December 2017, the meme's popularity rose significantly due to various viral tweets. Many posts referred to the pods as a "forbidden fruit". Memes involving the Tide Pods included joking about how "delicious" they appear, as well as posting images with the pods on top of food. Vox described the meme as "pok[ing] fun at the idea of consuming the pods, while (usually) stopping short of actually doing so." The publication noted that part of the allure of discussing, wondering, and joking about consuming the pods stems from the product's warning to not eat the pods. In early January 2018, television personality Jimmy Kimmel referenced the meme when discussing a tweet from President Donald Trump: "sounds like somebody's been in the White House laundry room eating Tide Pods again because the President of the United States is starting his own award show for the media." "Tide Pod Challenge" In 2018, following the meme's surge in popularity, media publications started reporting about people participating in the Tide Pod Challenge, an Internet challenge in which an individual consumes Tide Pods. Teenagers were the reported demographic participating in the challenge; they would record themselves chewing and gagging on pods and then daring others to do the same. Some of these videos were posted on YouTube. Some teens cooked the pods before eating them. In response to the meme, a spokesperson from Procter & Gamble (P&G) was quoted in BuzzFeed News emphasizing the purpose of their pods and the health risks associated with children: "Nothing is more important to us than the safety of