10 Cursed Food Combinations the Internet Swears By

Somewhere right now a person is spreading peanut butter on white bread and reaching for a jar of dill spears. They are not embarrassed. They have done this for years, and the rest of the household has learned to eat in another room.

We went hunting for the pairings the internet calls cursed, and sorted the regional traditions from the stunts. Some have a century of documentation behind them. One is simply wrong. Without further ado.

1. Peanut Butter and Pickle Sandwich

Older than most of the people defending it. The pairing spread through American kitchens during the Great Depression, when peanut butter was cheap protein, bread was cheap bulk, and a jar of pickles kept for months without a refrigerator. The New York Times has called it a thrifty and unacknowledged American classic, which is a generous way of saying nobody brings it up at parties.

Peanut Butter & Co. sold one as the Pregnant Lady at its Greenwich Village shop until the doors closed in February 2016. The jars are still on shelves. The counter is gone. Verdict: works, because the vinegar cuts the fat the way it does in satay sauce.

2. Fries Dipped in a Wendy’s Frosty

Dave Thomas put the Frosty on the Wendy’s menu in 1969 as one of the chain’s first five items, blending chocolate and vanilla into something thick enough to need a spoon. The dipping came later, from customers. In 2014 the brand finally tweeted, “If you don’t dip your fries in your #Frosty, you aren’t living life.”

Hot against cold. Salt against sugar. Your tongue reads that contrast as intensity, the same trick that sells salted caramel. Verdict: works, and you already knew.

3. Salt on Watermelon

A Southern summer habit, a Mexican street-cart standard with chilli and lime, and one of the few entries here with a peer-reviewed defence. Paul Breslin and Gary Beauchamp published a paper in Nature in 1997 called Salt enhances flavour by suppressing bitterness. Sodium filters selectively. It knocks the bitter notes down harder than the sweet ones, so the sugar that was always in the melon finally has room.

The melon stays exactly as sweet as it was. Your brain files it differently. Verdict: works hardest on a melon that was going to disappoint you.

4. Pineapple on Pizza

Sam Panopoulos was born in Greece and ran the Satellite Restaurant in Chatham, Ontario. In 1962 he opened a tin of pineapple, put it on a pizza with ham, and named the result after the brand printed on the can. He said people told him he was crazy, and then the orders started arriving, and then it became a permanent front in an online war he never asked to start.

YouGov found 12 percent of American pizza eaters put pineapple in their three favourite toppings and 24 percent in their three least favourite, roughly the statistical shape of a family argument. In February 2017 the president of Iceland told students in Akureyri he would ban it if he could, then posted a note headed “A Statement on the Pizza Controversy” clarifying that he holds no such power. Panopoulos died that June, aged 82. Verdict: works, if the pineapple is drained.

5. Banana and Mayonnaise Sandwich

White bread, sliced banana, a confident layer of mayonnaise, no toasting. Recipes pairing the two appear in print as far back as 1912, and the sandwich found its audience across the American South in the 1930s and 1940s. Bananas were cheap. Bread was bread.

Purists insist on Duke’s, which Eugenia Duke began selling in Greenville, South Carolina in 1917, originally to soldiers at Fort Sevier for a dime apiece. Duke’s carries no added sugar, which matters, because the banana is already handling that side of the ledger. Verdict: better than it sounds, worse than a banana.

6. Vegemite and Chocolate

Cadbury put a Dairy Milk block containing caramel and Vegemite on Australian shelves on 1 June 2015, pushed it with the hashtag #ChocPlusWhat, and watched 1.2 million blocks vanish inside three weeks. Mondelez later admitted the block was never meant to join the permanent range. It worked. It was never coming back.

Britain ran the longer experiment. Marmite Peanut Butter launched in 2019 at roughly 90 percent nut butter and 10 percent yeast extract, added a smooth version in early 2020, and had gone from Tesco and Sainsbury’s by September 2024. Salt and roasted nuts belong together. The shelf space died anyway, the usual fate of novelty products. Verdict: the peanut butter worked, the chocolate was a press release in a wrapper.

7. Spaghetti on Toast

Tinned spaghetti in tomato sauce, warmed through, tipped over buttered toast. New Zealanders eat this for breakfast without a flicker of self-consciousness. Wattie’s was founded in Hawke’s Bay in 1934, and tinned spaghetti became the first pasta most New Zealanders ever tasted. National production hit 5,000 tonnes by 1955, about a kilogram for every person in the country.

A national habit with a supply chain behind it. Add grated cheese, grill the lot, and you have a toastie that outperforms most food sold in airports. Verdict: works, and the tomato sauce does more heavy lifting than anyone admits.

8. Fruitcake with a Slab of Wensleydale

Yorkshire has done this since long before anyone thought to be clever about it. Joseph Lucas recorded the custom in his 1871 book Studies in Nidderdale, describing a Yule cake given to every family member on Christmas Eve alongside a piece of Christmas cheese. Wensleydale was made in spring and summer when the milk was best, then matured into December, arriving exactly when the fruitcake came out.

Crumbly, faintly sour, lightly salted cheese against dense boozy fruit is a contrast any cheeseboard would wave through. The Wensleydale Creamery at Hawes still markets the two together every December. Verdict: works. Obviously.

9. Cereal Drowned in Orange Juice

Here is where we stop being generous. In early 2023 Bella Ramsey, halfway through the first season of The Last of Us, told The Hollywood Reporter that their most recent meal had been cornflakes and dried strawberries with orange juice poured over the top, and called it good. The internet convulsed. Ramsey’s explanation involved years before oat milk was easy to find, and a habit that stuck.

Tropicana had already tried to manufacture the moment. In May 2022 it gave away Tropicana Crunch, a honey almond granola, free through its website around National Orange Juice Day. Granola, specifically, because corn and bran flakes go to sludge in orange juice. Verdict: fails, and we tried it twice to be sure.

10. Butter in Your Coffee

Tibetan po cha predates the wellness industry by several centuries. Brick tea is boiled for hours into a dark bitter base, then churned in a wooden cylinder called a chandong with a lump of yak butter and a pinch of salt until it emulsifies into something closer to soup. At altitude, in cold well below freezing, a hot cup carrying that much fat is a sensible piece of engineering.

Dave Asprey trekked in Tibet in 2004, was handed butter tea at around 18,000 feet, and spent years working out why it had worked. He swapped the tea for coffee and the yak for a cow and posted the recipe on his blog in 2009. The original has a mountain to justify it. Your desk does not. Verdict: the tea is excellent, the coffee is a lifestyle decision.