The Caribbean Food Trends Going Viral Right Now

For most of the internet era Caribbean food appeared online as somebody else's holiday content. That has changed. The region and its diaspora now produce enough of their own food media to set the direction rather than react to it, and the results are strange, funny and occasionally quite annoying to people who live here.

Jerk, applied to everything

Jerk chicken was always going to travel. It is smoky, visually dramatic, and the sound of a pan being scraped is made for a platform with audio. What travelled less well is the understanding that jerk is a seasoning and smoking method rather than a sauce you pour on things.

Hence jerk salmon, jerk pasta, jerk burgers, jerk cauliflower, jerk hummus. Some of it is genuinely good. Some of it is barbecue sauce with allspice stirred in, presented with enormous confidence. The pimento wood is what makes it jerk, and almost none of the viral versions have any.

Oxtail as an aspirational dish

This is the most consequential trend on the list, because it moved a price. Oxtail was historically a cheap cut - the part left after the valuable meat was sold, cooked long and slow because it had to be. Two decades of rising international demand, accelerated by food media, turned it into a premium item.

The result is a dish that occupies a strange position: culturally central, aspirational online, and increasingly expensive for the households whose cuisine it belongs to. The same pattern has played out with other foods elsewhere, and it rarely ends well for the origin community.

Doubles, explained badly by people who have never been to Curepe

Trinidad's doubles has become a fixture of street food content, generally with the bara made wrong, the channa underspiced, and a caption calling it a sandwich. Trinidadians in the comments have made a full-time job of correcting this, which has itself become part of the format.

The genuinely interesting part is that doubles is now recognisable to people who could not place Trinidad on a map. That is a real cultural export, however mangled the execution.

Sorrel, out of season and everywhere

Sorrel is a Christmas drink here. Online it has become a year-round wellness beverage, sold as an antioxidant drink and a blood pressure remedy - the latter having some genuine, if modest, trial support behind it, since hibiscus does appear to lower blood pressure slightly.

What gets lost is the sugar. Traditional sorrel is heavily sweetened, at 120 to 180 calories a glass. The wellness framing tends to assume the unsweetened version while the recipe shown is the sweet one.

Pepper shrimp and the heat challenge genre

Middle Quarters pepper shrimp has been absorbed into the enormous online category of people eating spicy things for an audience. Scotch bonnet challenges, hot pepper eating contests, the entire scoville-measuring genre.

It is harmless entertainment, mostly. The medical reality is that capsaicin causes real distress and occasionally serious complications when eaten in extreme quantity - oesophageal spasm and, in rare documented cases, worse. The shrimp themselves, incidentally, are among the better street food options here: high protein, low calorie, and the heat slows you down.

The diaspora kitchen genre

Arguably the most interesting thing happening. Second and third generation Caribbean people in London, Toronto, New York and Miami cooking their grandmother's food, usually with a running commentary about not quite getting it right.

This content does something the tourist-facing version never did: it treats the food as ordinary. Not exotic, not a holiday experience, just what is for dinner. It is also, quietly, an archive - a lot of recipes that existed only in one person's head are being recorded because someone pointed a phone at a pot.

Ground provisions, rediscovered

Breadfruit, yam, dasheen and green banana have started appearing in wellness content as high-fibre, low-glycaemic alternatives to imported starches. Which is true, and also something Caribbean people have known for approximately four hundred years.

The mild irony is that ground provisions lost status here over two generations, displaced by imported rice, flour and bread, and are now regaining it partly because the internet decided they are interesting. Whatever gets people eating breadfruit again is fine by us.

What is not trending, and probably should be

• Saturday soup.A whole cuisine's answer to food waste, cooked weekly across the island for generations. Every use-it-up trend online is a worse version of it.
• Steamed fish with okra. One of the best light meals anywhere, and almost invisible online because it does not photograph dramatically.
• Ital cooking. A fully developed plant-based tradition with its own low-sodium technique, decades older than most of what gets called plant-based online.
• Bush tea. Cerasee, fever grass, mint, ginger. An entire herbal tradition that the wellness industry would monetise instantly if it noticed.
• Cooking the whole animal. Cow foot, tripe, chicken back, fish head. Nose-to-tail eating was a trend in expensive restaurants a decade ago; it has never stopped being normal here.

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