Let’s Dig in the Fork: Why Eating Pudding with a Fork Is More
Than Just Internet Nonsense

Ever thought about eating a pudding with a fork? Probably not, because, well, spoons exist. And yet, that is exactly what has become the latest thing on TikTok. What started with meet-up in Karlsruhe in the end of August, rolled on to Hamburg (where participants even began drumming on their pudding cups with their forks), and is now preparing for its first Berlin gathering on October 5, looks on the surface like just another silly online trend. But if you dig in the fork, there’s more to it than that. This might actually be a remarkably clever and very human phenomenon.

At its core, the fork-and-pudding movement is about radical simplicity. You can show up with nothing more than a supermarket pudding cup and a fork, ready to eat, poke, or tap in rhythm with others. The Hamburg videos show dozens of plastic cups wobbling in time to a percussive clatter of forks, transforming their vanilla pudding into a kind of improvised musical instrument. The charm lies in the absurdity, but also in the accessibility. A pudding costs maybe one or two euros, and everyone can bring their own. At a time when the cost of almost everything else seems to be rising, from rent to coffee-to-go, a pudding-based meet-up is refreshingly affordable.

The deeper appeal, though, isn’t about price. It’s about presence. Germany, like many other countries, is experiencing what researchers increasingly describe as a loneliness epidemic among young people. A 2024 study from Brandenburg showed that nearly one in five school students reported feeling lonely, almost double the share from 2018. The Federal Institute for Population Research notes similar patterns among young adults under thirty, with financial insecurity making the problem even worse. Loneliness is not just about being physically alone, it’s about lacking a space to belong.

And here is where the pudding fork suddenly makes sense. The sociologist Émile Durkheim once coined the term collective effervescence to describe the energy that arises when people come together to perform the same act. Eating pudding with a fork is, in its own strange way, a ritual. It may not have centuries of tradition behind it, but the act of gathering in a square, pudding cup in hand, fork at the ready, creates a fleeting sense of unity. The rules are few and the stakes are low: no costumes, no entrance fees, no pressure. Just a group of strangers choosing to share the same ridiculous gesture.

In sociological terms, this is also about the creation of “third spaces”, places outside of work, home, or school where people can gather freely. Once, cafés, pubs, and community centers played this role. Today, many of those options either cost too much or no longer exist in the same way. Pudding, by contrast, is cheap, portable, and requires no infrastructure beyond a park bench or public square. In other words: the barrier to entry is nearly nonexistent.

Looked at like this, the pudding-with-a-fork trend is less a joke than a quiet protest against the conditions young people are living under. It flips consumer logic on its head. Instead of buying tickets to an event or a drink in a bar, the event is the pudding. Instead of competing over who wears what, the rules are playfully inverted: everyone eats wrong, together. Breaking that small norm, eating pudding with the “wrong” utensil, becomes a way of signalling that sometimes it’s okay to defy expectations, as long as you’re doing it side by side with others.

So yes, it’s silly. But maybe silly is exactly the point. In an era of spiraling costs, shrinking spaces for community, and an intensifying sense of isolation, gathering to eat pudding with a fork becomes something surprisingly powerful. For a brief moment, strangers become companions, the ordinary becomes special, and loneliness takes a step back.

Someday, we might look back at the sound of forks drumming on pudding cups not as just another internet fad, but as proof that even the strangest rituals can bring people together. Deliciously dumb, and quietly smart.