Main Character of the Week is a weekly column that tells you the most prominent “main character” online (good or bad). It runs on Fridays in the Daily Dot’s web_crawlr newsletter. If you want to get this column a day before we publish it, subscribe to web_crawlr, where you’ll get the daily scoop of internet culture delivered straight to your inbox.
The internet is a stage, and someone unwillingly stumbles onto it weekly. This makes them the “main character” online. Sometimes their story is heartwarming, like the Gen Z vs. millennial war over heart hands; usually it’s a gaffe. In any case, that main character energy flows through the news cycle and turbo-charges debate for several business days.
Here’s the Trending team’s main character of the week.
It’s the young man who discovered that sour cream is just two ingredients. Cream and vinegar.
And this revelation inspired an earnest debate reminiscent of The Dress. For those who don’t remember the dress: A viral post in 2015 asked if you saw one color pattern or a different one in a photograph of a dress. Similarly, this sour cream story is all about perspective.
With an economic twist.
First, did you know that sour cream is extremely straightforward to produce? (Assuming you have gone through the trouble of creating cream from a cow vis-à-vis the cow-to-cream pipeline.)
Given that this story is one of the most read of the week at the Daily Dot, I’m going to guess that no, you didn’t realize sour cream was just basically sour and cream.
OK, so we have a relatable factoid about a common product. Here is where the perspective comes in: Should you make sour cream at home or just buy it? That’s why @audhdfeller brought it up in the first place.
We all have a boundary at the grocery store. Do you buy lettuce and cucumbers? Do you buy a box of washed greens ready to be mixed with adorning vegetables into a side salad? Do you buy $5 premade salads from Target that you can stack in your refrigerator and eat during the week?
For most of us it boils down to economics. Shoot, young people on TikTok are positive that it’s cheaper to just go to Taco Bell every day instead of cooking at home. Where does one draw the line?
That’s what the sour cream story is really about.
By the way, you make sour cream by whipping cream with vinegar and then shaking it up in a jar and letting it ferment in the refrigerator. But don’t take my word for it, I have never done this. I’ve never had the economic need to consider this money-saving hack.
So the story is about the economic decisions we make in the dairy aisle. It’s about perspective. And it’s generational.
At the moment, Gen-Z has the cultural zeitgeist at its back and it is figuring out the world one post at a time. It is re-discovering the classics while also, uniquely, pushing back on what the previous generations were thinking. Here, a consumer-conscious young man thought wow I should not be wasting money on Daisy or Fage.
OK so once more: The sour cream story went viral because it was relatable, was about perspective, was about youth culture, and because it was so silly no one else thought to ask what the deal with sour cream was.
And that’s the real lesson. Stay curious and don’t judge yourself out of the room that you’re in. You just might save money. Or produce a genius blog post. Or a chart-topping song.
Sure, anyone with a cursory understanding of power chords could have written “Cold Hard B*tch” by Jet. But the lads from Jet did and you didn’t.
Many doubted me when I pitched this sour cream story, yet by understanding that the wise man knows nothing I insisted that we cover this dude‘s TikTok about sour cream to the tune of 1.6 million pageviews.
Internet culture is chaotic—but we’ll break it down for you in one daily email. Sign up for the Daily Dot’s web_crawlr newsletter here. You’ll get the best (and worst) of the internet straight into your inbox.
