Phagomania: The Chinese Salad Mystery

This month, Phagomania comes over all Scooby-Doo as we try to solve the mystery of the Chinese salad pictures. Try being the operative word

Feature by Lewis MacDonald | 06 Feb 2014

'Salad?' we hear you cry. 'For Phagomania? Salad’s alright, but it’s no bacon-fried-bacon or burger in the shape of a deer's head.'

Luckily for you, this is no ordinary salad, as you can presumably already see. Towering like edible high rises and more baffling than a book of Escher drawings thrown directly at your face, what you see before you are the efforts of Chinese Pizza Hut customers. 

Showing true national spirit by building ostentatious but egalitarian monoliths to your five-a-day, these individuals have shown acuity and courage to overcome the rule of ‘one plate per visit’ at their local chain pizza restaurant’s salad buffet. 

Bravely putting dexterity and craftsmanship before good sense and appetite (after all, they surely can’t have eaten all that having put in so much work), these photos started making an appearance on obscure message boards and forums in the far east several years back. Establishing their provenance was all but impossible, as was the task of parsing the odd messages that go alongside each image. Messages such as “Our aim is stacked salad. There is no maximum, only better!” and “We eat Pizza Hut's goal is to ‘eat Pizza Hut collapse!’”

After a thorough search and extensive contact with our friends in the salad underworld, no-one has been able to track down the artists behind these fine… things. 

One video on YouTube filmed in a Chinese Pizza Hut documents the finer details of the process, showing how devoid of scruples those stacking their various fruit, vegetables and dressings are. Amid all this mystery, one thing’s for sure – you need good technique to get to the top (without being crushed to death by a pile of lettuce).

Learn the tricks of the salad trade at tinyurl.com/saladbuffet; bbs.goumin.com/thread-403466-1-1.html; lixiang0769.blog.hexun.com.tw/39570558_d.html