A day later, on January 29, Australian blogger @cookingwithayeh decided to try the pasta. Its video reach was better than over 12.7 million people and it was the most watched feta-pasta leader on TikTok (but not a video in its entirety – that honor goes to the ASMR version, which has over 15 million views).
While @cookingwithayen credits Jaward, Jaward gives a nod to another food blogger in her caption: MacKenzie Smith, or @grilledcheesesocial. The Smith version, posted on January 28, contains about three million views.
So, if you’re looking for zero TikTok in a global feta-pasta wonderland, it’s Smith. She first posted the recipe on her blog in 2019. “It was very popular,” she said, “but it only started at the beginning of quarantine. ”Soon enough, it was her biggest blog post. So when Smith joined TikTok in January 2021, making feta-pasta video wasn’t very compelling. Within 24 hours, he had a million views. Over the past few days, Smith ‘s 200 fans turned 40,000.
However, despite her mastery of social media, Smith did not create the pasta in the first place. If you watch her video, she picks up two Finnish food bloggers: @liemessa, or Jenni Häyrinen, and @tiupiret, or Tiiu Puranen.
Two years ago, in the middle of a brutal Finnish winter, Häyrinen was hungry. She grabbed some related feta, but a straight block of cheese was not a balanced diet. So she added some tomato, made it into pasta sauce, and mixed in some noodles. Afterwards, Häyrinen added her creation to her blog and Instagram with the hashtag #uunifetapasta. “Immediately it went viral,” she says. “Within a few weeks, everyone in Finland was cooking it.” (That’s just a bit of a joke – Häyrinen says the original blog post received more than three million views. Finland’s population is 5.5 million.) Unifetapasta was not without its creative controversy. The recipe was similar to a spaghetti made in 2018 by Puranen, who claims to be the original feta-pasta recipe (hence the double tag in @grilledcheesesocial posts) .
Smith found out about the #uunifetapasta from a friend from Finland – and, after some translation support, posted it to her own blog in June 2019 while linking back to Häyrinen.
How does Häyrinen feel about her creation going crazy again two years later – but this time not from her own account? “I feel like I’m getting credit, even if that’s not all the time,” she says. But she understands how the origin of something can get lost when it is shared and renewed millions of times. “I understand that if people see the recipe on TikTok, they will pick the person they are following.”