Somehow, my TikTok FYP has been overtaken by German young people, seemingly hundreds at a time, eating pudding with a fork in public spaces. Welcome to the new trend: pudding mit gabel, which translates into English as, you guessed it, "pudding with a fork."

Mind you, I am neither German nor am I particularly fond of pudding. My knowledge of the German language stops at "guten tag." And yet, all over my timeline, there are people speaking German and eating pudding. (To be fair, I liked a single video — mostly in a WTF way — which likely sparked the shift in my algorithm.)

But the thing is, this is not niche content. There are scores of videos from these meetups, some of which have racked up millions of likes on TikTok. And these meetups tend to attract a lot of people. Here, take a look:

Strange, right? But kind of weirdly sweet, too? It's cool to see people doing anything together with such joy in 2025.

But there's still a lot that's left to explain about how and why this has happened.

What is the "pudding mit gabel" or "pudding with a fork" trend? And how did it start?

Again, overall, this trend doesn't involve much more than eating pudding with a fork with a bunch of other people. That's the trend. That's it. From what the videos show, there is typically a large group of people, all armed with a single-serve pudding and a fork. There is often a countdown, followed by some rhythmic, celebratory tapping of fork-to-lid — and then people eat. It's a strange, fun trend that's mostly lived on the German side of the internet.

There are certainly lots of articles about it in German-language outlets. It's spread to different German and Austrian cities like Hannover, Munich, Stuttgart, and Vienna.

So...who started the "pudding mit gabel" trend? In short: It's completely unclear. It's more of a movement than a single person's work. AI translations of German articles suggested it started in the German town of Karlsruher, spurred on by specific meme pages for each city as it spread. That's often the case with trends; they sort of just appear, and the momentum takes on a life of its own.

It's more interesting to consider why this is a trend. Absurd times birth absurd trends, and things are pretty strange out there right now.

At the risk of sounding like an Old Man, we live in a disconnected time. German meme pages spark an absurd trend — eating decadent, spoonable food with a fork in parks with friends — because we're all craving connection.

It's hard to get folks together to just sit in a park. But make it something strange, make it a trend, and people will show up just to be there. Remember the time a Philly mab ate a rotisserie chicken and went super viral, with crowds packing in to watch the feat? Or the time people mobbed New York City streets for a Timothée Chalamet lookalike contest? Or how about all the Instagrammable foods that inspire massive IRL lines? The internet loves taking weird online stuff into the real world.

It just so happens that young German people, somehow, decided on pudding with a fork. And, yes, if you were wondering, it seems the trend could be coming stateside. A person posted about an NYC pudding-with-a-fork meetup in Central Park, and it racked up hundreds of thousands of views. There appears to be interest in organizing U.S. meetups on Reddit pages, too.

So yes, "pudding mit gabel" is a distinctly German trend, but it could be international very soon. And you know what: Sure, why not?