You deserve better than a slop bowl

In mid-December, as the year wheezed toward its end and everyone collectively stared into the psychic refrigerator to see what was left, Merriam-Webster announced its 2025 word of the year: slop.

Their corresponding release made it clear that just because the term was chosen doesn’t mean it was being venerated. “We define slop as ‘digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence,’” they wrote. “All that stuff dumped on our screens, captured in just four letters: the English language came through again.”

The flood of slop in 2025, they concluded, was prolific and oddly mesmerizing. It included absurd videos, off-kilter advertising images, cheesy propaganda, fake news that looks pretty real, junky AI-written books, “workslop” reports that waste coworkers’ time — and lots of talking cats. (Always the cats.)

“Like slime, sludge, and muck, slop has the wet sound of something you don’t want to touch,” the editors continued. “Slop oozes into everything. The original sense of the word, in the 1700s, was ‘soft mud.’ In the 1800s it came to mean ‘food waste’ (as in ‘pig slop’), and then more generally, ‘rubbish’ or ‘a product of little or no value.’”

I find this interesting because, as it happens, there is a parallel trend unfolding in the culinary world, running neatly analogue to the AI-driven slopification of the internet: the so-called “corporate slop bowl.”

A slop bowl has become internet parlance for a particular mash-up of ingredients — warm grains, vaguely globally inspired proteins, a surcharge for avocados — served up at fast-casual restaurants where the selling point of the cafeteria-style assembly line is efficiency, not flavor. The price point hovers around $18. Instagram and TikTok are punctuated with posts featuring half-eaten bowls and captions that range from the sincere (“Am I the only one who gets disgusted by their bowl midway through?”) to the unmistakably dystopian: Doordash your slop bowl. Get extra guac. Pay for it with Klarna. Default on the loan. Eat at your desk. Never stop looking at your screen. Create shareholder value.

They are easy. They are mundane. Which may be why there is such a robust online subculture devoted to “hacking” orders at these joints — swapping sauces, doubling proteins, gaming the system in hopes of coaxing pleasure from something designed, primarily, to be frictionless. And they may be losing some of their sheen.

As Jordan Valinsky reported for CNN in late 2025, “the big three slop slingers — Cava, Chipotle and Sweetgreen — all reported similar problems in their recent earnings: Younger customers, particularly those aged between 25 to 35, are pinching pennies and choosing to forgo the $15 (or $20) warm bowls.”

Want more great food writing and recipes? Sign up for Salon’s free food newsletter, The Bite.

The decline has been stark enough that it was a key talking point in Chipotle’s last earnings call of 2025.

“We’re not losing them to the competition; we’re losing them to grocery and food at home,” CEO Scott Boatwright told analysts. “It is one of our core consumer cohorts. They feel the pinch and we feel the pullback from them as well.”

It is perhaps not so mysterious, then, that people are growing reluctant to keep throwing good money at something the culture has, collectively, agreed to call slop. Which, it bears remembering, is not a neutral word. As the editors of Merriam-Webster note, by the 1800s the term had come to mean “food waste.” And while we are, of course, big fans of creative food-waste reuse over here, let’s be honest: this is not that. There is a better way.

Coming off the back end of a very beige, very carb-forward holiday season — followed by a flu-turned-virus I can’t quite seem to shake — I find myself craving something else entirely. Something brighter. Something nourishing. Something with a lineage. What I want, right now, is what I would call an old-school hippie bowl.

Even when it isn’t called this on the menu — sometimes it’s a sunshine bowl, sometimes a macro bowl, sometimes a Buddha bowl (a term Buddhist monks themselves find a bit silly, for what it’s worth, according to this great Bon Appétit report on the origin of the phrase) — you know an old-school hippie bowl by virtue of the places you find it. At the lone, crunchy macrobiotic restaurant that continues to exist, stubbornly, as the city grows sleeker and more expensive around it. At the vegan café whose name contains the word “Bloom” or “Blossom.” Or made by the woman in your apartment building who has both a co-op volunteering shift and a single, long gray braid.

These bowls go by many names, but they are ontologically distinct from the slop bowl. Where the slop bowl is optimized for throughput, the hippie bowl is the product of belief. It emerges from a particular food lineage — one shaped by mid-century macrobiotics, health-food evangelists and a curious, earnest embrace of global cuisines. It favors whole grains, legumes, vegetables prepared with intention, and sauces that taste like someone cared. It is modular, yes, but not anonymous. It is nourishing in the old sense of the word.

And — this is the part that matters — it is better.