The viral sweet potato trend is a culinary scam

January 17, 2026 — 7.00pm

Wacky food trends have always been a thing (side-eyeing whoever thought it was a good idea to stick vegetables in jelly in the ’70s and call it a salad). Still, with the advent of the internet – and short-form video apps like TikTok in particular – they’ve become more frequent and far-reaching than ever before.

There’s been pesto eggs, butter boards, cucumber salad, glazed skin smoothies, chilli crisp everything – and now, there’s sweet potato and cheese. Yep, if you’ve been on TikTok in the last month or so, you’ve almost certainly seen at least one person eating a roast sweet potato stuffed with a hunk of cheese. And if you paused on that video for more than three seconds in a fit of confusion and/or curiosity, your algorithm was then likely taken over by literally hundreds of people eating the same combination.

A total yam sham.Credit: TikTok/Aresna Villanueva

I like to think I’m not easily swayed by peer pressure or fleeting trends. I mean, I never once said yes to cigarettes or drugs when I was in high school – and sure, I was never really offered any, but you know, I would have said no. Yet there’s something about these viral food trends that gets me. Maybe it’s all the moaning influencers do when they’re eating. I’ll have what she’s having, and all that.

So when I first came across the sweet potato-and-cheese trend, I was intrigued, but also kind of baffled. I mean, I’ve had sweet potato and cheese together plenty of times – usually with something in between them, like a bean concoction. The combo didn’t seem particularly revelatory – if anything, it seemed a little boring.

I went down a rabbit hole and discovered the originator of this particular trend was a woman named Courtney Cook. She’s a pretty, blonde American teacher and mother with a southern twang and an air of approachability that has helped her gain 2.5 million TikTok followers.

Her particular “recipe” involves roasting a sweet potato in the oven, leaving it to sit for a couple of hours until it’s lukewarm, and then pulling the top off and stuffing it with large chunks of cheese (often “cut” with a spoon – the only utensil Cook seems to keep in her classroom desk, where she usually sits to eat). She often pairs her sweet potato with a side of spring onions, which she munches on like it’s a carrot, and onion “cups” – the outer layers of a raw white onion – which she fills with store-bought pasta salad.

Watching her videos and scrolling through the comments, I was overcome with a mix of fascination, confusion, and just a mild amount of horror. She ate her food with enthusiasm, and millions of people just as enthusiastically watched, cheered for her, and made their own versions of her food. Everyone seemed obsessed, with hundreds of commenters raving about how delicious and satisfying their sweet potato was, and how much they now looked forward to eating it every single day.

There must be some kind of magical alchemy I’m missing, I thought. Something exceptional that makes this particular way of cooking sweet potatoes so popular. Naturally, I had to try it for myself.

Reader, I cooked my sweet potato. I waited hours for it to be ready, according to Courtney Cook’s specifications. I diligently took the top off, and I stuffed it with larger hunks of cheese than seemed pleasant.

I took a bite.

And I was more confused than ever.

After all that… it was just sweet potato and cheese. Huge hunks of cheese that weren’t even nicely melted or gooey.

I turned back to Cook’s videos and scrolled and scrolled and scrolled, trying to unpack what it is that makes people so gaga for her meals, and the sweet potato in particular.

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What struck (and honestly, sort of impressed) me was the sheer audacity of it all. Her confidence to put out there, loud and proud, the kind of gremlin food combinations I usually cobble together the day before I get groceries, when there’s no food left in the house, or on the third day of my period when I have five different cravings and no energy to actually do anything about them.

It’s “girl dinner” for every meal.

“We’re not stressing,” Cook often proclaims as she makes her latest concoction. There is something in her breezy, perky delivery that’s compelling. And there’s some merit in the normalisation of low-effort food, and people embracing meals that are both physically and emotionally satisfying (although there’s no way someone who isn’t as thin or put-together as Courtney Cook would get the same reaction to joyfully stuffing their face with carbs).

Still, I can’t shake the feeling that the obsession with these cheesy sweet potatoes is a modern-day emperor’s new clothes. And yet, there’s a part of me that wants to try again – maybe with a different cheese? Maybe I am the problem? No, no, it’d still just be sweet potato and cheese. Unless…

At least there’s one thing I know for sure: I will never willingly eat a slab of raw onion, no matter how much pasta salad is piled on top.

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