Sometimes we need to do a little bit less. Not everything needs to be A Thing. Let's count "seemingly ranch" among that group.
In case you missed it — how did you miss it — Taylor Swift showed up to a Kansas City Chiefs game in support of Travis Kelce last Sunday. She was spotted cheering and snacking in the family's suite with Kelce's mom. Swift, like many spectators in the stadium, ate a plate of chicken tenders. Or, that's what fans surmised from the photographic evidence: a lone chicken tender on a plate with a side of ketchup and a condiment that seemingly looked like ranch dressing.
Posting the photo, Twitter/X user and Swift fan account @tswifterastour made a completely innocuous comment. Or at least it appeared so at the time.
Simple enough, no? Just a post with a siren emoji reading, "Taylor Swift was eating a piece of chicken with ketchup and seemingly ranch!" Not for nothing, this displays good journalistic instincts since there is no way to know from a picture if it is ranch.
But, alas, because we're in a moment of cultural hyper-fixation on Swift and Kelce — and because everyone is scrambling to vacuum up bucks and clicks in that wake — "seemingly ranch" has become A Thing. (Yes, you could argue this article is coasting on the wave of that fixation. I am aware of the irony.)
This simple tweet from a Swiftie fan account has been corporatized and warped into much more than an amusing little post. I admit that adding an exclamation point and siren emoji to the phrase "seemingly ranch" is, at face value, funny. But it's normal for a stan account to get overly excited over anything their fave does. That includes eating the favorite condiment of Midwest sports bars.
The corporate response was, ahem, swift. Heinz announced it would be introducing a limited-time-only product called Ketchup and Seemingly Ranch. Of course, Heinz has been selling Kranch — you guessed it ketchup and ranch — since 2019. That isn't to single out Heinz because the company was far from the only one to attempt to cash in on the Swift bump. Walmart? Yep. Hidden Valley? But of course. McDonald's? Seemingly ranch is on the menu. The Empire State Building? Uh, sure. Lays, Van Leeuwen Ice Cream, carmaker Infinity — the list is seemingly endless.
Sure, it's just a meme. We love memes around here. Yet, the corporate need to jump all over every trending thing is tiring. The owner of the fan account itself seemed quite overwhelmed. Not to mention, they're not going to see a dime from any of these products, despite being the inspiration behind them.
"Been approached by possibly the 2 biggest new outlets in the world for an interview over seemingly ranch and I’m terrified and shook at the idea of everything to come," they posted in response to the fervor.
Later, they added: "Stepping away from seemingly ranch for a second, I won’t be posting that specific picture of Taylor and Travis at the afterparty just out of basic respect for her considering it was a private event and she probably didn’t even know she was being photographed at all."
Stop for a minute and consider that a Taylor Swift fan account seems to have more tact and restraint than major brands and news outlets.
I understand how the internet works. I live on the internet for a living. I know that brands and outlets rush to the latest trend because, well, that's just what we do. That's how the thing works. Every little thing is everything for a moment and then, like so many memes before it, it disappears into the vast morass of the internet's long-term memory.
But a fan account tweeted about Taylor Swift's condiments of choice, and within a matter of days we turned that into real products and a real story you could watch on the evening news.
As a wise person once said, we need to calm down.
