An influencer on TikTok has come under fire after she posted a video criticising a stranger’s food shop... because it contained items she deemed to be “junk food”.
Olympia Anley explained in her video why she thought people currently “live in a society that normalises and literally encourages treating the symptom and not the cause” when it comes to health and wellbeing.
The 20-year-old wellness influencer caveated her clip, which was posted last week, by saying she did not intend to “offend anyone with this video”.
She admitted that she was “quite snobby” about other people’s food shops, adding that she was “not proud of” it.
Anley recalled doing her food shop and seeing the woman in front of her at the cashier “loading on all this junk food”, which included “white bread, crisps, Pot Noodles, all that kind of stuff”, suggesting the woman might have been having a party.
She continued: “And also, a whole lot of medicine, like pills, sachets. I could not believe it.
“It was so paradoxical for me. And again, no judgement and I don’t know her personal situation, but it really spoke to me about how we don’t pay attention to what we put in our bodies enough and then we numb it with drugs so we can’t feel what’s going on inside.”
Anley’s video, the original of which has garnered more than 1.4m views at the time of writing, has been slammed by other TikTok users for being “tone deaf” and “classist”.
She has since turned off the comments section on the video, as well as the ability to make “stitches”, which allows other users to post the original video alongside their reactions.
Some people posted their own weekly shops that contained items mentioned by Anley as “junk food”, while others explained why they thought she was wrong for judging what other people buy, particularly during the ongoing cost of living crisis.
One TikToker, Simone Rowley, said: “I wish we could all live in the world that Olympia lives in, she’s able to buy all these fresh fruits and veggies… I wish I lived in a world where I could just chuck things in my trolley and not have to worry about the consequence of my bank after.”
Another user, Robyn Flight, said in her own video: “We are in a cost of living crisis. My family can’t afford to buy fresh food, we have to go to the food bank because there is just no way we’d be able to afford that. But when we walk around the supermarket we don’t want to show what we’re buying, because it is embarrassing, you’re buying this tinned food but that’s all you can afford.”
In the UK, food inflation has been rising continuously since late 2022. According to Which?, overall inflation on food and drink at supermarkets continued to rise in March to 17.2 per cent, up from 16.4 per cent the month before.
The cost of staples such as cheese, white bread and porridge oats have soared, with the price of Britain’s favourite cheese increasing by an average of 28.3 per cent across eight major supermarkets.
