First let me talk about the 6-7 meme. You probably saw it; as someone mentions “six seven”, someone else does the “grab balls” gesture with their hands, alternately, while repeating “six seven~”. It doesn’t really have semantic meaning, but it has a social one, that made it so popular: it signals someone belongs to the group of people who know the meme.

Now lemme talk about carbonara. See, there are a lot of reasons why the “canonical” recipe eventually settled this way, instead of another. For plenty (most?) people, the canonical recipe is perfect:

• garlic and eggs don’t really go well together, they fight a bit
• pecorino’s sharp taste improves the dish in a way gruyère or grana/PR wouldn’t
• guanciale is chewier, and the smoky flavour typically found in bacon would also fight other ingredients

Bear in mind every single of those points is subjective: they’re a matter of taste, and while I do believe this taste should be shared by plenty people, this is not a true/false matter. As in, someone out there might actually like garlic x eggs, and that’s completely fine.

However. When people gatekeep carbonara, they never talk about those points, right. It’s always that “authentic” babble, being parroted over and over: “ackshyually lol carbonara should be made with $ingredient_1, never $ingredient_2 lmao”. Because the gatekeeping is not about helping you to make the best-tasting carbonara for you, it’s about signalling “I know CHRUE CURRBONAWA”. Much like 6-7, except coupled with disdain for what the others made.

It’s a bloody meme. But a really cringe one.