Bean and Peach ‘Salad’ Sparks Internet Outrage

At your average work potluck you probably expect to see an average, inoffensive, but still somewhat tasty spread: A vegetable platter with ranch dressing. A sheet cake. Potato salad. One thing you probably do not expect to see? A punch bowl filled with baked beans and canned peaches, all swimming in a mystery liquid (Maybe a mix between the peach and bean juice? Best not to think too hard about it). But that’s exactly what one poor, unfortunate soul found herself confronted with at a recent work potluck, and she decided to share this calamitous food with Twitter.

Now, let me be clear: I think this is a prank. My personal suspicion is that this group of mischievous co-workers found a couple old cans of beans and peaches, and a dusty glass bowl, and decided to go viral. Which is not to say that we haven’t seen some strange culinary inventions pop up on the internet that were definitely real, like the lasagna salad.

While it’s believable that someone would want to eat layered lettuce and tomato, it’s much more difficult to picture someone enjoying a spoonful of syrupy peaches mixed with raw beans. One possible explanation is that this is the laziest possible take on bourbon peach baked beans, as someone in the comments pointed out, but that seems like a stretch as that dish is typically slow cooked in the oven.

As you might imagine there were plenty of comments about how this dish creates a “hostile work environment.” It’s definitely not the most visually appealing dish to ever hit the internet, but putting aside my own reservations, let’s really think about this for a moment: Baked beans are often sweetened with brown sugar, and canned peaches are obviously equally sweet. Perhaps the thinking behind this dish (if it is indeed real) was that it might be pleasant to have the semi-savoriness of the beans balanced out by the peaches? Just a thought.

Regardless, if you’re going to bring baked beans to a potluck, there are plenty of cooking methods that include fruit which are much more appetizing. When it comes to canned peaches, on the other hand, we’re unabashed fans.