What is Zoe Barrie's Cooking Advice?

A viral TikTok from March 2023 in which influencer Zoe Barrie dismissed seasoning in favor of fresh onions and garlic, which Twitter users recycled into a racist in-joke built around her "seasoning police" phrase.

Where did Zoe Barrie's Cooking Advice come from?

Barrie posted the original video on TikTok on March 15, 2023; Twitter users @bonethirty and @JustinTarnation reposted it the next day, which brought it to a much wider audience.

What does Zoe Barrie's Cooking Advice mean?

On Twitter, "seasoning police" became a euphemism some racist users adopted for Black people, after @ModeMonadic and others claimed the phrase sounded like a slur.

How do you use Zoe Barrie's Cooking Advice?

Posters typically paste cut-out stills of Barrie's face over crime-news tweets, as @ted_fren did, so her expression stands in for the "seasoning police" critique.

Is Zoe Barrie's Cooking Advice still popular?

Attention peaked in March 2023, with the viral quote tweets and cutouts clustered in that window and documented afterward on Know Your Meme.

Zoe Barrie's Cooking Advice

2023viral videodeclining

Published October 26, 2026

Zoe Barrie's Cooking Advice, also known as Seasoning Police, is a March 2023 viral TikTok in which food influencer Zoe Barrie dismissed heavy seasoning in favor of fresh onions and garlic. The clip was addressed to the "seasoning police," and within three days Twitter users had retooled that phrase into a racist euphemism and started pasting cutouts of her face over crime-news headlines.

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Overview

Seasoning Police content runs on two overlapping tracks on Twitter. The first is the phrase itself, which racist accounts repeated as a coded label for Black people, reading Barrie's condescending delivery as an in-joke they could claim4. The second is a reaction-image format: still frames of Barrie are cut out of the TikTok and laid over news chyrons or tabloid screenshots about crimes, so her disapproving face appears to react to the story below7.

TikTok

Posters linked the Zoe Barrie's Cooking Advice edits to earlier reaction templates such as JetBlue Racist Burger King and Scott Adams Cutouts, which used a white face as a stand-in response to Black subjects5. The joke sits entirely on the reader recognizing the racist subtext.

Gallery

Origin & Background

Platform

TikTok / Twitter (viral spread)

Creator

Zoe Barrie

Date

2023

On March 15, 2023, food influencer Zoe Barrie uploaded a TikTok reply to a commenter who had told her, "please season your chicken." Barrie addressed the "seasoning police" in the clip and argued that dry seasoning is inferior to fresh aromatics such as sauteed onions and garlic. Her TikTok reached more than 1.2 million views and 144,000 likes within six days1. Barrie's post was the catalyst, with the meme format itself taking shape the next day once the video was reposted to Twitter2.

How It Spread

On March 16, 2023, Twitter accounts @bonethirty and @JustinTarnation reposted the clip. The @bonethirty upload drew more than 2.2 million views in five days2, and @JustinTarnation's version reached roughly 2.7 million3. Quote tweets attached to those uploads reframed Barrie's wording as racial code.

On March 17, @albademiks wrote that Barrie had done more for "the dissident right" than any trad poster, a reply that drew 2,700 likes in four days4. @ModeMonadic followed on March 18, calling "seasoning police" "more powerfully racist than any slur I've heard"6. Users then started pasting cutouts of Barrie's face over tweets about Black suspects, with examples by @0x49fa987 and @ted_fren8. The Zoe Barrie's Cooking Advice cutouts were explicitly compared to JetBlue Racist Burger King and Scott Adams Cutouts as part of the same reaction template lineage5.

Timeline

2023-03-15

Zoe Barrie posts the original TikTok reply to a commenter telling her to season her chicken.

2023-03-16

@bonethirty and @JustinTarnation repost the clip to Twitter, where it reaches a combined ~5 million views within five days.

2023-03-17

@albademiks posts the "dissident right" quote tweet that frames the clip in racial-political terms.

2023-03-18

@ModeMonadic calls "seasoning police" "more powerfully racist than any slur I've heard," and Barrie-face cutouts begin appearing over crime news.

How to Use This Meme

A typical Zoe Barrie's Cooking Advice edit crops Barrie's disapproving expression from the TikTok and places it beside or above a crime-news tweet or chyron referencing a Black suspect, so her face reads as the "seasoning police" judgment7. Captions often leave the headline unchanged, letting the cutout do the work.