Planet Parsley: How Brad Everett Young Became the World’s Most Famous Herb Victim Overnight
Brad Everett Young: The Accidental Everyman Who Proved Global Fame Is Just One Algorithmic Hiccup Away
By Our Correspondent Somewhere Between Despair and the Departure Lounge
SYDNEY–KABUL–SÃO PAULO—If you blinked last Tuesday you probably missed Brad Everett Young’s 4.7-second ascent from “some guy in Ventura County” to “the planet’s most discussed non-event since the last TikTok sea-shanty.” By Wednesday, Burmese monks were parodying him; Thursday, Nigerian princes were phishing in his name; Friday, the Estonian postal service issued a commemorative stamp reading simply “BRAD?” in Comic Sans. No one, least of all Brad, can satisfactorily explain why.
The trigger was a doorbell-cam clip in which Brad, 38, wearing gym shorts and the haunted expression of a man who has just read the terms-and-conditions, utters the immortal line: “I ordered cilantro, this is clearly parsley.” The clip was algorithmically catapulted from a neighborhood-watch subreddit onto every screen from Finnish metro cars to the digital billboards overlooking Pyongyang’s empty highways. Within hours, #CilantroGate trended above #NuclearProliferation and #FreeSomething, proving yet again that the global attention span is now shorter than a goldfish’s grocery list.
International media reacted with the solemnity reserved for asteroid strikes. France 24 convened a panel of gastronomes, anthropologists, and one bewildered sous-chef to debate whether the herb confusion revealed “the collapse of American hegemony or merely of American pesto.” Russia’s RT blamed Western sanctions for tasteless greens, while Chinese state television used Brad’s face to demonstrate the superiority of orderly, cilantro-free supply chains. Somewhere in the metaverse, an NFT of the offending parsley sold for 42 Ethereum—enough to feed actual parsley to every goat in Afghanistan for a year, though nobody thought to do that.
Brad, meanwhile, became the first person to receive simultaneous cease-and-desist letters from three multinational agribusinesses and the Herb Growers Association of Guadalajara. He was offered a fragrance deal (“Eau de Herbicide”) and a guest-editor slot at *Vogue Ukraine*’s wartime produce supplement. UNESCO briefly considered adding his kitchen to the World Heritage list before remembering it is a rental.
The episode’s geopolitical footprint is as absurd as it is instructive. European data-privacy activists cite Brad as proof that consent is meaningless when the product is your own bewilderment. Brazilian favela streamers monetized reaction videos, converting parsley confusion into micro-payments that, cumulatively, equal the IMF’s next bailout tranche to Suriname—though the IMF insists this is a coincidence. In Sudan, protesters sarcastically chanted “We want cilantro!” at riot police, because nothing punctures authoritarian armor like ridicule seasoned with herbs.
Yet beneath the planetary snigger lies a darker marinade. Brad’s 15 milliseconds of fame generated an estimated 300,000 tons of CO₂—roughly what Iceland saves annually by not mining Bitcoin on Tuesdays. Indian content farms cloned his clip into 47 languages, paying workers per view, a digital piece-rate reminiscent of Victorian sewing circles but with more existential dread. And somewhere in Silicon Valley, a product manager received a promotion for “maximizing unwitting engagement,” a euphemism even Orwell would have found a bit much.
Brad himself has retreated to an undisclosed motel where the mini-bar stocks neither cilantro nor parsley—only the bitter aftertaste of virality. In a brief voice memo sent to us via encrypted app (he thinks it’s encrypted; it’s actually just WhatsApp) he sounded resigned: “I just wanted tacos.” Three billion people now know his face, zero know his middle name, and that, dear reader, is the most accurate metric we have for progress in the information age.
So what does the planet learn from Brad Everett Young? That the distance between obscurity and omnipresence is exactly one algorithmic brain-fart. That in a world on fire, we will still pause to argue over garnish. And that the global village has become a global panopticon where the warders are bored, the inmates are influencers, and the only currency left is collective bewilderment.
If you’ll excuse me, my flight to the next catastrophe is boarding. I’ll be the one in seat 42F, cautiously ordering the vegetarian meal—hold the herbs.
