Food Prices Keep Rising. Just Look At McDonald’s Hash Browns.

This week, the trendiest dish online was … hash browns?

The humble, crispy potato disk in recent days has transformed into the starchy equivalent of Sydney Sweeney. On the social media platform Threads, it was the topic that suddenly, everyone was fixated on. For many, the conversation was merely about the conversation, with some people piling on nonsensically with random hash brown commentary, others offering love letters to the deep-fried spuds and many just wondering why the heck the basic breakfast mainstay was trending. But there was at least some meat to this carb-heavy discussion, with many users expressing anxiety about runaway prices for everything (including, of course, the lowly hash brown).

“Imagine you just downloaded threads today for the first time ever and every single post is about hashbrowns,” one user wrote. Some cheekily referred to the platform as “hash brown headquarters” while others lauded “the great hashbrown moment of 2025.”

For those who could follow the (ahem) thread, the hash brown discourse appeared to begin with a random post griping about the rising cost of the breakfast staple at McDonald’s. “How’s McDonalds charging $4.35 for a hash brown,” the user theworddegree posted, followed by three crying emojis.