I Signed Up For HelloFresh Meal Kits. Turns Out They’re Rated X.

A 21st-century mom who wants to emulate the Proverbs 31 woman may not have a household of servants to help shoulder the countless tasks of daily life, but she does have modern conveniences that ladies of the Old Testament could never have conceived — dishwashers, robot vacuums, drive-thru pharmacies, and meal kit delivery services like HelloFresh.

As a busy mom who wants to make sure my kids are eating healthy meals at home but also wants time to write articles like this one, my family has subscribed to HelloFresh as our food delivery service on and off for nearly 10 years. We have especially come to rely on it to get dinner on the table as I’ve been undergoing cancer treatments for the last year and a half.

But at the start of Pride month, HelloFresh added an unpleasant assignment to my already overloaded schedule — find a new meal delivery service that doesn’t come with a side of anal penetration jokes.

On June 5, in honor of homosexuality, transgenderism, and the rest of the sexual predilections represented in the rainbow flag, the company posted on Instagram, “We know eating isn’t always a top priority this month. We respect that. But for those of you who are … prepping … we have an extensive lineup of high-fiber recipes available. Happy Pride.”

For those not initiated into the sexual practices of gay men, let me help decipher what “prepping” means. HelloFresh is saying that their product is useful for clearing out the rectum of feces in preparation for sodomy. Yes, that’s what it means.

To a certain extent, conservatives, Christians, and others who adhere to a natural-law understanding of sex (that male and female bodies are biologically complementary and ordered toward procreation, while sex between biologically incompatible bodies is fundamentally disordered) can be grateful to HelloFresh for saying out loud what so much “love is love” Pride propaganda tries to obscure — the actual nature of the act being celebrated.

HelloFresh’s post tears away the gauzy veil the LGBTQ movement has long draped over itself with G-rated images of wholesome-looking men in respectable sweater vests holding hands on the beach. It reminds us that the sexual relationships being applauded bear no resemblance to the union of a husband and wife.

If there was any doubt about the joke’s intended meaning, HelloFresh’s social media team quickly removed it, leaning in and doubling down in further responses.

Grindr, the dating app that gay men famously use to source immediate and often anonymous sex, predictably cheered the post, prompting HelloFresh to reply “we’re feeling a little XTRA this month,” with a hand-over-mouth emoji, a play on the term X-rated. When another respondent wanted in on the indecent joke, saying, “I wHOLE-heartedly thank you” (get it, HOLE?), HelloFresh quipped, “thank you from the BOTTOM of our hearts.” Lest this subtlety be lost on anyone, they then announced that they are offering a special Pride discount code throughout June — “BOTTOMSUP.”

It’s worth pausing to remember what product HelloFresh is selling here. Food. It’s hard to imagine the marketing meeting that concluded the best way to entice customers to buy their food was to tie it to mental images of toilets, human waste, and anal sex. Industry veterans like Duncan Owen, an alum of Havas Media Group and current insight head at Craft Media London, expressed revulsion, pointedly asking, “Good Lord, HelloFresh, what were you thinking? This is disgusting.”

The post was so offensive, even some gay influencers objected, with Blaine LaBron, known as the “Common Sense Gay,” calling it “demeaning,” “grotesque,” and “disgusting.”

Since the post, many customers have shared their intentions to cancel their subscriptions and look elsewhere for their meal delivery needs, and it raises the question of whether HelloFresh is about to join Target, Bud Light, and other brands who suffered significant revenue loss as a result of the LGBTQ virtue-signaling. Especially given that public mood on the issue seems to have shifted dramatically in recent years.

Along with the anecdotal data of Target and other retailers significantly scaling back their Pride promotion in the last couple of years (Target no longer carries Pride merchandise for children, for instance), polling appears to show Americans tiring of the lobbying.

A recent Gallup poll found that Republican support for gay marriage is down 18 points since 2022, going from 55% approval to only 37%, a remarkably short span of time for so precipitous a drop. Independents, too, are souring on same-sex unions, with their support plummeting six points. Overall, the number of Americans who favor gay marriage is now at 65%, the lowest point since 2019.

There’s plenty of debate to be had over why Pride is losing its appeal with the American public. Some have argued that the movement overplayed its hand when it began targeting children. Maybe the moms who make purchasing decisions no longer found slogans like “love wins” and “born this way” so inspiring once they realized it might result in their daughters asking to cut off their breasts to become sons.

Others point to signs of resurgence in Christian faith across the U.S. and Great Britain. And it certainly is interesting that HelloFresh’s marketing approach specifically frames Pride month as a sexual rite, and not, as those milquetoast Target and Cracker Barrel campaigns would have it, just a month to make two long-committed granddads with their gingham-lined picnic basket feel special.

In this, the Instagram post was an acknowledgment of what Christians have always known — the evangelistic fervor of the modern LGBTQ movement is so totalizing because it is simply a new iteration of the same old paganism with which Christianity has always competed. And those old religions have always pitted their temple prostitution and ritualistic orgies against the demands of Christianity that man shall leave his father and mother and become one flesh with his wife. For a time, it seemed paganism would be perpetually ascendant until the final destruction of the United States. But then, there have been rumors about the death of the Christian church since those crucial first three days when it was established.

Certainly, red state governors have lately felt emboldened to begin countering Pride programming in a way they hadn’t in the past. Tennessee, Indiana, Alabama, Utah, and Arkansas have all officially declared that in their states, June will not be a celebration of deviant sexual behavior but of the nuclear family and marital faithfulness (homosexual unions are notoriously much more open to other sexual partners than heterosexual ones).

While it’s too soon to know for sure why Mr. and Mrs. America have soured on the rainbow displays, Proverbs also has a good word for our corporate titans — Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.

Former HelloFresh contractor Joshua Garrison said on X that he has delivered thousands of orders for the company and described a corporate culture more concerned with enforcing ideological conformity than with compensating the workers responsible for getting meals to customers’ doors.

“The audits were run by an upper-management ‘boss babe’ who walked the floor pushing crystal therapies and demanding pronoun discipline,” he wrote. “The employees mumbled the magic words and went home with pitiful paychecks…That was the culture two years before the ad. The ad is what happens when that culture stops hiding.”

In fact, the incident has drawn attention to previous occasions where HelloFresh signaled that they aren’t interested in Republicans as customers. In April, DoorDash driver and grandmother Sharon Simmons delivered McDonald’s to the White House to celebrate the “no tax on tips” legislation her company had supported. HelloFresh clapped back, “We considered dropping off a HelloFresh box at a very famous house (painted white)…but we didn’t want to overwhelm anyone with ‘step 1: preheat oven.’”

Many an arrogant executive has discovered that while they may be experts at profit-and-loss sheets, they are poor prophets of where public sentiment is headed. And mistaking elite fashions for permanent consensus could cost them dearly.

Customers have rediscovered that their purchases are a vote that they cast every time they open their wallets. And if they don’t find it especially appetizing to be pitched dinner ingredients via allusions to feces and sodomy, they can easily shop elsewhere.

In fact, new technological advances are a help here as well. I asked ChatGPT, “Please give me a list of meal delivery companies that have not participated in Pride month.”

It gave me a long list, complete with reviews on food quality, packaging convenience, and preparation difficulty. Within minutes, our family was all signed up to a new meal service without a moment’s inconvenience or so much as a week of missed meals.

God bless the free market.

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Megan Basham is a reporter for The Daily Wire and a frequent contributor to Morning Wire. In her previous role as an entertainment editor and podcast co-host for World Magazine, she interviewed numerous A-list celebrities. She has also written for The Wall Street Journal, National Review, and Townhall. Her book, Beside Every Successful Man, was published by Random House.