Logan Moffitt has never been more hydrated.
“Sometimes you need to eat an entire cucumber,” said Mr. Moffitt, a 23-year-old Ottawa-based content creator, in a video of a cucumber salad recipe he shared on TikTok early last month. Since then, he has posted dozens of videos of himself making a quick meal out of a simple English, or hothouse, cucumber to genuine fanfare. One of his posts has already drawn nearly 27 million views.
Now, fans on the internet simply call him “cucumber guy.”
Mr. Moffitt’s viewers seem entranced by his ability to take an affordable ingredient and twist it into myriad flavor combinations, encouraging people to riff in their own kitchens along the way. With a whole cucumber sliced on a mandoline, he has concocted jalapeño-popper salads, salt and vinegar salads, and smoked salmon with everything-bagel seasoning salads in a deli quart container filled to the brim. After a few minutes of vigorous shaking, he digs into his creations with a pair of chopsticks.
Cucumbers have been Mr. Moffitt’s favorite piece of produce for some time. “I’ve been eating them like candy since I was a kid,” he said in a phone interview on Tuesday.
Before his newfound virality, Mr. Moffitt, who began cooking for his family at 14, had primarily used his TikTok account for laid-back cooking videos, drawing inspiration from television hosts like the English chef Jamie Oliver and the popular YouTube cook Laura Vitale. But he cites the Korean cooking doyenne Maangchi as most responsible for his cucumber quest.
There’s more to these videos’ appeal than the seasonality of cucumbers in the Northern Hemisphere.
For Amanda Brennan, who grew up in the era of Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig and other diet fads and services, being offered a cucumber as a snack was, for much of her life, code for weight loss.
Now, “they’re being presented as something that you should enjoy,” said Ms. Brennan, a trends strategist in New York City, rather than something “you’re forced to eat” to lose weight.
Ms. Brennan, 38, who came across Mr. Moffitt’s cucumber salad videos three weeks ago, said she equates his endless riffs on the simple English cucumber to a meme: a set template (the cucumber) and a formula that can be repeated, ad infinitum, with variance. In other words, one recipe, infinite possibilities.
“As other people are riffing on the recipe with their own takes,” she said, it “gets passed from person to person and changed along the way.”
Most of the comments on Mr. Moffitt’s videos praise the recipe and his cooking methods.
That said, a key gripe among fans of the “cucumber guy” is that he overfills the deli quart containers he prepares his salads in, surely leading to an uneven distribution of seasoning … right? (Mr. Moffitt said he just shakes it “super well.”)
Ryan Foster, a barista in Belfast, Northern Ireland, said he has eaten an entire cucumber every day since he first saw a video of Mr. Moffitt shaking up a quart container of smoked salmon, cream cheese, everything-bagel seasoning and a whole sliced English cucumber about three weeks ago. Before that, he hadn’t eaten a cucumber at home in two to three years, he said.
But Mr. Foster, 26, had to visit three different shops before he finally found a cucumber — they were sold out almost everywhere. “The U.K. is going through a very big heat wave at the moment,” he said. “Everyone just wants to eat something light.”
It’s also been hot stateside. “Cucumber sales tend to remain steady throughout the year,” said Charlotte Myer, the senior vice president of merchandising at the New York City-based online grocer FreshDirect, but in July the retailer recorded a 172 percent increase in sales of organic greenhouse cucumbers over the past year.
Time will tell whether the craze will outlast cucumber season. For now, Mr. Moffitt is posting as many of these videos as he can — and eating two to three whole cucumbers a day now to make that happen. His next salad target? A Bloody Mary version.
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