CHICAGO, Illinois — The latest food challenge has no recipe, no restaurant, and no winner, and it has taken over a great many kitchens, a great many phones, and, in at least one reported case, an entire Saturday morning at a diner on the North Side. The idea, in full, is that you take two foods, you line them up, and you decide, by the smell of the room and the sound of the person next to you, whether the combination is delicious or disgusting. The emojis do the teasing. The palate does the damage.

The trend, which has been spreading for a few months now, asks participants to guess, before tasting, whether a given pairing will land as a revelation or a mistake. The combinations are the whole point: grapes with peanuts, strawberries with balsamic vinegar, lemon with cinnamon, a slice of bread with a smear of peanut butter and a dash of salt. Some of them, the people who have tried them will tell you, and this is said with a great deal of quiet shock, are good. Some of them, the same people will tell you, are a thing you do not do a second time, and you do not explain, and you do not, under any circumstances, film a second person doing.

"I bit into it thinking it was a mistake and it was not. That is the whole trend. It is the thing where the mistake is the part you did not expect."

THE EMOJI COMBO CARD: DELICIOUS OR DISGUSTING

  • 🍇 + 🥜 (grape, peanut): Delicious, by a wide and quiet margin. The crunchy-salty-sweet is the one that converts people. It is the one people come back to.
  • 🍓 + 🍷 (strawberry, balsamic): Delicious, but the room has to be willing. This is the one that needs a glass and a moment.
  • 🍋 + 🥨 (lemon, pretzel): Delicious, and the one that should probably be on a bag of pretzels and is not.
  • 🧀 + 🍌 (cheese, banana): Disgusting. The room is not willing. The room was never going to be willing.
  • 🥒 + 🍫 (pickle, chocolate): Disgusting, but the one that gets a second bite from exactly one person, and then a third from no one.
  • 🍞 + 🥜 + 🧂 (bread, peanut, salt): Delicious, and the one that makes a person sit down very slowly and not say anything for a while.

A food scientist who has not, to date, been approached by a brand to make the thing official, offered the only honest description of why the trend works, which is that the human tongue is, for the most part, a very good guesser and a very bad judge, and that the gap between the two is where the whole thing lives. “The nose tells you one thing,” the scientist said, “and the mouth tells you another, and the whole trend is the moment those two disagree and you have to pick a side in front of a person you like.”

At the diner on the North Side, a high school kid who was working the shift off of school was asked, for the record, whether she would ever put one of the combinations on the menu. “The grape and peanut, maybe,” she said. “I would not put the pickle and chocolate on the menu. I would not put the pickle and chocolate anywhere. I have tried the pickle and chocolate. I am telling you this for the record and then I am not doing it again.”

The trend has no sponsor, no official rules, and no end in sight. It has, in the time it has been running, converted a small number of people, permanently shocked a slightly larger number, and produced at least one video of a man eating a grape and a peanut with the specific seriousness of a man doing a very important thing.

At press time, the grape and peanut was still the combination people were coming back to, the pickle and chocolate was still the combination people were apologizing for, and a diner on the North Side was still deciding, with a great deal of quiet, whether the lemon and pretzel was a menu item or a personal statement.