Mayonnaise is Versatile and Affordable. Why Do So Many People Hate It?

Dionne Warwick hates mayonnaise.

Earlier this month, the legendary singer retweeted a post from mayonnaise brand Hellmann's asking if anyone else ever craved mayo. "Please do not start," Warwick wrote. Five days later, a fan tagged her in a tweet with a picture of a wine glass inexplicably filled with mayonnaise. "Please do not involve me, baby," Warwick replied.

She's hardly alone in this fight. Mayo haters are legion, inspiring Amazon apparel, heated Reddit threads, and a Buzzfeed article titled "23 Things You'll Only Understand if you F*cking Hate Mayo." At the time of this writing, Warwick's anti-mayo tweets collectively received nearly 9,500 likes. (Requests to Dionne Warwick's press agent for comment on this story were unanswered.)

"It's disgusting, it's so gloppy, and people just slather it on," says Sean O'Connor, a comedian in Los Angeles, CA and fellow mayo hater. "There's zero subtlety to it. It's just kind of overwhelming as a condiment for me."

And yet, mayonnaise doesn't just endure; it thrives. It's both condiment and key ingredient in everything from elote to steak sauce to chocolate cake. In 2021, the global market for mayonnaise was $11.8 billion, according to market research firm IMARC. This far-reaching fanbase could fill a Dionne Warwick stadium tour.

Why, then, is mayonnaise so divisive?

It's a centuries-old question. Since inception, mayonnaise has divided families, antagonized communities, and escalated rivalries.

Historians trace the origin of mayo all the way to the 1756 siege of Port Mahon on the Mediterranean island Minorca. By some accounts, mayonnaise was created by the French chef of the prevailing Duke de Richelieu as part of a meal celebrating France's victory in battle, and was named mahonnaise after Port Mahon. Others claim that de Richelieu's chef learned how to turn eggs into a creamy condiment from Minorcans and so, since the island is now part of Spain, mayonnaise should actually be considered Spanish. (Unsurprisingly, this theory has enraged generations of francophiles.)

Nationalism aside, mayonnaise elicits a decidedly visceral response from its detractors. In a 2017 Popular Science article titled, "Mayonnaise is Disgusting, and Science Agrees," Kendra Pierre-Louis explores whether mayo hate derives from humans' evolutionary aversion to anything resembling death or decay. Seriously.

"Its viscous quality is the sort of thickness that you'd get from fluid oozing out of a rotted carcass as anyone who has ever poked a rotted squirrel with a stick can attest," Pierre-Louis writes. "Disgust also tends to align strongly with our revulsion about bodily fluids."

Bill Oakley, a Los Angeles-based TV writer and food Instagrammer, vehemently disagrees. "Blue cheese reminds me of decay. Mayonnaise is as pure and clean as the freshly fallen snow."

Mayonnaise is also crucial to many beloved regional American dishes, Oakley points out, like chicken salad and the tomato-mayo sandwiches with cult-like status across the American South.

Matt Lardie, a food and travel writer in Durham, North Carolina, agrees. "Here in the South, it's almost seen as a non-negotiable seasoning, much like salt and pepper. Mayonnaise is the key to so many classic southern dishes — potato salad, pimento cheese, deviled eggs, tomato pie, and yes, the tomato sandwich — that it would be unthinkable for a proper southern kitchen or pantry to be without it."

For those who love it, mayonnaise serves a vital purpose.

"Mayonnaise is the antidote to a dry sandwich," says Oakley. "Can you imagine having a turkey sandwich with leftover turkey from Thanksgiving without mayonnaise? What kind of person doesn't put mayonnaise on that?"

Jay C. Williams, a writer in Norwalk, Connecticut, is exactly that individual. He describes himself as "averse" if not entirely opposed to mayonnaise. "It's fine for a binding agent, but I'm not putting straight mayo on a turkey sandwich."

To some, mayonnaise is unpleasant. To others, "mayo" can be shorthand for blandly clueless or criminally uncool. In the 1977 film "Annie Hall," when the titular character asks for a pastrami sandwich with mayonnaise, it's played for a laugh: the joke is that no self-respecting Jew would put mayo on pastrami. More recently, in advance of the 2020 presidential election, detractors nicknamed candidate and former mayor Pete Buttigieg "Mayo Pete," citing his perceived blandness, whiteness, and lack of support among nonwhite voters. "I get the white part," Buttigieg told The New York Times.

Oakley believes that such pop cultural portrayals lead some people who enjoy mayonnaise to stay quiet.

"Mayonnaise haters are about 25 percent of the population, but they're very vocal," he says, "I also think a fair number of them are posers. They have this idea of mayonnaise as a symbol of whitebread American mediocrity. But mayonnaise is not mediocre. The idea that anyone would consider having a BLT without mayonnaise is just repulsive."