Can You Really Eat Crocs? An Investigation
For years, an urban legend has held that Crocs can be survival food. VICE now reports the final word on whether you can—or should—munch the divisive clog. ...
It’s been 20 years since Crocs debuted at a Florida boat show. Ever since, the shoes’ squishy, marshmallow-esque form has graced small-town streets and Balenciaga runways alike, inciting equal parts adoration and vitriol—but rarely indifference. They’re an enduring Y2K classic! Their ubiquity is obvious, but one aspect of our collective Crocs fixation remains a mystery: Why are people so obsessed with trying to eat them? ...
I can’t remember where I first heard that you could eat Crocs. Maybe a childhood friend? It’s an urban legend that feels like part of the innate, Jungian collective unconscious. I’ve watched it circulate at playgrounds, frat parties, and on the internet for over a decade ...
One of the earliest online traces about eating Crocs is a 2006 Straight Dope message board post from a user named @Bobotheoptimist, who alleged that they emailed a Crocs representative about the shoes’ edibility and shared the company’s purported response. It was a simple albeit pot-stirring reply, as it acknowledged the possibility that Crocs could have some nourishing material. “Although Crocs are non-toxic, there is little, if any, nutritional value in the material we use,” the rep replied, explaining, “[The edibility] is a rumor, said to have started with a camp counselor who boiled a Croc, and cut it into pieces, substituting the actual shoe with candy before he fed it to the camp children.” ...
There must have been something in the air because 2006 was also the year my former co-worker Ian Burke, then age 11, ate a portion of a Croc. “To my knowledge, Crocs are the only shoe that's safe to eat,” Burke told me. He, too, had grown up with an almost intuitive sense that Crocs could be wilderness survival food, so when that one kid with armpit hair in his friend group said they should all eat one, he didn’t think twice. “I ripped off the strap since I still needed to be able to wear [the rest of the shoes] home that night, and we cut it down the middle and ate it. It was super chewy and hard to get down, kind of like eating a really tough piece of Styrofoam.”
How did he feel afterward?
“Potent.”
By far, the most in-depth account about eating a Croc is a 2016 article by Gunnar Lundberg, who documented his experience for his St. Louis Park, Minnesota high school’s newspaper. “I was trying to get my article quota in for the semester, and I hadn’t written for their ‘Diversions’ category yet,” he told me by Zoom from Scotland, where he’s currently in graduate school. Lundberg skewered and weighed down his Croc in a pot, boiled it for 90 minutes, and consumed “two normal, steak-sized bites” with a sriracha dipping sauce. “I didn’t have any noticeable digestive discomfort,” he said. “I could feel it linger in my throat, but then it was never to be seen or heard from again. Unless it’s still in me.” ...
