Jennifer Aniston is no stranger to inspiring people with her lifestyle. Back in the mid-’90s, fans — and some fellow sitcom stars like Debra Messing — went crazy over “the Rachel” haircut she sported on Friends. And with the 53-year-old actress looking like she hasn’t aged a day since the classic comedy aired its last episode on NBC in 2004, it’s no surprise that everyone is obsessed with knowing her food and fitness habits. One recipe that’s being credited to Aniston is for a salad, which TikTok users claim was the one eaten regularly by the actress behind the scenes of Friends, and she had something to say about the viral salad that bears her name.
Different videos featuring the “Jennifer Aniston Salad” have garnered a combined nearly 60 million views on TikTok. The recipe calls for bulgur, diced cucumbers, fresh parsley, fresh mint, red onion, garbanzo beans, crumbled feta cheese, and pistachios. The videos all claim that this was the salad eaten by Jennifer Aniston and her pals Courteney Cox and Lisa Kudrow every day on the set of Friends. However, during a recent interview with Shape, Aniston has some disappointing news for fans looking to duplicate their lunch habits:
I'm sorry, I feel like I'm disappointing everybody, but that's not my salad. It looks delicious, but it's not the salad that I had on Friends.
She unfortunately might be right about disappointing some fans who hope that eating this for lunch for ten years might have the same magic anti-aging effects as those bestowed on the Friends actresses. One popular TikTok video of the recipe even asks if this will make her arms look like Aniston’s. (It won’t.)
Back in 2010, Courteney Cox told the LA Times that her favorite ritual on the set of Friends was eating a “doctored Cobb Salad” for lunch with her co-stars every day. Jennifer Aniston told Shape she’s not sure how that viral recipe was credited to her, but that the one going around TikTok is “totally different” from what the actresses who played Rachel, Monica, and Phoebe ate.
Their salad, Jennifer Aniston said, consisted of shredded lettuce, chicken, egg whites, a couple of garbanzo beans, bacon, and a basic vinaigrette. Sometimes things got crazy and they added pecorino cheese from a nearby Italian restaurant. Yeah, I’d say that’s pretty wildly different from the recipe making the rounds on social media, and it also seems a lot easier to throw together. The TikTok-famous salad sure does look good though:
Well, if anything was going to motivate me to attempt bulger, this recipe just might do it! Jennifer Aniston has opened up lately about other aspects of that time in her life. While appearing on the series finale of The Ellen DeGeneres Show, the Murder Mystery 2 star recalled that the end of the sitcom came at the same time as her divorce with Brad Pitt.
Being confronted with those memories was part of what made the cast’s recent reunion unexpectedly hard. In 2021, Jennifer Aniston gathered with Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, David Schwimmer, Matthew Perry, and Matt LeBlanc for Friends: The Reunion. Aniston said it was “so creepy” how everything was frozen in time, and she was taken back to 2004, remembering how different they all were back then. If you want to time travel back to that era, all ten seasons of Friends, including the reunion, are available for streaming with an HBO Max subscription.
