电子榨菜 diàn zǐ zhà cài
The videos your meal is not complete without.
The short answer
CasualNow commonChecked November 2026
Dianzi zhacai — “electronic pickled vegetables” — is the comfort show or video you put on while eating, every single time. Like the real pickle beside the rice, the meal feels incomplete without it.
In a chat
- 琦琦 Qiqi
你吃饭的时候看什么？
What do you watch while you eat?
- 灯灯 Dengdeng
一部老剧，看了十遍了，是我的电子榨菜。
An old show I've seen ten times. It's my digital pickles.
- 琦琦 Qiqi
我也是！没有电子榨菜吃不下饭。
Me too! I can't eat without my mealtime show.
In the Dengdeng app, Dengdeng and his friends text you in Chinese every day, at your level.
How to reply
推荐一下你的电子榨菜！
Tell me your mealtime show!
When not to use it
- It is for light shows you half watch. If you call a film someone loves 电子榨菜, it can sound like you call it shallow.
What it means
榨菜 is a salty, crunchy pickle of mustard stems — the cheap, reliable side that turns a plain bowl of rice into a meal. The electronic version is whatever you queue up when you eat alone: a sitcom you have rewatched four times, a two-hour video essay, a stranger quietly cooking in the countryside. Nobody watches it closely. Nobody eats without it.
The metaphor is exact. Zhacai is not the point of the meal — the rice is — but eat without it and something is missing. Dianzi zhacai is just as load-bearing: the food is fine, the show is nothing special, and the combination is the only version of lunch that works.
How people use it
The word slots into the ritual vocabulary of eating: 吃饭必备电子榨菜, “digital pickles are essential at mealtimes”. Asking for recommendations is a standard conversation opener — 求电子榨菜推荐 — and a good answer gets praised as 下饭, “goes well with rice”.
That last word is the local quality scale. A 下饭 drama is not high art; it is smooth, undemanding, and perfectly watchable between bites. The habit pairs naturally with dazi-style low-commitment companionship: where a meal buddy shares your table, dianzi zhacai shares your screen.
Where it comes from
The coinage spread across Chinese platforms in 2022, when eating alone with a screen had become the default meal format for a generation of students and office workers. By the end of that year it was on roundups of the year's internet words, and brands were already borrowing it for ads.
Its staying power comes from saying something quietly true: the pickles are not about taste, and the video is not about watching. Both are about making a solo meal feel like an occasion. That is why the word has outlived the specific shows people first ate it with.
In use
2 examples吃饭没有电子榨菜，这顿饭吃得一点灵魂都没有。
Eating without your digital pickles — this meal has no soul at all.
求推荐下饭的电子榨菜，最近的剧都看完了。
Recommendations for with-rice digital pickles, please — I've run out of shows.
The characters
Explore individuallyelectricity; lightning
child; here a suffix for “of the digital age”
to press; to squeeze
vegetable; side dish
Individual character meanings do not always explain the meaning of the whole word.
Sources
This guide is original Dengdeng editorial content, offered under CC BY-SA 4.0. The linked dictionary entries adapt CC-CEDICT under the same license.