> Then Pharaoh also called for the wise men and the sorcerers, and they also, the magicians of Egypt, did the same with their secret arts. For each one threw down his staff and they turned into serpents. But Aaron’s staff swallowed up their staffs.
- Exodus 7:1-12 (NIV)
Many moons ago I had a girlfriend who worked on an nationally broadcast afternoon show where they often had guest chefs demonstrating dishes, so I would come home from my thankless PhD work to eat Michelin-starred food from a lunchbox. Overall not so bad.
Not sure what the quote has to do with anything here, but it's a as good an opportunity as ever to say that large parts of the "Old Testament" draw most of its inspiration from the code of Hammurabi ("an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth"), the Epic of Gilgamesh (which gave us, notably, the story of the deluge, and the dark role of the serpent) and Ancient Egypt, to which it owes, among many others, the concept of eternal life and the idea that man was made in God's image.
To be "in God's image" was one of the titles of Pharaoh.
And about the staff: early depictions of Jesus often have him holding a magic wand [0], as he was considered by followers and ennemies alike to be a magician. The "Three Wise Men" or "Three Kings" (?!) that show up at his birth are just "magi" (magicians) in the original text [1].
If truth is defined as beliefs which lead one to make decisions that cause you/your society to thrive, this is a good thing (that the Old Testament has similarities to other major works). Implies a kind of evolutionary algorithm for truth. Likely implies these stories are more true because they’re more tried and tested. Societies who believed them became strong.
If truth is about repeated experimentation or journalistic records (a very new concept in history of writing - less than 500 years), then perhaps this is of concern.
I accept both definitions, but when they’re in conflict, the former tends to be more end-to-end, while the latter tends to overfit to the moment. Mostly because data is scarce and life is a very complex distributed system. On the other hand, the former changes slowly while the latter perhaps keeps up with the pace of change.
Except the point of life is probably to thrive more than to collect a list of facts. So when in conflict, I lean towards the former. Personal choice tho. I expect most of HN leans the other way.
> If truth is defined as beliefs which lead one to make decisions that cause you/your society to thrive
This is 'metaphorical truth' to be precise.
But it's only a part of the virality of memes, not the whole.
Propagation can occur not just due to usefulness, but to other factors such as simplicity/replicability, human susceptibility / 'key in a lock' etc.
If survival was purely metaphorical truth, then all surviving lifeforms would be 'the most true' (including viruses being 'true' to us). Which can be argued, at a philosophical level - But then we've expanded the definition so much as to lose relevant meaning at the pragmatic level.
I gave up tablets and pills of all kinds a long time ago now, but, at the time, if god himself had popped up to tell me something, it wouldn't have been a huge surprise.
That’s true, but the article also explains it isn’t nefarious; she had a stalker (after past horrible trauma), and was terrified, so replaced the live audiences with extras. It just happened to work so well it caught on and became a mainstay of sitcoms after that.
Still happening in 2022, though hopefully the outrage and changes after this incident avoids most future ones. Even the description in the article is really sad.
Wasn't there some horrible story about the number of animals killed in the filming of Homeward Bound or some similar movie? I simply cannot comprehend the callousness of people towards animals back then. I guess our cultures are simply too different, but it genuinely seems like people saw all animals as "things" until, like, the 1950s or something like that. What the heck?
> I guess our cultures are simply too different, but it genuinely seems like people saw all animals as "things" until, like, the 1950s or something like that.
There’s a weird disconnect where people ignore or are wilfully ignorant of cruelty to animals in industrial food production but are sensitive to it in virtually every other context. I saw a woman the other day who was tending to an injured pigeon and had called animal welfare people to come tend to it. Meanwhile, millions of chickens live in appalling conditions and die horrible deaths en masse.
I am genuinely unsure where this disconnect comes from. I was the same for most of my life but a few years ago, I started thinking about the animals I was eating and then I couldn’t eat them any more.
I don’t begrudge people their compassion. A few nights ago I went outside to put some stuff on the barbecue and my wife was in the backyard, concerned for the fate of a female cardinal that had flown into our sunroom window. It was stunned and couldn’t fly. Its mate was worriedly flitting through nearby bushes. “That’s so sad,” my wife said. “Yes,” I agreed, and then I put her skewers of meat on the barbecue.
"Cruelty" is a rhetoric word because its meaning is caught between the classical "deliberate use of pain" and the new "neglect, indifference towards another's pain" and of course, that discrepancy is fully exploited. What livestock beasts suffer is purely for practical reasons.
>I am genuinely unsure where this disconnect comes from
1. Empathy is a base emotional response triggered by nearby animals, not a rational/moral one.
2. Empathy is also an evolutionary tool that "happened" in (some) humans to help survive situations that require some sort of cooperation, like harsh winters. Anthropomorphization is an associated bug, not a feature.
2b. Being disconnected from nature and reality is the #1 cause for such disorder; you don't see any kind of vegetarianism in rural people.
3. People with a brain realize that eating meat is important.
4. People with a bigger brain also realize that that eating other animals is the prerogative of power: humans have simply won the animal kingdom's oldest game and are enjoying its spoils. Things wouldn't (and shouldn't) be different if positions were reversed.
It is mostly just proximity and framing. A hurt wild animal is alive and right in front of you. Meat from the grocery store is a prepackaged product that isn’t mentally associated with the bloody process behind the scenes required to get it there. The commercial aspect is pretty dependent on this distancing.
Case-in-point: I once stayed in a small town in Morocco for a few weeks. There wasn’t a grocery store nearby, just a market, and if you wanted chicken, they killed it in front of you. Needless to say, being directly confronted with the process…I didn’t eat meat the entire time.
To make it worse: it's not millions of chickens, that live in appaling conditions and die horrible deaths.
We kill around 50 billion chickens every year.
That is 137 million chickens every day. Chickens that are used for eating are alive for around 28 to 42 days. That are 3.8 to 5.7 billion chicken on any day.
The numbers might be slightly off, because chicken raised for eggs are alive longer (around a year).
Chickens bred for eating ("meat birds") often can't live much past when they'd be slaughtered without massive health issues. They've been turned into freaks.
One whale takes much more time and energy than the equivalent food that comes from chicken. Much, much, much more efficient to eat chicken. Whales would entirely disappear if harvested at the same similar rates calories consumed.
Mencius, a thinker from over 300 BC, once said: "A gentleman, in his attitude towards animals, having seen them alive, cannot bear to see them die; having heard their cries, cannot bear to eat their flesh. Therefore, a gentleman keeps his distance from the kitchen."
The background of this statement is as follows: King Xuan of Qi once saw a man leading an ox to be slaughtered. Moved by the ox's sorrowful appearance, he was deeply distressed and ordered the butcher to spare the ox. However, the butcher informed him that the ox was intended for sacrificial rites. It must be noted that in ancient times, the two most important affairs of the state were sacrifices and warfare. Sparing the ox would have violated the moral principles of the time. In desperation, King Xuan came up with the idea: "Why not replace this ox with a sheep?" Later, the more he reflected on it, the more absurd he found his own decision. He then sought advice from Mencius, who uttered this statement in response.
Mencius believed that what distinguishes humans from beasts is humanity, meaning that humans treat all things with kindness, but human goodness is limited. Therefore, a gentleman practices kindness by helping those in front of him, unable to extend it to all.
If the little bird was tasty it might have gone on the bbq too.
We humans are capable of empathizing with different creatures differently. Some people have their empathy dial set up so high that they anthropomorphize plants. Some have it set so low they're psychopaths. Most functional people are in the middle.
Personally, keeping chickens has almost completely put me off empathy with them. Roosters are assholes. Into the pot with you.
What do you mean, in many places around the world we kill people society or state considers assholes, including US.
Then we can discuss where is the cutoff line for enough assholishness to go for a slaughter and where something less severe, but practice is here and not going anywhere.
Whether you feel empathy to someone/something or not, is really quite different from whether you have moral obligations to it. I do not think I have moral obligations to a chicken, but then again, I think everyone agrees the chicken has no moral obligations to me - jokes about asshole roosters aside, I don't think you really think the rooster has wronged you by being as it is.
Maybe moral obligations can be one-way, but then only temporarily as I see it. Someone who's sleepwalking, or a baby, don't really have moral obligations to me, but they will when they wake up / grow up.
> I am genuinely unsure where this disconnect comes from
Much easier to sympathise with a live animal that looks like an animal than with a brown rectangle covered in sauce. Also much easier to sympathise with the plight of one entity rather than millions: a GoFundMe for a relatable charity case rather than helping the billions of people worldwide who need it
If you travel around the world a bit, ie more remote parts of south east Asia, you will see this attitude towards animals is often still well and alive.
Most people think they have developed their principles with reflection and consideration, but in my view most moral principles are post-facto rationalisations used to justify whatever-it-is the person wanted to do. So, excuses to justify the already decided upon action, rather than anything to determine the parameters of action, eg 'the money was too good', 'it smelled so good', etc.
Anyway, in answer to why people were callous back then and are so concerned now, I'd say nothing has changed, except what people view the norm to be. What seemed like 'callousness' was possibly considered 'practical' (or 'unsquemish'). For most moral relativists, whether they project 'practicality' or 'kindly concern' is simply an output of what they understand their social norms to be, rather than anything based in genuinely considered and applied principles.
I remember reading about a man being accused of mistreating his donkey in somewhere like 1835 Brittan. The case went to a court, but I'm fuzzy on the details.
We also have "No one was harmed in the making of this video" and similar, which has become so prevalent that its absence is sometime used to infer that someone was indeed injured or killed in the clip.
> I've seen clips on Reddit where animals are harmed for engagement. Usually "nature is brutal" type clips, where one animal kills another.
Social media is like TV and cinema before regulations. It is full of cruelty, and all kinds of abuse to animals but also to other people. (Recently there was a death related to this).
Civilization does not happens without effort from citizens and lawmakers.
When Instagram introduced reels, I started to get exposed to these weird and horrible clips of people 'rescuing' sick and abused animals, and begging for donations. I don't know for certain, but there's lots of clues that these accounts are engineering these encounters. Seeing these clips is genuinely distressing, and it's hard to make Instagram stop showing them. Just another way social media is causing real harm to add to the list, I guess.
Western YouTubers often say something like this article title whenever they get a large amount of food for a review or something. Rhett and Link say that almost every video.
I wish they put this on screen in Germany, too (though in German, maybe, instead of Japanese). In cooking shows, I always fear they throw the food in the gargabe. With that note on the screen, if they do throw it in the garbage, at least they would be evil liars. Which might be less likely, and so I could feel better.
Regardless of disclaimer, I’m sure the food cooked on TV going to waste is not the norm - dozens of people are on set when filming any of these shows, and they’re all curious to try the dish.
And also in Youtube "I ate every dish on the menu at restaurant XYZ". I really like these, but man do I feel bad afterwards. Please tell me nothing went to waste!
As noted sometimes the staff can't eat it, heck sometimes you might not want to eat it. That has to happen pretty often.
I worked at a company with a particularly sensitive HR team who would host pizza parties now and then, but they'd only order "weird" pizzas and I guess they liked it, but they were quite miffed when people stopped coming / didn't want to eat some pizza with some kind of fake cheese and unrecognizable veggies.
They were really miffed when my boss ordered our team pizza on their pizza day too, suddenly very concerned about waste...
Many years ago, I was on a training course, all typical engineers, and the guy who had organized it, a foodie, had ordered the day's spread from a very expensive and fancy catering place. Skeptical engineers eyeing the spread, which included such things as "cold orange soup"; one of them said "I should have brought my rabbit".
The message was clearly received. Next day and subsequent ones, an equally high quality spread of actual engineer food was tabled. But with no rabbit to eat it up, I think a lot of the first day's spread was wasted.
This was during the pre-2K tech boom years (this dates me!) Really fancy catering at (my) work is a distant memory now.
Vegan cheese is an abomination. Even if one is vegan they shouldn't eat that crap, just eat something else instead. You can make much better vegan food if you focus on trying to make vegetables good versus torturing them into a facsimile of animal products.
US cheese-in-tube is an abomination (I’m French ;-) ) and my Italian neighbor thinks the same about pinanle-fat-dough pizzas.
As for every product type there’s good and bad. I love this one[0], it’s made by a bunch of artisan chiefs near my city. Ingredients: soy, cajun nuts, ferments. Probable process: cook, smash, add ferment, wait.
Beside tradition offense there’s no reasons to restrain ourselves torturing-with-ferments lipid products that didn’t came out from udders. Fermented products are delicious and cooking has always co-evolved with technology, product availability and customs, why should someone restrain from experimenting?
I share the ultra processed disdain but to be honest there’s as much UPF in "fascimile" that some of their counterpart. That non-vegan-milk cheese has 16 ingredients in it[1].
Eh, I find vegan cheese very variable. I never seek it out but experience it relatively often. Sometimes it's tasty and chewy. Sometimes it's a bland monstrosity. I don't know why.
If you haven't make shakshuka yet, it's worth a shot. It's one of my favorite places to use lots and lots of feta. It's not normally vegan since it's topped with an egg, but that's easy enough to remove and forget. Eat it with toasted pita.
I thought I liked vegan pizzas, having only tasted the restaurant varieties which either don't have cheese or have some sort of savoury dressing instead. Then I tried a vegan frozen pizza, and I found out what people hate about them. Some gray slimy substance which apparently someone, somewhere, thought was similar to melted cheese.
Whole Foods is an offender here. They were selling a slice of fresh vegan pizza, which I assumed just had vegetables on it. Instead it had this obscene goopy “vegan cheese” that had more in common with mochi than cheese. (Yes, you can find pizzas with mochi on it in Japan, but they don’t call it cheese!)
More places should have compost recycling that includes food waste. That gives food waste somewhere to go that isn't the trash. And it turns yard and food waste into compost so organics stay in the environment.
I don't understand why people will have these stupid preconceptions about food which normally you unlearn during childhood. Complaining about food without tasting it is stupid and childish. Of course if you try something and it doesn't suit your tastes then it's fine to complain, but dismissing something offhand because you aren't familiar with it is rather narrow-minded.
I used to work in an R&D type environment as a mobile developer. Once in a while, people would go into a room nearby to test bread for the stores. Of course, they got whole loaves but only needed to taste a little, so I got free bread. Didn't have a big enough freezer at the time though, so I couldn't get as much as I wanted to.
And I used to live with an Indonesian lady (student housing, but she was in her 40's, I think she worked for the embassy), she had a friend or relative that had a restaurant and would sometimes come home with foodstuffs like a bag of cooked chicken or fish rolls.
This is similar to the Japanese concept of Shitsurei (失礼, しつれい). It is of course impossible to comprehend this unique idea that no other world culture has ever conceived of. What a remarkable society!
I did chuckle a bit, but the idea of mottainai is just way more prevalent within Japan, compared to Western countries. I can't speak for other Asian countries, but it's very easy to feel that compared to North America and Europe (places that I've lived in). Funnily, I've felt it in post-soviet countries as well, but that's coming from the feeling of scarcity in the beforetimes.
I’ve also lived in NA Europe and Japan and disagree with this sentiment.
“Don’t waste stuff” is taught by plenty of parents, people talk about using every bit of the buffalo in America. Everyone in my generation has the grandparent who threw nothing away.
There’s maybe more modern examples of cultural thrift in Japan due to the postwar experience compared to the US… but even then.
I feel like I’m talking to aliens when these discussions of “unique Japan” things come up that are, in my experience, plenty present abroad.
I don’t even think Japan is particularly that good about reuse and waste beyond its recycling programs!
Maybe I'm wrong, but from my personal experiences in NA and Europe, even though wasting is "frowned upon", there's no feeling of "guilt" with the action of "waste". Honestly, I'm not sure how to explain it.
To understand "generational" behavior it's helpful to understand the prevailing conditions at the time.
Obviously these become somewhat sweeping generalizations but they largely hold.
A concern either waste directly correlates to abundance. Countries with historical (ie post war) food insecurity treat food like it is precious. Even if it has since become abundant.
People who grow up with financial insecurity spend money very carefully, even if they now earn plenty.
These attitudes span generations. The attitude of parents often gets taught to children. Although in some cases a generation will "flip".
For example, the post war boom in births lead to a generation that had to compete for infrastructure all the time. There were limited school places, jobs, promotions etc. "Winning" became the driving force. Winners got rewarded, losers got left behind.
Their children (x-gen) refused to play the game. They prioritized family over work. They handed out trophies for "participation". They talk about "work / life" balance.
Each of us is a product of our upbringing. Some things we carry forward as important values. Others we actively discard as unwanted mistakes our parents made.
From my experience, the idea that you shouldn't waste things, and food in particular, is similar in Japan and France. That was even stronger with my grand-parents who lived through food scarcity during WWII in France.
US however seems pretty unique in its not caring about waste. Heck, it's really tough not waste food because all servings in restaurants are for 3 people so unless you bring everything in boxes you'll be wasting things.
Yes, in the same way I chuckle when I hear people (often practicing martial arts) talking about how "a Sensei" would be a word you can't translate, to talk about some kind of magical mentor...
This is why when you buy a book about mottainai in a Japanese bookstore, it comes with a detachable cover page, the bookstore gives you a cardboard cover so people can't see what you're reading, then puts the book in a plastic bag with a nice twist on top and then puts the bag in a branded paper bag.
Many Boomers may have heard something along the lines of "Many kids in Japan are starving and would love to have that food" even, bringing this somewhat full-circle.
Any waste as long as it's not plastic. Plastic's a free-for-all. There's really nothing you can't individually plastic wrap. An apple? Wrap it in plastic. A cookie? Plastic. A plastic straw? You can wrap that too.
This bugged me for a while but two things came to play for me:
- humidity and the generally mold-friendly conditions of Japan means that not doing wrapping of certain food in small packs means you’re risking food waste. And generally speaking food hygiene issues can be avoided
- if you look up how much plastic is actually needed to wrap something in plastic, it’s not that much material. A single Lego brick is more plastic than a loooooot of Saran wrap.
It’s good to reduce waste when possible, but I do get the health/food waste concerns. And to Japans credit, I’ve found that plastic packaging for like… products tends to be way less than equivalent plastic packaged products abroad in many cases IME. My Sony earbuds came entirely in cardboard packaging! No fancy thick printed box either, just some thin simple paper material.
I think the plastic food displays are due to high uncertainty avoidance, so patrons can see exactly what their meal looks like before ordering. Yes you could use real food but the hassle of periodically filling the display case with freshly cooked dishes would be silly.
Some American restaurants have real food displays, too. With a chilled display case and limited airflow (and choosing only meals that keep well - avoiding exhibition of garnishes or salads that wilt in hours), you can put the same dessert on display for days.
At the end, of course, you have to throw it away - it might not be safe for staff to eat by the point it's visibly decomposing from 3 feet away. I find that just knowing the food in the case is destined for the garbage to rankle, especially when I'm simultaneously looking at menu prices and wondering why the meal costs so much; it's interesting to learn that the Japanese make those meal displays out of plastic/wax for the same reason.
We should have more picture menus where every single menu item has a actual picture of the food served, instead of the guest trying to imagine the food based on often deceptive and flowery text descriptions.
Restaurants (at least in the US) have very strict standards about how long you can keep something at room temperature before you have to throw it away. Those standards are extremely conservative, and lead to a lot of food waste, but if I were on the staff I'd at least want to keep an eye on how long something has been sitting out. Those standards have just been beaten into me.
You also see that on a lot of fictional TV shows with dining scenes. Often nobody actually puts anything in their mouths. It was made hours ago while you were off shooting something else, and still more time while they got costumes, lights, makeup, etc. right (and for several takes). By the time film is rolling it has gotten quite gross.
(Assuming it was even food in the first place. Fake food often looks better and doesn't go off.)
This is the answer. The food is perfectly fine. It's fresh, there's catering on set, and it can be replaced as needed, unless it's something super unusual.
BUT if you eat the food in one shot you need to eat it in all the shots for continuity, so you can edit it together. Get ready to start barfing after 40 big bites of the same damn thing.
If you look closely, you'll also see the coffee/tea cups actors sip from are usually empty. Can't afford the risk of accidentally spilling liquid on the costume and delaying the shoot.
> If you look closely, you'll also see the coffee/tea cups actors sip from are usually empty. Can't afford the risk of accidentally spilling liquid on the costume and delaying the shoot.
If I were a prop-master (is that what it is called?) I've always thought that I'd just have a bag of plaster of paris handy. Then 30 minutes before going on set just dump some in the prop-cup with some water.
Sets quickly, density is about the same, physics of the cup should look convincing. Probably best for disposable cups though.
I assumed the drink cups were empty/opaque so there was no continuity problem. If you splice together different shots, but the liquid level bounces around, it could be distracting.
> If you look closely, you'll also see the coffee/tea cups actors sip from are usually empty. Can't afford the risk of accidentally spilling liquid on the costume and delaying the shoot.
Sometimes they are colored water, so you cannot drink but it still looks like a cocktail. Or at least that's how it was on the few movie sets I've been at.
One thing I noticed over and over, from cheap sitcoms to expensive blockbusters - when actors sip, they have liquid, but clearly the movement of glass to mouth is 'dishonest', as in too fast or too low for any liquid to actually make it into mouth. No swallowing movement of throat neither.
I guess its subconscious - they know they are not going to actually drink it, they focus their mind on other aspects of acting, so this part leaves them not faking it well.
If you see it once, you can't stop noticing it elsewhere afterwards, beware.
When I was a kid, my dad and I were watching a cooking show together. I asked him "what do they do with all the food they make", and then, as if on cue, the host said, "In case you're wondering, the staff eat all the food we make here." My dad and I looked at each other with a silent look of "whoa".
It's why I have a hard time watching some of the Gordon Ramsey shock cooking shows. He'll take a barely over or under-done filet and toss it in the bin to make a point. That's just not OK
Having spent my first couple years right out of college at a production company that shot a lot of ads for a grocery chain I can assure you that I took as much food home with me as possible
Quick and very fussy question I'm hoping someone with native-level Japanese could comment on.
My inclination (as a non-native learner) would be to translate 美味しくいただきました as "the staff enjoyed it later". It's both slightly more formal and elegant-sounding than the comparatively coarse "ate", and captures the pleasure implied by 美味しく ("deliciously"). I would expect plain old "ate" if they used 食べました.
Of course, I'm not a professional translator or native speaker! It’s possible I'm over-indexing on the textbook knowledge I have of the language and in practice, to native Japanese eyes and ears, the things I think I'm seeing aren't really there.
IMO the bottom line is Japanese-English language pair don't translate natural AND verbatim at the same time. Either you're going to paraphrase heavily, e.g. "leftovers were shared with crews", "caution wet floor", or give it up and let it be "staff ate it", "here around is undergoing cleaning", etc. Some amounts of balancing act is always going to be needed.
English alternatives like “The staff enjoyed it later” or “The staff had the pleasure of eating it later” I would expect come across more euphemistic than normal to the average English-speaking viewer. So the question is whether the original was intentionally trying to come across euphemistic, or whether the original was using formal/polite language solely because of its position as being on TV.
English doesn't have rules as clear cut as Japanese's for politeness—especially nuances! I think it's fine to translate it to "ate".
In turn, I'm not a native English speaker, but in the dictionary I searched in, "enjoy" isn't a synonym of "eat", whereas いただく definitely is—albeit a very polite one[1].
It isn't literally, but it takes on this meaning in context. If you "enjoy" ("receive pleasure or satisfaction from; have the use or benefit of" per M-W) food, it's hard to imagine that you did anything else with it (er, let's not explore that here, please).
It's much like how the primary, literal sense of いただく is more like "receive".
“Enjoy” isn’t a synonym for “eat” in English but it definitely does carry the right meaning here. It’s a little poetic, but it’s idiomatic and native speakers will understand it.
What you say makes sense for explaining what was meant, but localizers might well simplify this kind of thing (just as they "punch up" other lines) on the basis of the significance of the line in cultural context. Basically, the 美味しく is culturally obligatory here (you'll see similar things in advertising copy), which causes it to lose meaning.
You're not wrong - "the staff ate it later" is a word-for-word translation, so it's kind of weird to leave out 美味しく. (among other things a meaningful translation would say "crew" instead of staff)
But the nuance of the JP here is that it's using a polite set phrase, not describing whether people enjoyed the food or not. A bit like how "a good time was had by all" is used to wrap up a story, not really to describe what kind of time people had.
tl;dr, 美味しく is there because the JP would sound weirdly flat without it, and you're right that "enjoyed" would probably be a better.
Not Japanese, but I feel if you translated it that way you would risk people reading the article into assuming the sentence could be used in ways that match the sense of "enjoy" in English that could never match the sense of the word used in Japanese, e.g. the staff enjoyed a movie later.
this seems to be making its way to western shows as well - when taskmaster has a food based challenge, they often include a reassurance that the food didn't go to waste. and i've seen similar on some youtube shows.
Yeah Taskmaster (which I adore) came to my mind too. I think it's more common when the food in question is an animal product, but still it just seems a bit contrived when behind the scenes the catering company is probably chucking tons of food the talent didn't feel like eating on a given day anyway.
It's entertainment, it has an environmental cost, sometimes a big cost. I don't think you need to signal that it's unacceptable for that cost to be paid solely for entertainment's sake. What's the difference between some food waste and burning fuel to drive a boulder out of town for a laugh.
we watched a cooking competition show last year where one of the contestants was tasked with breaking down a 100lb fish in order to prepare 4 entree sized portions of which the judges likely only took a bite or two... food waste in this kind of show is a given but this was totally galling.
The whole “the staff ate it later” routine is really just a symptom of a broader intolerance in Japanese media. After years of getting complaints over the most innocuous things, Japanese TV shows have started slapping disclaimers on everything, even the most trivial situations.
You see it everywhere: statements like “this is just one of many possible hypotheses” to appease people who might disagree, though to be fair, Western media sometimes include similar disclaimers, or “this was filmed with the owner’s permission” even when it is not really necessary. Then there is the excessive blurring—if someone with even a minor scandal appears, they are edited out or blurred, and a message like “this was recorded on MM-DD” pops up, all to avoid viewers asking, “Why is this person on TV?”
Of course, I understand the need for disclaimers in situations that really warrant them, such as scientific experiments that require proper oversight. But the disclaimers added just to dodge silly complaints do nothing but infantilize viewers, and honestly, they are kind of insulting.
Ultimately, this is part of a bigger problem with Japanese TV. It has dumbed itself down to the lowest common denominator, pandering to the most vocal complainers who often lack basic critical thinking skills. This is not unique to TV, either; Japanese businesses in general have long been hypersensitive to the “customer is always right” mindset. Thankfully, there is some pushback against that now. Still, TV is especially vulnerable since broadcasters get access to public airwaves at relatively low cost and are expected to act like a public utility, making them an easy target for complaints.
Ironically, all of this is helping drive younger generations away from TV, not just as a medium, but because the shows themselves feel less and less relevant.
I hope the staff didn't eat the food later, as the competitors often had to swim in it or crawl through it. I think it was generally real food, which was occasionally controversial (maybe it would have been more controversial in Japan?).
Interesting. Consideration is key; but not above all else. Imagine being one of the staff from the article who felt obligated to finish the food out of some misguided guilt.
I see both sides because you don't want staff intentionally making "mistakes" just to get some food but I worked for almost a decade in restaurants and only McDonald's didnt let you eat the food.
This must be a high end/low end thing. When I worked at a family diner, it was a free for all on the buffet leftovers which could not be recycled for the following day.
depends on how close to the bus/dish position you are. i used to eat leftover tiramisu from the bus tub all the time when i washed dishes at an italian restaurant.
...not that i would do that today, but i was poor, and it was good :)
I wish some of these cooking competition reality shows would declare this kind of thing. One recent competition one "Is It Cake?" constantly trucks out these sort of demonstration items where some true wizard behind the scenes is making a ton of lifelike items that the actual contestants have to guess about just to determine their own order/ranking in the competition. I always wonder what happens to all of the cake from just that portion of the show (and some other segments). The 'Kraft services table' in the back much be epic etc
I read an interview from the British Baking Show which said that all of the crew knew to keep a spoon in their pocket so they could sample the dishes at the end.