I am old enough to remember the cultural overreaction to "foodies," which coincided with the cultural overraction to "metrosexuals." Every single time you might have went on :reddit-logo: after that and saw some :le-pol-face: fantasizing about brutalizing or murdering overweight people in one thread while in another thread talking about how mantastic his bacon on bacon sandwich with bacon bits stuffed with mac and cheese and soaked in maple syrup has renewed his "man card," well, all of those :brainworms: started with Epic Meal Time.
Industrial demand and industrial output of factory-farmed processed meat products spiked steeply and the plateau after the spike remained significantly higher after that cultural disease broke out. Bacon used to be that thing that people had two strips of next to some eggs and hash browns and pancakes, but all of the phantasmagoria you see stoked and perpetuated by the Wendy's brand, where they hypersexualized and slightly aged up a little girl to be a blood soaked carnist that would make :jordan-eboy-peterson: proud, all of that started with Epic Meal Time. :agony-consuming:
It may be a looser correlation, but that show's start and peak of popularity also seems to coincide with the modern age of Funko Pops and what I call Bazinga Brain, the consumption as identity wrapped in a false veil of irony to hide just how childish it all is. It's why a meme car company lead by a self described "meme necromancer" :cringe: that peddles toy flamethrowers to manchildren can have a fraction of the output of its competitors and the cars can be shoddy by all modern metrics but that same company is also the highest valuated car company in the world. :stonks-up:
I blame Epic Meal Time for hellworld. Fuck Epic Meal Time. :rage-cry:
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. :rat-salute:
I think the K-pop fans got mad at him when they found out but thats all I've seen.
This may just be bc I usedy to watch filthy frank a lot, but I tend to give him more credit than I do the others. I like to think he saw what kind of audience he had and bailed, but who knows. I would probably hate his content going back now and watching
Yeah it was clear at the end he wasn't that into it anymore, so I'm glad he moved on. That's something other channels from that era could learn from
That whole Idubbz, howtobasic and others side of youtube was really bad
I'd hope so, but the thought of all those eggs being rotten :kombucha-disgust:
this is an underdeveloped thesis, but ive been thinking about the rise of foodie culture and the declining rate of profit
food is a great commodity for capitalism because its necessary and it gets consumed after purchase, but of course theres a limit to how much volume can be sold, and of course basic staples are much less labour intensive to provide in enough volume to feed everyone than they used to. and processing/packaging of staple food is one of those areas that has become particularly automated. so if you can make food more labour-intensive, theres much more scope for profit. both in terms of fancy ingredients that are more labour-intensive, and the rise of restaurant/cafe culture that adds a tonne of labour to the food production process. and for what its worth, the restaurant side is mostly labour directly involved in the process of production, which is something thats increasingly rare in the west, and the initial capital requirement is relatively very low (which i guess is also why so many restaurants are allowed to fail)
so selling a bunch of alienated middle-class drones on food consumption as an identity and class signifier that they can build their whole personality around seems like a deeper push from capital that was running out of pointless shit to sell people
also i have never watched epic meal time and have no idea what it is
This "foodie culture" has always been a thing. Or at least, has been around for a very long time, more than a century. I would look at a lot of data before saying anything like what you said, I doubt that "foodie culture" has really been an increase in people interested in fancy dining. I think it's more likely just a change in what fancy dining looks like.
But I also haven't looked at any data very closely, so what do I know.
I am old enough to remember the cultural overreaction to “foodies"
a lot of us hated those pricks because they gentrified everything
Everybody gets really into the food they can afford to eat
This is completely false. Plenty of well off white people eat the most boring food imaginable simply because that's what they like
I hated them too. I kind of still hate them.
"Over" is the load-bearing part of my word choice of "overreaction."
The anti-foodie overreaction sort of infantilized everything and turned it into crude performative manhood rituals as if they were performed by 13 year olds trying to act 30.
Epic Meal Time was like Starship Troopers in that the people whom it was making fun of also thought it was cool.
I have literally never considered that it was meant as satire
I don't know if it's better, but you've certainly got some balls slagging-off Hexbear vegans lol
it’s better than beating off to veganism all day like some people here
Woof. It's just cringe takes all the way down in this thread.
Could Epic Meal Time not be a symptom of such things rather then a direct cause?
Yes. In fact it 100% is. This is just an update if Tim Allen humor and shit like that.
It was financially backed by the industrial pork interests of the United States for purposes of selling more bacon, and it worked. Number went up. Way up.
That sounds like a cause.
Giacomo Rossini has a lot to answer for for retiring from opera to become a professional fancy eater.
The recent(?) video of them rolling up the entire McDonald's menu into a burrito and eating it was so amazingly revolting that I had to believe it's satire? I hope?
Satire loses its point and fails as satire if it isn't even clear what it's satirizing.
Industrial demand and industrial output of factory-farmed processed meat products spiked steeply and the plateau after the spike remained significantly higher after that cultural disease broke out.
I'd be interested to know what your source is for this, because I find it hard to believe that production of processed meat was significantly lower before Bazinga Brain
This is more of an after-the-event article, but note that the fad persisted enough for demand (and industrial production) to remain higher than before the chronological start of "Epic Meal Time."
https://modernfarmer.com/2014/03/will-always-love-bacon-bacon-fad/
Very interesting! Not really enough to prove it, but I cba to argue. I was fairly young when all this happened, so reading about all the nicknacks that were made around bacon feels like I'm surfacing repressed memories
Marketing works. If it didn't, it wouldn't be done. Epic Meal Time, not long after it started, was further expanded by financial support by the industrial meat industries, pork in particular. I unfortunately can't find the link anymore but it was something written BY one such industrial interests' marketing people about what a smashing success their investment was.
Around the time Epic Meal Time was popular, there was a smaller youtube show called "Regular Ordinary Swedish Meal Time". It was an avant garde masterpiece where they'd cook real home made swedish dishes while being incredibly aggro towards normal ingredients and appliances. But when they finished, the boys would get around the table and angrily grab their forks and knives and eat silently, intensely, and politely.
I only saw maybe one epic meal time but I always fucking hated that bullshit.
meal time: all material and social inequity:: lady ghost busters: all material and social inequity
when people tell you to read theory, it's so you can avoid posting this very post
