> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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].
“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.
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".
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I thought the story was going to end with the swallowing of a staff.
But this was almost as good.
Swallowing of a staff? Is that what you young people call it on these days?
Cool story, I upvoted because the downvotes felt a bit harsh. But what does the first part have to do with the second part?
"staff" meaning either the crew filming a TV show, or meaning a magical staff
I get it now. More staff engineers than I expected in the Bible.
pretty much everything is in the Bible if you look, even automobiles: "and G-d drove Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden in His Fury"
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=plymouth%20fury&ia=images&i...
> The one driving the chariot drives like Jehu, the son of Nimshi. He’s driving like a crazy person.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2%20Kings%209&v...
Joshua 6:27 KJV: "The Lord was with Joshua and his Triumph was heard throughout the land."
https://www.google.com/search?q=trumph+motorcycle
“Jesus and his disciples were all in one Accord”
And don't forget that Moses received the Ten Commandments on tablets, although it doesn't say whether he used iPads or something running Android.
It's rumored that God was wary of humans having apple products.
Perhaps because of the temptations of walled gardens?
And that Revelation 5/6 contain the original doomscroll.
I thought it was warning of poorly chosen file permissions (0666) and the evils of “simulation” —- the evils of userns namespaces and VMware!!!
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.
Good product placement, but either the numbers of his disciples has been greatly exaggerated, or that was one very cramped Honda!
Was jesus secretly a clown?
Come for tea, my people.
not related with Bible: a staff engineer's journey with Claude Code
Maybe the food was left out too long and he got a staff infection?
In the west we have “No Animals Were Harmed in the making of …”, which I’m only just learning comes from the American Humane Society: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Humane_Society#No_A...
I had always thought it were a generic phrase!
And "filmed in front of a live studio audience", which doesn't prevent the addition of laugh tracks.
I read a long time ago that Fran Drescher of The Nanny fame was huge in replacing those audiences with extras instead of random people.
https://www.news.com.au/entertainment/tv/flashback/how-fran-...
Tripwiring (and thus fatally wounding) horses was quite a thing back in the day.
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.
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.
> 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 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.
You are thinking of Milo and Otis, which incidentally was filmed in Japan.
AFAIK nothing was proven, but it got a reputation.
You're probably thinking of Milo and Otis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Milo_and_Oti...
Cimino's Heaven's Gate (1980) is usually pointed as the movie that caused the "no animals were harmed" disclaimer to be added to subsequent movies.
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.
One comedy (I think State and Main) had something like "Only 2 animals were harmed in the production of this film" as a joke in the credits.
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.
I mean nature is brutal, but typing down an animal to be consumed by another isn't natural.
Anyway, I don't think movies and TV are the main source of animal cruelty anymore.
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 wonder how this plays out.
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.
Did Detective Boyle organize this meal?
>actual engineer food
Bachelor chew! Now with flavor!
> didn't want to eat some pizza with some kind of fake cheese and unrecognizable veggies.
What I want to know is what ghastly pizza establishment serves fake cheese and what are mystery veggies?
> what ghastly pizza establishment serves fake cheese
Most of them, I imagine, in order to accommodate vegan customers. Some advertise it louder than others.
> what are mystery veggies?
There's quite a variety out there. I've seen broccoli, sundried tomato, artichoke, spinach....
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.
Eh, there’s some that are perfectly meh and are useful for texture reasons. I don’t really bother with them, but “abomination” is quite amusing me.
I don't see how any of these could be considered "mystery" veggies in most contexts, let alone on pizza.
I'm pretty sure they weren't unrecognizable or mystery and it's just being used as a pejorative for food they didn't like
Those are very normal weggebobbles for anyone outside the US. Big no-no to vegan cheese though.
Are they not normal inside the US?
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.
Vegan feta has the best success rate for me. Unfortunately, feta has limited applications.
(I'm not vegan but I like to try vegan products anyway.)
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.
> feta has limited applications.
Politely beg to differ.
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!)
It was from an actually good pizza place that had some wild choices for pizzas.
Inexplicably they didn't order any of the "regular" pizzas from there.
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.
Having tasted it, you’re free to decide it’s not for you. And you’re certainly free to decide that it’s not enough to tempt you to an HR… “party.”
I choose to eat what I want. It’s that simple.
Im even less interested in others picking interesting things for me when I am busy working.
Do you still resent your mom for making you finish your plate?
Pontificating about a mindset you've never experienced by calling it narrow-minded is the brilliantly subtle satire I come here to see every day.
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.)
That and nobody wants to eat a meal 40 times to get 40 takes.
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.
This is why everyone eats takeaway noodles in a box in sitcoms.
TV, Japan
It's related to the concept of Mottainai (もったいない, 勿体無い) in Japanese culture. Where any waste is considered bad, specially related to food.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mottainai
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.
On the upside our kids will do the same.
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.
(I'm exaggerating, but only slightly.)
The people bring the bags home, fold them up carefully, and keep them around for the next time they need a gift bag.
There is a similar concept in English culture called "waste".
Doesn't sound as strong due to the lack of tv captions
Yes, waste is an English cultural concept, especially in the US.
In this concept, waste is viewed as a sign of affluence.
So ironically, the more one wastes the more "conservative" one is considered to be.
Pretty much the opposite of the Japanese concept of mottainai.
The idea of not wasting food as a sort of baseline concept is a thing plenty of parents in the US teach their children.
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.
> In this concept, waste is viewed as a sign of affluence.
Seems pretty dumb. Maybe mostly a US thing?
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 wonder if this is why they tend to have plastic food displays at restaurant
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_model
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.
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.
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].
[1]: https://jisho.org/word/%E9%A0%82%E3%81%8F
“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.
>"enjoy" isn't a synonym of "eat"
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".
Itadaku is literally the kenjogo form of taberu (eat). It just happens to have multiple meanings.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
for example: https://youtu.be/_gNZR5IEsAA?si=x5nvoBzC9Xc4fxFs&t=1674
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.
These days AI generated photo probably waste even more resource that the real food itself.
I'd contrast this with the game show "Double Dare".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Dare_(franchise)
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?).
I genuinely thought this would be about a temporal dog-ate-my-homework sort of thing. Really.
I’m glad that Japanese society cares this much about food waste. We could use more of that where I am (USA).
I read somewhere that there's more English articles on Japanese topics in wikipedia than the entire japanese wikipedia.
Seems to check out true. HN types really seem to love their Japan.
If you want the ultimate in "The staff ate it later" watch Steven Raichlen's Project Smoke on PBS. The crew of that show eat like Kings.
https://www.pbs.org/show/steven-raichlens-project-smoke/
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.
Perhaps they hire special staff members with enormous and undiscriminating appetites.
I first thought this was going to be a story about big tech company bureaucracy, where the staff ate all the good ideas.
"What happened to the other plutonium core?"
"The staff ate it."
It's the opposite of restaurants, usually they don't let their staff eat leftovers.
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.
Restaurant staff usually eats before service, no? At least where I'm from.
And it's usually made from leftovers in the kitchen, as I understand it.
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.
From what I've seen, it's totally ordinary for "sandwich artists" to prepare lunch for themselves from the ingredients on display.
Instead: a discount for what you unloaded from the frozen truck last week... and just cooked
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.
Yah, I can’t imagine much of the food from The Great British Bake Off (as we call it) goes to waste!
... and they lived happily ever after
Same thing, no?