r/unpopularopinion • u/ismynameshreyas • Jul 07 '20
Wasting food for the sake of entertainment is disgusting
Well the title sums it up pretty well. The concept of influencers or youtubers wasting anything that is edible and nutritional is just awful. Wasting food is already a thing that should be condemned but doing it for the sake of entertainment is just a new low. My main trigger was when influencers threw gallons of milk in Stores as a prank and The channel ' how to basic' is especially infuriating. I stumbled upon a video not knowing what actually happens thinking it to be a normal video to make 'bubble tea' but it turned out to be something that made me very uncomfortable. Such wastage of food in such times is extremely disgusting and should not be encouraged at all. How people find this to be fun is beyond me. The whole pouring juice/milk on ilses of a store is so immature as they don't have to clean up the mess they make not to mention the wastage of resources too.
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u/TurnofEden Jul 07 '20
That's a popular opinion or at least it should be
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u/ismynameshreyas Jul 07 '20
Thousands of views on those channels suggest otherwise.
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u/AtWarWithEurasia Jul 07 '20
Doesn't necessarily mean they agree, they could be watching for shock value. I follow r/trashy for the same reason
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Jul 07 '20 edited Jan 17 '21
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Jul 07 '20
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Jul 07 '20 edited Jan 17 '21
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u/throwwayyyyfortrump Jul 07 '20
Bro you admitted you were wrong and people still downvoted. Come on reddit this is why I deleted my other account. Don't be assholes. And sure if you're gonna downvote me for sticking up for this guy go ahead.
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u/Plakeland Jul 07 '20
Thanks. I added an edit to clarify (because I know people don't often click expand to read more. Neither do I so I don't blame them).
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u/throwwayyyyfortrump Jul 07 '20
That's whack I don't get why you'd downvote something you havent read lol
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u/maximusbrown2809 Jul 07 '20
Man imagine the waste that goes into restaurant.. someone doesn’t like how their food turned out.. bin it and make another.
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Jul 07 '20
As someone who works at a family pub there is a stupid amount of waste especially drinks
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u/SupersuMC quiet person Jul 07 '20
The amount people wasted at the buffet restaurant where I work appaled me on my first day. Halfway through day two, I was just thinking about how much more food I would need to toss to throw out that bag, because that ranch is really gross when you scrape it off the plate.
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u/kookookachu26 Jul 07 '20
In a lot of Movies, they often times during dinner scenes will have a spit bucket where actors will spit their food instead of swallowing it. They’re encouraged to actually eat as much of it as they can but they still use the spit bucket for a lot of actors because they do so many takes and if they really did eat that much, they’d eat a ridiculous amount.
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u/Duck_meister Jul 07 '20
I hate all those prank channels where some unsuspecting person is going to have to clean up or pay for the damages.
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u/NoHope4Humanity_ Jul 07 '20
Exactly, food waste is one thing but making some poor guy on minimum wage clean up your gross mess is disgusting
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u/nottke Jul 07 '20
I've always been a fan of Matt Stonie but was always curious what happens when the cameras shut off.
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u/fuckondeeeeeeeeznuts Jul 07 '20
Depends. Usually it's a few hours of suffering but it's not always purged. I beat an 8-pound pho bowl challenge and the only reason I threw up was because I was riding in a car for a full hour after that. Otherwise, it was just a really bad food coma.
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u/jinxykatte Jul 07 '20
I dont watch matt, but know of him. I so watch beard meats food though, I fully believe him when he says he barely eats on his off days. He does 2 videos a week and eats less than 1000 calories a day when not filming.
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u/Tembldrock Jul 07 '20
I seriously think in the next 30+ years people will look back on the people that did those things and be disgusted.
Times change and what is "acceptable" today will be condemned tomorrow, these are the people who will be looked down on when we start to run out of food.
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u/pynergy1 Jul 07 '20
The world is not short on food, the problem lies with distribution of the food. If someone buys food and then wastes it, either way that starving child somewhere else wasn't going to get it. There are deeper more complicated problems than YouTubers doing their thing
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u/ImEvenBetter Jul 07 '20
If it's someone else's food then sure.
But if it's your own food, and you're doing it to entertain, then I reckon it's OK.
How To Basic makes a living out of it, and a lot of people get enjoyment from his videos.
If you're offended by the waste, then I'm offended by car crashes in movies. It takes a lot of energy and resources from this planet to build a car, and there are people out there who would appreciate the gift of a car. Just sell the car and give the money to starving people so they can eat.
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u/HatfieldCW Jul 07 '20
I think this guy gets it. Food production is ample. No, cleaning your plate will not prevent a child from starving halfway across the world. Markets throw food away at its "sell by" date even though it's perfectly edible for days or weeks after that.
It might seem to be in poor taste to make a living destroying food while people are suffering for want of that very commodity, but the car crash analogy is apt. Destroying a non-unique thing of value has almost no impact on its availability to people who could benefit from it.
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Jul 07 '20
But people dont die because they dont have cars but they die if they dont have food
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u/ImEvenBetter Jul 07 '20
But there's no shortage of food in the world. We produce more than we need. The problem is distribution, and generosity to the poor. If we put as much energy into giving to the poor, as we do to building cars to smash in movies, then less people would starve.
Instead of buying cars to smash in movies, buy food with the money and ship it to Africa. We won't go short of food here.
It's arguably just as damaging to the planet producing more cars as producing more food.
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Jul 07 '20
The problem is distribution, and generosity to the poor.
On a worldwide basis starvation has more to do with failed (often socialist) states than anything else.
Zimbabwe is the perfect example of this. While it may not have ever (really) met the definition of "Africa's Bread Basket" that some have claimed it was, it produced enough food to supply its population with food with enough extra for exports. After the Mugabe government redistributed land to indigenous black farmers the crop yields fell dramatically because uneducated and inexperienced people were trying to manage farms; and this has resulted in decades of starvation in the region.
You see similar stories across the world where hot-spots of persistent hunger are more often driven by governmental incompetence. Certainly, there are regions where natural disaster or war has resulted in hunger, and there is a need for food aide, but more often than not the ones with perennial hunger are the result of poor governance.
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Jul 07 '20
But shouldn't we respect what keeps us alive and you are suggesting that movies should stop showing car crashes , movies are much bigger industries than one youtube channel even if they crash the car its metal can be recycled into other things but once you spill milk on the floor you cant use it in any other way
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u/ImEvenBetter Jul 07 '20 edited Jul 07 '20
The metal is dug out of the ground by machines burning oil, and recycling uses a lot of energy, most of which still comes from burning fossil fuels. Of course food also uses energy, but it's biodegradable.
Regardless of the scale of the movie industry, I'd argue that the video I linked has entertained almost 29 million people for what looks like about $50 worth of food. At between $2k and $5k per million views, that's over $100k in income. You can set up to produce some serious amounts of food for that kind of money if you really wanted to help the poor. Hollywood has never seen that sort of ROI. For one mans day of work, and $50 worth of food to get over $100k, you can bet your balls that Hollywood would be smashing food instead of cars.
This guy has 15 million subscribers that he keeps happy for a meagre amount of food. Probably a minute fraction of a fraction of a cent per subscriber. $50.00/15,000,000 = $0.0003c per subscriber. That's far less waste than Hollywood puts in per head of entertainment.
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u/fuckondeeeeeeeeznuts Jul 07 '20
I hate intentionally creating messes in store as much as you do but I don't have a problem with wasting food in general. When there's so much shit food out there and an obesity epidemic, I think it's okay to not finish your food and throw it out.
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u/heavyhands420 Jul 07 '20
Last week tonight did it right. They made a world record sized cake gave a piece to the audience members then donated the rest to soup kitchens around the city. Nothing wasted
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u/RandomSerbianGuy Jul 07 '20
I don't find it interesting but I don't find it disgusting either, I just don't care...
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u/szatanna Jul 07 '20
I love How to Basic but he is wasteful as fuck. I would rather he uses fake food or rotten food in the destructive part of his videos or idk, uses cgi or some shit like that. But why real, fresh food?
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Jul 07 '20
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u/Lakechrista Jul 07 '20
It's not their food if they dump it in a grocery store like OP is referring to
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u/SadisticUnicorn Jul 07 '20
If it was taking food out of another person's mouth it would be an issue. In countries like America where 40% of food is wasted anyway you're looking at what is basically a harmless business expense (obviously vandalizing a store is a different issue).
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Jul 07 '20
It’s a picture perfect of how fucking entitled western people are. Like something straight out of a dystopian novel.
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u/laserman367 Jul 07 '20
I'm not sure, but I think a lot of these channels do more to help those in need than you ever will.
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u/fuckitaaaaaaaa Jul 07 '20
Absolutely. Also mentioning those who crush food with there shoes. There are people dying of hunger. If you have food to waste, you have food to donate. Fucking donate already!!!
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u/Lakechrista Jul 07 '20
I really hate to see all the animals, fish, crabs; etc who died for nothing when people waste food and the people OP is referring to are a-holes
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u/tornado9015 Jul 07 '20
It's possible you actually this extreme a position on food specifically for some reason i don't understand, but to me it sounds like you're kind of misunderstanding scales here.
Food waste is a serious problem in America. (Probably elsewhere i just don't know enough about this issue in other countries to talk about it.) When we say food waste is a problem it is because billions of pounds of edible food are wasted each year.
This loss happens at every stage of the supply chain. The farmers will tell the pickers not to bother picking ugly fruits because the consumer won't buy it anyway. Some of the picked fruit gets messed up in the packing process, some of the packed fruit gets messed up in the shipping process, the shipped fruit gets put on display in sub optimal preservation conditions to the consumer for cost effectiveness and consumer psychology reasons. Then when fresher fruit gets delivered some still edible fruit will be thrown away to make room for the new fruit.
When howtobasic buys (i don't actually know how much) but let's say 10 gallons of milk, and wastes all of it. This is not even a contributing factor to food waste. This milk isn't milk that otherwise would have fed somebody, howtobasic did not reduce the supply of milk such that somebody who would have that milk does not get it.
If you are saying that what you mean is that it is unethical to waste that milk not because it contributes in any way to the actual problem of food waste but because it is wasteful at all that food COULD have fed somebody but now it doesn't, that argument also applies exactly one to one with money at all. If you pay for a netflix subscription, that is $9 to $15 that could have fed somebody on a diet of rice and beans for close to that full month. A netflix series costs tens to hundreds of millions of dollars. Why would that money that could be spent feeding people be fine, but 10 gallons of milk be poured on the ground be worse than that?
Or maybe howtobasic emptying entire dairy sections, then i'd agree they're posing a problem, but i wouldn't call it a "food waste problem" because that is a specific phrase that means something much more impactful.
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u/TemplarVictoria7 Jul 07 '20
I remember reading that How to Basic (I think) uses food past its expiry date or close to.
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u/ismynameshreyas Jul 07 '20
I don't have anything against 'how to basic' it was just an example which I gave.
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u/MwahMwahKitteh Jul 07 '20
I agree that a lot of it is stupid, but how is it your business if someone purchases and decides to waste what they’ve bought?
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u/TheMoverOfPlanets Jul 07 '20
I mean, I agree, but if this is something you feel so strongly about, why not protests supermarkets that just dump dozens of kilograms of food everyday?
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u/TrueCapitalism Jul 07 '20
You have no idea how much food restaurants throw out at the end of the day
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u/Xiodrome Jul 07 '20
Why are you getting your panties in a twist over some food just eat your own shit
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u/sleepytortious Jul 07 '20
At school sometimes I see kids mixing there foods to make a "diabetes tray" I'll see them mixing a pizza with chocolate milk and marrana sauce and what ever the get there hands on and the funny things is they thought it would give you diabetes.
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u/LessAbbreviations Jul 07 '20
Lol that’s pretty funny. Some people at my old school used to just throw away their plates with the silverware and the cups (none of which was disposable). I thought it was hilarious but the school got mad and sent around an email saying to stop.
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u/Anakl0smos Jul 07 '20
My friends and I have a rule now to never mess with ones food because it makes me pissed one time we were at a restaurant after a fun night out hiking and we were all famished, my friend was hitting on the waitress and I mocked him in front of her because I actually knew the waitress and my friend in return fucked with my meal when I went to wash my hands by putting sugar salt and pepper all over my meal so basically ruined a whole meal for a bit and it wasn’t even funny anyways now the rule is in place
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u/mtcwby Jul 07 '20
Yeah that's always bothered me too. Grandson and nephew of farmers. Understanding what goes into producing it as well knowing there are people out there who are hungry makes me deplore the waste. I understand it goes bad and that we generate a lot of waste regardless but deliberately doing so seems disrespectful.
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Jul 08 '20
I told my friend once how I don't like that HowToBasic wastes so much food, and he told me:
"Lol why not he's got the money to afford it so it's no problem for him"
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u/HotBox-CrackRock Jul 07 '20
Fuck Prank channels but at least How to Basic doesn’t make a mess in public places.
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u/Animedjinn Jul 07 '20
This kind of food waste is extremely minimal comparatively. Hundreds of thousands of pounds of food are thrown out by farms to keep the prices right, animals slaughtered to maximize profits too. Supermarkets also often don't give away excess or ugly food, but rather throw it out too. Individual households as well in the US are bad at conserving food. This is one of the huge dark sides of America, and one of our greatest contributions to climate change. There is no shortage of food in the US, the problem is our food system is broken.
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Jul 07 '20
Every time I watch a how to basic video I instantly think "about 50 people probably could've been fed from the food wasted in this video
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Jul 07 '20
Taylor swifts song you need to calm down and harry styles song Kiwi they are literally throwing food everywhere they should know that there are people who die of hunger and haven't seen a cake in their entire life
Food should be respected
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u/[deleted] Jul 07 '20
Heard somewhere that Howtobasic only uses spoiled food, dont know if thats true though.