HN Reader

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!

> 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.

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.)

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...

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 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.

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

I’m Japanese, and in Japan it’s pretty common for TV shows or YouTubers to get called out if they look like they’re wasting food. Japanese people really expect food not to be treated carelessly. Folks would love to see a “No food was wasted” one.

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/

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.

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

It reminds me of the proposal to shake hands at the end of Goldeneye:

> Miyamoto, with a series of suggestions for the game. “One point was that there was too much close-up killing – he found it a bit too horrible. I don’t think I did anything with that input. The second point was, he felt the game was too tragic, with all the killing. He suggested that it might be nice if, at the end of the game, you got to shake hands with all your enemies in the hospital.”

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/oct/26/goldeneye...

Many people are against throwing away of food because of certain principles.

But the irony is of course that in the West most people eat _far_ more calories than they really need, so they are doing basically the same thing.

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".

Ok, now if we took a picture of all the food in the world, a more accurate caption would be:

"The staff threw away 30 to 40% of it and ate the rest later."

I first thought this was going to be a story about big tech company bureaucracy, where the staff ate all the good ideas.

... and they lived happily ever after

Same thing, no?

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.

TV, Japan

It's the opposite of restaurants, usually they don't let their staff eat leftovers.

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 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

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

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 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.

I would go with "Care has been taken to minimize food waste." or some paraphrasing of it.

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.