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I hate food tasting/eating videos

And now for something completely different.

For some reason I seem to have this small quirk, maybe a bit of a pet peeve, that I find mildly frustrating to watch videos of people eating.

I was reminded of this yesterday, when I was browsing twitch.tv when I stumbled across a channel that looked like an interesting novel idea: It was a guy playing jazz on the piano and playing (online) chess at the same time. I suppose as some kind of mild challenge. Can you concentrate on both things at the same time?

I think the stream had been going on for quite a long time, but a bit irritatingly, a mere 20 or 30 seconds after I joined and started watching, he had to get the laundry out of the machine or something (right in the middle of a chess match), so he was away for something like five minutes. When he came back, he took an apple and started eating it (rather than, you know, continue playing the piano) while playing the chess match.

Do you know how long he ate that one single apple on stream? For ten minutes. That might not sound like much, but believe me, it was an eternity while watching him, waiting him to resume the whole idea of the stream. How on earth can somebody eat one single apple for ten minutes? I don't think I could spend that much time on one single apple even if I tried. And it's not like he ate a bite then stopped for a minute and then took another. No, it was constant chewing... and chewing... and chewing... and chewing... endlessly. Like the slowest eating of something I have seen in my entire life. And it was an apple, not like a steak or something. An apple! One! It doesn't take that much time to eat one. I can't explain how aggravating it was to watch. "Get with it already, for fucks sake!"

The reverse isn't much better, though. I also hate those "let's try (whatever food)" videos where the guy first talks and talks and talks like for half an hour, then finally he takes like one microscopic bite from whatever food, and then just sets it aside and talks and talks and talks for another half an hour. I know that the idea of such videos is not to watch someone eat the entire meal, but about commenting on that particular piece of food, but even knowing that doesn't help much. I somehow get somewhat of a reverse feeling of the previous example: It feels like all that food (often delicious-looking) is going completely to waste, is getting cold, and might even be thrown away, while the guy just talks and talks. What a waste. For some reason this can also feel frustrating.

One thing that's also mildly aggravating, both in videos and in real life, is watching people eat food that has been prepared so that it consists of bite-sized pieces. The idea, of course, that it's very easy to eat: Just eat entire pieces at a time. Just put it into your mouth, and chew. That's it. But many people, instead of just eating these chunks whole, for some reason need to dissect them, either by taking small bites off them, or sometimes even by cutting them with a knife into even smaller pieces.

The most "shaking my head" moment I ever experienced was, in a real-life situation, someone cutting sushi pieces with a fork and a knife. You know, those small rolls that have seaweed around keeping it whole. That was like an "OMFG" moment. Hello? You don't eat sushi with a fork and a knife, for fucks sake! You especially don't need to cut them any further! That's not the idea!

Speaking of dissecting, another thing that kind of aggravates me is people taking a piece of food like a hamburger and... well, almost literally dissecting it. Taking it apart. Open it, take the components out... Why? Also the people who do this in order to remove the pickles from the hamburger.

I really can't understand why some people hate pickles so much. What's about pickles in particular that they hate?

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