Yes, this is a fetish for someone
June 2, 2021 1:51 AM   Subscribe

because there's a magician named rick lax who has a web of viral content pages, a subset of which is "thin white women do gross shit to food." this lady is a magician's assistant & part of the content network
Talia Lavin answers a horrified Tweet sharing a video of a woman making peanut butter & jelly sandwiches directly on the counter top. If you too were wondering why your social media is overrun with gross food videos, Ryan Broderick at eater.com has more background on Rick Lax.
posted by MartinWisse (72 comments total) 11 users marked this as a favorite
 
Punchline - free to good home:

Ex-Lax
posted by fairmettle at 2:17 AM on June 2, 2021 [3 favorites]


This gives me the same kind of creeping horror-response as reading about extruded algorithmic animated content intended for kids on youtube... I have a vision of the internet and all human entertainment turning into just endless mindless freaky combos of meaningless things that tap into some very primal base stimulation-and-reward part of our brains. It freaks me out. (Also aware that this is also how so-called "prestige" entertainment works, just gussied up and with an aura of "art" to make it seem less terrifyingly machinistic and dreadful.)
posted by Balthamos at 3:35 AM on June 2, 2021 [22 favorites]


“and don't forget the important role of 'dumbass husband who goes WAAAAAOW at his wife making a mess like she just discovered something unprecedented'”
posted by 3.2.3 at 3:36 AM on June 2, 2021 [4 favorites]


I have a vision of the internet and all human entertainment turning into just endless mindless freaky combos of meaningless things that tap into some very primal base stimulation-and-reward part of our brains. It freaks me out.

Didn't we hit that with Ren and Stimpy?
posted by mikelieman at 3:44 AM on June 2, 2021 [5 favorites]


> I have a vision of the internet and all human entertainment turning into just endless mindless freaky combos of meaningless things that tap into some very primal base stimulation-and-reward part of our brains.

Candy Crush: The Society
posted by The Card Cheat at 4:28 AM on June 2, 2021 [8 favorites]


There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
posted by glonous keming at 4:31 AM on June 2, 2021 [41 favorites]


Yes, I've seen those, and I've read all kinds of discussion about what they say about race, class and gender - mostly not especially enlightening discussion that assumes that the woman herself made these because she is very stupid even if rich and thinks her food hacks are really clever and the resulting food really delicious. It's a relief in a way to know that we've been faked out and that no one actually thinks "it's a great idea to make spaghetti on a marble slab".

On the lefter part of twitter, we often make immediate identity-based judgements because we don't have the actual background about what's going on - it's not as though this only happens with the spaghetti on the counter videos. We assume that the surface truth of the video neatly and clearly maps onto some underlying truths which are relatively detached from the medium - we assume that the medium is being used sincerely to reflect reality and that the reality isn't "already well-off people making content to make more money".

There is so much trust in social media among people who should know better. This strikes me as a generational difference and not really anyone's fault, but the left I grew up with doesn't really trust social media, tends not to use real names, tends to be deeply skeptical of achievement-as-displayed-on-social-media, etc, and the ten-years-younger left tends to see social media as a mirror of the world, often uses real names, etc.

I mean, the point isn't that no one else thinks this; the point is that the left has always had access to critiques of capitalism and social media and should know better.

Social media is a big norming machine. I'd say about half of what I see on twitter comes down to "people who [eat/read/cook/exercise/travel/dress/cut their hair/wash/decorate their homes] differently from me but in a politically innocuous fashion are doing it wrong and are pathetic or ridiculous". Sometimes it's "people who situate Foucault's work differently from how I situate it" instead of "people who wash their pillows differently" but it's the same underlying logic.

It gets even more depressing when you realize that we're all arguing about monetized content of one kind or another.

Pet twitter and "this twitter exists soley to promote my history blog" twitter seem to be the only good twitters lately.
posted by Frowner at 5:13 AM on June 2, 2021 [45 favorites]


Wait, Americans put jam in squeezy bottles?
posted by biffa at 5:14 AM on June 2, 2021 [1 favorite]


You can get cheap grape jelly in squeezy bottles because this is the kind of jelly you'd use making a sandwich or toast for a kid. But in general, no, neither jelly nor jam come in squeezy bottles. For instance, I did not grow up in a grape jelly household and our peanut butter sandwiches were made with strawberry from a jar. Grape is a bafflingly inferior jelly, too, especially given that cheap strawberry is much better and costs about the same.

Edit to add - see, my first move is a norming move knocking on people who eat grape jelly. Never mind, eat all the grape jelly you want, I take it back.
posted by Frowner at 5:21 AM on June 2, 2021 [15 favorites]


People are weird.
posted by donpardo at 5:21 AM on June 2, 2021 [2 favorites]


Wait, Americans put jam in squeezy bottles?

That's nothing. We can get peanut butter and jelly already mixed in the jar. Somehow, the jelly in that jar is even worse than the jelly in squeezy bottles.
posted by Thorzdad at 5:55 AM on June 2, 2021 [5 favorites]


biffa, it gets worse. Google “goober grape” and prepare to be either amazed at American ingenuity or despair for the future of the planet.
posted by caution live frogs at 6:02 AM on June 2, 2021 [1 favorite]


(Damn it, Thorzdad, I stopped to fix a vandalism on Wikipedia and you sniped me…)
posted by caution live frogs at 6:02 AM on June 2, 2021 [3 favorites]


From that Eater article: "It is, at this point, statistically impossible to not half-recognize magician Rick Lax." Welp, guess I'm a statistical impossibility today!

Also, I always figured Goober Grape for something that a) suggests a sort of very minimal saving of effort in making a PB&J--you only have to open the one jar, see--and b) automatic generator of horror in kids who don't like their foods touching each other.
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:14 AM on June 2, 2021 [4 favorites]


Well, and Goober Grape also saves you from needing a spoon for the jam and a separate knife for the peanut butter, because it’s the truest gastronomical anathema that the two should ever sully within their original jars from using the same spoon in both. Goober Grape helpfully front-loads a massive dose of revulsion for you direct from the factory so you are fully desensitized to the general horror of it.
posted by mochapickle at 6:29 AM on June 2, 2021 [7 favorites]


I haven't watched the video and don't really want to, but I need info about a specific detail in the description: is the "on the counter" part relevant or what people are reacting to as gross? Is the particular countertop in the video visibly unclean?

(Like, I use plates or cutting boards for food prep, myself, just because I'm lazier about washing my counters than older generations in my familial lineage. And I have seen a wide range of kitchen cleanliness schemas or practices. But there certainly would not have been anything gross or unhealthy about eating food directly off of my grandmother's kitchen countertops. So while there are definitely instances I've seen where that would very strongly gross me out, it's also not at all a universal rule.)
posted by eviemath at 6:29 AM on June 2, 2021 [3 favorites]


"On the counter" for this genre of video means "you have a big marble slab which at least looks clean and you spread out, eg, a lot of cooked pasta and a lot of meatballs and a lot of sauce and a lot of cheese and you mix the whole thing on the slab with your hands". "You" in this case being a young thin blond white woman in an expensive kitchen.

Technically, as long as the hands and counter are really, truly clean there doesn't seem to be anything especially unhealthy about this; it's just gross-looking and violates norms around food preparation. The food is also very bland and often made from jarred sauces, pre-cooked meat, etc.

The counter aspect is more about norm violation and sort of the right-wing version of bimbo discourse than anything else. Now that I think about it, the whole thing plays off popular enjoyment of contempt for women - the fetish angle, the "lol what a dumb rich lady" angle, etc.

The pandemic made me terminally online.
posted by Frowner at 6:45 AM on June 2, 2021 [14 favorites]


The food is gross but so is the condescending voice of the unseen male cameraman who's effusively praising the woman making a mess as if she's a small child.

"Oh wow. Look at that!"

That guy can fuck all the way off.
posted by evidenceofabsence at 6:52 AM on June 2, 2021 [7 favorites]


I hate that I keep coming across these videos. We all know what's going on; we all could just look away and not retweet it and let the gross fad die. But, no, for some reason, I still keep seeing people spread these videos as if they're real and worthy of our attention.

The internet was a mistake.
posted by meese at 6:59 AM on June 2, 2021 [13 favorites]


Relatedly, perhaps, I’ve never seen the appeal of those shops where you watch a teenager mix your ice cream and toppings on a cold countertop. Nope, not one little bit.
posted by sjswitzer at 7:11 AM on June 2, 2021 [8 favorites]


"the condescending voice of the unseen male cameraman who's effusively praising the woman making a mess as if she's a small child."

Is, also, unfortunately a thing in porn.
posted by Jacen at 7:15 AM on June 2, 2021 [8 favorites]


is the "on the counter" part relevant or what people are reacting to as gross? Is the particular countertop in the video visibly unclean?

The counter she makes the sandwiches on is actually a table. She also makes many different kinds all at the same time in rows, PBJ, PB & strawberry jam, PB & banana, PB& pickle, maybe also PB & chocolate, and scoops the mess off the table with a spatula on to the top bread for each sandwich type. So IMO it seems like it takes longer and makes more mess.

The mess actually comes off the table more cleanly that you might expect.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:24 AM on June 2, 2021


I feel like I've walked through a dimensional gateway without noticing it; like in a sci-fi sense where you seem to be walking in a straight line but actually you've gone off in some fourth-dimensional way and now you're in another world where everything is the same but slightly wrong, like a splinter in your mind to borrow a phrase.

...because I don't recognize this meme at all, and all of the discussion above (including the links) is just confusing me more. Is this what dementia feels like? Have I gone mad? Am I dissociating? I have multiple TVs! I have computers in every room of the house, I am on the public-facing internet for hours a day! Nothing about any of this makes any sense at all!

[no, I mean quite seriously. this is like waking up one day and everyone you know is talking about ... I dunno ... how Garbuncle The Great wasn't so great plus he faked his military conquest of Africa, Africa is still a continent and hasn't been turned into a giant Broadway theatre complex and you're standing there thinking "wait, Garbuncle the who? What happened to Africa?".]
posted by aramaic at 7:26 AM on June 2, 2021 [14 favorites]


The internet was a mistake.

My take is that the internet has made the private public. This stuff doesn't come from nowhere.

There were folks who were always into weird shit. The ability to broadcast video with a phone nearly everyone has now just means everyone can see the folks who get off on public displays. And the freaky-deaks can monetize their weirdness.

I like watching nerds in sheds building boats. I've even given money to them. That seems to be no species of different to me.
posted by bonehead at 7:29 AM on June 2, 2021


The Goober Grape discourse makes me glad that we actually haven't created Mayostard... yet.
posted by SansPoint at 7:30 AM on June 2, 2021 [2 favorites]


This is why I use an extension that only recommends me YouTube videos from channels I subscribe to.
posted by Reyturner at 7:40 AM on June 2, 2021 [2 favorites]


SansPoint: I present to you Mayomust and for the discriminating palate, Dijonnaise.
posted by Serene Empress Dork at 7:52 AM on June 2, 2021 [7 favorites]


For the record I am totally OK with dijonnaise, said mochapickle.
posted by mochapickle at 7:57 AM on June 2, 2021 [9 favorites]


I wouldn't put any mustard or mayonnaise on my records. Yech!
posted by aubilenon at 8:10 AM on June 2, 2021 [4 favorites]


Technically, as long as the hands and counter are really, truly clean there doesn't seem to be anything especially unhealthy about this; it's just gross-looking and violates norms around food preparation. The food is also very bland and often made from jarred sauces, pre-cooked meat, etc.

This is maybe a derail from what i thought was a really interesting thread but the 'plateless spread things around like a jackson pollack' vibe has its origins in Alinea's dessert program [yt video] i believe. Keen watchers of this season's Below Deck: Sailing Yacht may have noticed boat chef Natasha's repeated recreations of the same (at a level somewhere between a 20 course michellin starred level and these pretty gross videos produced only for clicks).
posted by Exceptional_Hubris at 8:12 AM on June 2, 2021


(Damn it, Thorzdad, I stopped to fix a vandalism on Wikipedia and you sniped me…)

That's cool. Someone was wrong on the internet. You were doing god's work. ;)
posted by Thorzdad at 8:21 AM on June 2, 2021 [4 favorites]


Last week, he posted a new video of a woman making food directly onto a countertop. This time it was spaghetti instead of nachos.
Hmmm. The link is much more general than implied and I can't be bothered to find the right video. But, everyone I've ever seen make small amounts of pasta has done exactly this, including professional chefs. A clean counter isn't any different from a clean plate, except for its heat capacity. That's one of the reasons you get a marble or stone counter, right? What am I missing?

This is fascinating. I genuinely don't have an opinion on whether it's good or bad for the world. I'm pretty sure I don't want to watch most of it.
posted by eotvos at 8:21 AM on June 2, 2021


Heinz has a whole line of hybrid condiments. (Still waiting for "franch" from Breaking Bad, though.)
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:31 AM on June 2, 2021 [1 favorite]


The difference between the Hybrid Condiments like Mayomust and Goober Grape is that the Hybrid Condiments are homogenous mixtures, but Goober Grape is alternating sections of peanut butter and jelly.
posted by SansPoint at 8:33 AM on June 2, 2021 [1 favorite]


That's one of the reasons you get a marble or stone counter, right? What am I missing?

You read "making pasta on the counter" and thought about a pile of flour with eggs/yolks being incorporated into a well. the video(s) actually of cooked dried pasta being dumped out of a strainer, onto a kitchen counter which has had jarred sauce poured all over it.
posted by Exceptional_Hubris at 8:39 AM on June 2, 2021 [3 favorites]


The difference between the Hybrid Condiments like Mayomust and Goober Grape is that the Hybrid Condiments are homogenous mixtures, but Goober Grape is alternating sections of peanut butter and jelly.

Well, the first time you use it anyway.
posted by Serene Empress Dork at 8:39 AM on June 2, 2021 [5 favorites]


But, everyone I've ever seen make small amounts of pasta has done exactly this, including professional chefs.

eotvos, I can't find the specific video either. But, based on the "mac&cheese on the countertop" video that's also linked, it's not going to be a woman making pasta (like, making a dough, rolling it out, and cutting it on the counter), it's going to be a woman dumping cooked pasta and sauce and maybe other ingredients on the counter and swirling them together to make spaghetti.
posted by hanov3r at 8:41 AM on June 2, 2021


I’ve never seen the appeal of those shops where you watch a teenager mix your ice cream and toppings on a cold countertop.

The one near me was called Steve's. Maybe Steve went on to bigger and better things, but I never understood the appeal either, and it's gone now. First, the noise - metal spoons clicking on marble - probably encouraged by mgmt, and an attraction to some; and Second, no thanks, but I don't actually want any of your 'mix-ins' in my ice cream. Crunchy peanut butter, yes; but smooth ice cream.
posted by Rash at 8:44 AM on June 2, 2021


There is so much trust in social media among people who should know better. This strikes me as a generational difference and not really anyone's fault, but the left I grew up with doesn't really trust social media, tends not to use real names, tends to be deeply skeptical of achievement-as-displayed-on-social-media, etc, and the ten-years-younger left tends to see social media as a mirror of the world, often uses real names, etc.

People love to make these very general statements about "social media", which I don't think is very useful. It's not that Facebook isn't Twitter (though it isn't), it's more that social media is whatever you want it to be. I keep hearing about social media trends on mefi and in the news, but I never see any of them first hand, as my social media experience is Facebook posts from my actual, real life friends, and not much else. How much trust I put in "social media" is directly a consequence of how much I trust the self-report of my friends. It isn't something you can generalise from, or to. And I suspect there are a lot of other users, particularly if my generation (thirty-something) who have an in a sense similar experience, in that it is also unique to them.
posted by Dysk at 8:48 AM on June 2, 2021 [6 favorites]


Interesting how dumping a raw egg on flour and squishing it between your fingers is not gross, arranging spready food on a board is not gross, but these videos are. Is part of the difference a class thing I wonder?
posted by joeyh at 8:49 AM on June 2, 2021 [2 favorites]


Let's not forget about Mayonegg
posted by Morpeth at 8:52 AM on June 2, 2021 [2 favorites]


Stump, Flom & Lax my favorite 70s prog band
posted by moons in june at 8:56 AM on June 2, 2021 [1 favorite]


I’m a LITTLE relieved, because these videos felt really off to me. The weirdest part is Lax and everyone else in the article blandly insisting that these are somehow sincere, as if “good for the algorithm” translates into “good content.” Which, like, I guess it does, on a level that’s completely alien and terrifying to me but absolutely exists.

It makes me think of Matt Farley who basically writes songs to satisfy any possible search, but there’s something even more sinister about these videos to me. But hell, if we can have fine artists who essentially deal in money as their medium (Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst), why not other artists who work with the algorithm. I can respect it on that level even if I hate the result.
posted by jeweled accumulation at 9:31 AM on June 2, 2021 [2 favorites]


Adding a factor of discomfort is part of the point of these - even if the countertop is technically clean, the act of squishing together the cooked spaghetti and jarred sauce looks offputting for whatever reason. And sometimes they go the extra step, like the one with the woman pressing her forearms against buttered bread to smoosh it down.
posted by PussKillian at 9:32 AM on June 2, 2021


I mean, I don’t mean to be…whatever, but wasn’t it always perfectly obvious that these were meant to be parodies of all the “ONE WEIRD TRICK!” lifehack videos, and not actual suggestions for making meals? The first few times I saw these along with the comments, I was kind of floored that in the comments anyone took them seriously. Yet they did.
posted by holborne at 9:52 AM on June 2, 2021 [2 favorites]


I saw the original "spaghetti-o pie" video as being in the same rich vein as the infamous Adequacy.org troll articles. It's just been updated for a new generation of (apparently just as credulous?) users.
posted by Kadin2048 at 10:06 AM on June 2, 2021 [2 favorites]


I like watching nerds in sheds building boats. I've even given money to them. That seems to be no species of different to me.

You've seen the rebuilding of the Tally Ho on the Sampson Boat Co channel? If not I think you'd enjoy.
posted by calamari kid at 10:10 AM on June 2, 2021 [1 favorite]


who basically writes songs to satisfy any possible search

I, certainly incorrectly, feel like one could make some money by making a million very short songs called "Aaron is right and Andrea is wrong", "Aaron is right and Andrew is wrong", ... "Zoe is right and Zachary is wrong", so that people could ask their Alexa to play one as a rhetorical device when they're having an argument with someone.
posted by aubilenon at 10:15 AM on June 2, 2021 [8 favorites]


So I was the only one who was thinking "and at the end she's going to fold the counter in half and eat it like the world's biggest peanut butter, jelly, banana and Nutella sandwich EVAR" ... ?
posted by chavenet at 10:28 AM on June 2, 2021 [2 favorites]


aubilenon: monetizing might be a bit difficult (unless you put in ads?) but you could absolutely build a service to do what you're proposing, and I think it's actually quite a clever idea. Standard royalty-free soundtrack, text-to-speech, get top 1000 most popular name lists, and a half hour later you've got ninety million "songs" ready to go.
posted by aramaic at 10:28 AM on June 2, 2021 [3 favorites]


I went to law school with Rick Lax! Nice guy and he seems to have figured out the Facebook algorithm really well. He actually wrote a book about his time in law school. I get a kick out of the fact that he went to law school because he thought he'd need a real career and that magic wouldn't pay the bills, then decided being a lawyer sucked and really dove head first into making magic work. Seems to have paid off for him.
posted by Arbac at 10:31 AM on June 2, 2021 [5 favorites]


The Goober Grape discourse makes me glad that we actually haven't created Mayostard... yet.

If I had to pick a favorite 1990s comedy sketch featuring an alleged participant in the 1/6 US Capitol riots wearing a yellow-and-white striped Abraham Lincoln costume while firing a machine gun, I'd say it's probably this one.
posted by Atom Eyes at 11:41 AM on June 2, 2021 [2 favorites]


I feel like the one paragraph on Mukbang that contextualizes this is a way bigger part of the story. Watching women make gross food is 100% porn. It's porn. PORN. What is porn? Watching people do things that are forbidden and that you desire. The foods in these videos are mostly appealing junk. Nerds. Pasta. Nachos. Candy. The videos are disturbing and the women are conventionally pretty doing disturbing things with stuff you want to eat. The sets even look like porn sets! Rented spaces without the feel of someone's lived in 'home'. Porn, I say.
posted by latkes at 12:02 PM on June 2, 2021 [9 favorites]


What?!
HowToBasic is evolving?!
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 12:14 PM on June 2, 2021


There is so much trust in social media among people who should know better. This strikes me as a generational difference and not really anyone's fault, but the left I grew up with doesn't really trust social media, tends not to use real names, tends to be deeply skeptical of achievement-as-displayed-on-social-media, etc, and the ten-years-younger left tends to see social media as a mirror of the world, often uses real names, etc.

Thanks for articulating this - this has been in the back of my brain but I've never quite managed to put it into words.

On a related note, I definitely saw a number of academics on Twitter taking the spaghetti-o pie video very seriously as a cultural artifact.
posted by coffeecat at 12:15 PM on June 2, 2021


Interesting how dumping a raw egg on flour and squishing it between your fingers is not gross, arranging spready food on a board is not gross, but these videos are. Is part of the difference a class thing I wonder?

I took an anthro class way back in undergrad and the professor talked about how norm violations offend/disgust people and then they start rationalizing that reaction. The offense often takes on a moral component even when it should have no ethical or moral impact whatsoever.

As an example, he said imagine seeing a person use a screwdriver to pound in a nail, when there was a hammer sitting right next them. You might challenge this person and if they responded "this works fine" you might say something like "it'll hurt the screwdriver" or something, even though you'd have no idea if this was correct. But you know they are doing it wrong. (This professor was entertaining because he tried out many of these norm-busting experiments in reality to gauge people's reactions.)

Same thing here I think. It's just wrong to people. This isn't what counters are for! We have bowls! Use a bowl! I don't think it's class per se.
posted by mark k at 12:40 PM on June 2, 2021 [7 favorites]


We have bowls! Use a bowl!

Careful what you wish for. A channel produced by this same guy has a detailed video on how to make delicious party margaritas in a functioning flushing toilet. It’s technically a bowl, so.
posted by mochapickle at 12:51 PM on June 2, 2021 [4 favorites]


if they responded "this works fine" you might say something like "it'll hurt the screwdriver" or something, even though you'd have no idea if this was correct. But you know they are doing it wrong.

Corb Lund wrote a song about that guy back in 2007. "Drilled holes in his boards with the wrong kind of bit
And when they don't line up he blames the government"
posted by The_Vegetables at 12:54 PM on June 2, 2021 [3 favorites]


Atom Eyes: Wait, what?!
posted by SansPoint at 1:07 PM on June 2, 2021


Interesting how dumping a raw egg on flour and squishing it between your fingers is not gross, arranging spready food on a board is not gross, but these videos are. Is part of the difference a class thing I wonder?

I don't watch these videos, but as described, they aren't the same thing. When you are making pasta on a counter, it's because you need a very large flat surface to roll it out on, and you'll then transfer the cut pasta to either hang to dry or to smaller containers that wouldn't be suited for rolling; i.e. the counter choice is functional, though of course a lot of people will opt to keep a rolling mat around for easier cleanup. For spaghetti, you'd transfer the mix to a bowl for serving at table, a bowl that you could have just mixed it in in the first place. So it's pointless and leaves extra mess. Even if you are mixing it on the table that you plan to eat on, it's a lot easier to move a bowl to a water source to clean it than it is an entire table. So less gross than just ridiculous.
posted by tavella at 1:15 PM on June 2, 2021


SansPoint: This guy
posted by mochapickle at 1:16 PM on June 2, 2021 [1 favorite]


SansPoint, I think Atom Eyes is talking about this rumor.
posted by hanov3r at 1:16 PM on June 2, 2021 [1 favorite]


Careful what you wish for. A channel produced by this same guy has a detailed video on how to make delicious party margaritas in a functioning flushing toilet. It’s technically a bowl, so.

the producers of these videos are acquainted with the contents of a bowl, all right
posted by StarkRoads at 1:18 PM on June 2, 2021 [5 favorites]


Pickles with peanut butter and jelly and banana is legit though. I'd eat that off a countertop any day. Tip: adding some cheddar cheese takes that whole ecosystem to a brand new level.
posted by turbid dahlia at 2:55 PM on June 2, 2021 [1 favorite]


Sanspoint, serene empress dork Durkee sauce has been around since 1857
posted by brujita at 3:37 PM on June 2, 2021 [2 favorites]


Not sure if anyone's posted this, but So these kinds of videos? Yeah, the majority of them are sexual fetish content.
posted by zardoz at 7:07 PM on June 2, 2021


> So these kinds of videos? Yeah, the majority of them are sexual fetish content.

Extra funny that the poster in the thread saying “careful guys, this is soft core pornography” is the lady who went viral for fantasizing about having her calves cramping up while getting railed by Beto O’Rourke of all people
posted by Space Coyote at 7:18 PM on June 2, 2021 [1 favorite]


Is this supposed to make me miss social media?
posted by Big Al 8000 at 7:32 PM on June 2, 2021


s. A clean counter isn't any different from a clean plate, except for its heat capacity. That's one of the reasons you get a marble or stone counter, right? What am I missing?

Cats.

Claim that counter is clean all you want, I know there were cats, with litterbox feet dragging their buttholes down the whole length of that counter 30 seconds before filming started.

Or

Worse
posted by wotsac at 7:44 PM on June 2, 2021 [1 favorite]


and scoops the mess off the table with a spatula on to the top bread for each sandwich type

Ah. Pre-mixing sandwich ingredients like peanut butter and jelly and then putting them on the bread is extraneous effort and mess, and something one would more commonly do in a bowl than on a flat surface, yeah. Though I guess it's like Cold Stone Creamery, but with other foods?


Cats.

Claim that counter is clean all you want


Counterpoint: no cats came anywhere remotely near my grandmother's kitchen counters (which we did on occasion lay bread directly onto before spreading peanut butter on the non-counter side of one slice and jelly on the non-counter side of a paired slice, before sticking them together as a sandwich that we would run outside to eat directly afterwards). It's not how I would choose to live, but some people don't have furry, non-human family members living with them. (Personally, my cat is trained not to go on the kitchen counter, because that is most definitely a health and cleanliness issue, yeah.)
posted by eviemath at 8:23 PM on June 2, 2021


Those of you being all "countertops are dirty and not for food prep!" - how would you knead a dough, or do any bread-baking activities at all?

Working with food on a kitchen countertop is normal, standard, accepted practice. You clean them first, obviously, you know, like you do with your plates, chopping boards, and whatever else you prep on and eat off.
posted by Dysk at 11:19 PM on June 2, 2021 [6 favorites]


how to make countertop coffee!



This is one of those internet things that I've become aware of only second-hand from other people talking about it.
posted by RobotHero at 10:22 AM on June 3, 2021 [2 favorites]


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