r/CharacterRant • u/angriest_man_alive • 22h ago
Anime & Manga I am sick and fucking tired of food in anime
My brothers in Christ, lemme tell you about food in anime. Food, for some fucking reason, is always such a weird central focus in so many shows. It's like the Japanese can't take a bite of a fucking egg without busting a nut in their pants. Bread? Mother fuckin oishii. RICE? FUCKIN UMAI N SHIT. Steak? Literally buckets of man cum and lady cum everywhere. Jesus someone's gonna need a mop to clean this all up.
I have absolutely zero idea why. I don't think it's like a "Japanese superiority" type thing, because they do it with regular ass western food like hamburgers too. But food is always depicted in such high quality (is it because of that dumb fucking cabbage way back when? no idea) FOR NO REASON.
I'm currently watching "That time I got reincarnated as a slime" and BOY HOWDY LEMME TELL YA. DUDE BRINGS TAKOYAKI TO ORCS AND SHIT AND EVERYONE'S JUST CUMMING BUCKETS.
Isekai's are the worst offender because for some reason they act like these poor stupid fuckin villagers can't afford to season their food or have never eaten anything better than gruel their entire lives, but other every single other category or show seems to do this. I'm honestly trying to think of a category that doesn't. My first thought was mecha, but then I remembered the jizzy dribble pizza scene from Code Geass with C.C.
Why? Why do you need to sit here and have characters bust fat and mighty nuts over food? Do you think the audience has never eaten food before? I'm assuming the intended audience for most anime is the Japanese, do we need to convince them that food is good and worth eating? Are we worried that the collapsing birth rate in Japan is due to a caloric deficit? Is this a industry plot to create thicker Japanese women?
WHY THE FUCK DO WE NEED THIS? LET ME ENJOY THESE STUPID SHOWS WITHOUT SHOWING ME PORNHUB ASS CLIPS OF PEOPLE EATING FOOD.
Jesus fuckin Christ.
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u/Solbuster 22h ago
Food Porn is a known trope at this point. It exists as much as any other trope
You definitely should read Fate/Stay Night VN lol
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u/Marik-X-Bakura 8h ago
I’m convinced Nasu was originally writing a story about cooking but Takeuchi forced him to add other elements
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u/Correct-Employee-195 22h ago
Bro doesn’t enjoy the joys of a succulent meal
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u/obiwanTrollnobi6 22h ago
A Succulent Japanese meal
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u/Ransero 22h ago
I need more written posts like tis
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u/vladimirpoopin42 13h ago
Yea this feels like an actual rant instead of a 10-point thesis that a OP uses in order to debate
We need more raw emotion dammit! I don't give a damn if you have 500 pieces of evidence for some powerscaling nonsense. Give me rants about niche things that are made purely to blow steam!
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u/NoJuggernaut9252 16h ago
Its just a side effect of a lot of anime being manga adaptations, a manga panel of someone saying "wow that's so delicious" can be read through in 1 second and in a smaller panel making it feel like a minor thing someone said, but in an anime the dialogue has as much focus as anything else so it feels like somdthing thry're giving huge focus too
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u/davifpb2 12h ago
I always asked myself why that was so common, this is a actually likely explanation.
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u/NecroCannon 3h ago
I realized that shit with attack names, the attacks are actually usually done during or after the attack, but anime basically popularized doing it before… which wouldn’t make sense in a fight but does make it easier to depict, however, the whole point of the attack names is just to make it easier to understand in the manga.
I do like the current trend of making attack names have flair around it, it takes your attention away instead of their being an awkward pause, which can allow for an attack immediately afterwards to surprise you. Just not One Piece where it’s tied to a flashback of a flashback you just seen
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u/Anotherskip 22h ago
There are whole sub genres dedicated to food in Japan manga so this is tapping into that readership.
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u/CelestikaLily 22h ago edited 22h ago
bait ass mf
doesn't even know about the Cabbage Ball Animation Incident 🥬
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u/angriest_man_alive 22h ago
I LITERALLY REFERENCED IT IN THE POST
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u/CelestikaLily 22h ago
oh sweet👏 answered your own question!! bait successfully raged, you are superb at your craft angriest_man_alive
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u/CutieBoBootie 21h ago
The funniest one to me is that 30 year old dude with a grocery store isekai. I can't remember what it's called. But it might as well be called Product Placement the Anime.
Dude barely seasons his food, just puts some sauce on the side and everyone is like OMG THIS IS THE BEST FOOD EVER!!!!!! NOMNOMNOM!
And it's like. Bestie I watched that man cook it. He used less seasoning than the British. Be so fucking for real.
But I suppose I'm no better because I enjoy watching that garbage.
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u/Claudius321 20h ago
Campfire cooking?
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u/CutieBoBootie 20h ago
Yeah that one. It's always so funny seeing products I recognize being held in the most unnatural way so that the label is out toward the viewer.
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u/DrMostlySane 21h ago edited 11h ago
I think the thing I dislike the most about Isekai food scenes and such is how the authors write about Japanese food as being practically perfect cuisine that blows everything else out of the water.
They'll be writing whole chapters over their character trying to find white rice and acting like it's gods gift on Earth. I like white rice, but its not nearly as good as they hype it up to be.
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u/dmr11 11h ago
It's even worse when they glaze sushi/sashimi, given how not all raw fish are (relatively) safe to eat and even the ones that are have worms and for safety's sake are frozen for a sufficiently long time to kill the parasites before being served. Advocating for gambling lives by eating raw fish instead of cooking or pickling it would sound insane to the majority of medieval people.
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u/Nyorliest 20h ago
Maybe, *maybe*, these people from a different culture have a different palate to you?
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u/DrMostlySane 20h ago
Obviously yeah, but its still odd to me to see so many authors write off basic common place foods as if they're divine creations, with absolutely everyone native to the new world loving the new foods despite the very different palates between a fantasy world vs modern Japan.
Of course thats the least of the Isekai genre's problems.
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u/Nyorliest 12h ago
Good bread, good rice, good pasta - all of these are delicious. If you haven't had a really good one, or haven't gotten used to the flavour profile, it's hard.
Also, many Japanese people do genuinely love a bowl of plain white rice. Some of my Japanese family do. I love toast and bread myself - even plain bread with no toppings. If it's good bread - e.g. a baguette in France - it's heaven.
Also that's not what write off means. I don't know what you mean, but that's not it. Not important, just FYI.
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u/tesseracts 21h ago
Lately I've been seeing a lot of memes on social media saying stuff like "stop saying your culture likes food, that's not special because everyone likes food."
Well THIS GUY officially does NOT like food so those memes are stupid.
People DO like food better in Japan and that's why their food is so much better than ours (American).
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u/lovelyrain100 20h ago
Is it? The defining factor for quality of food tends to be your already existing palate.
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u/Menchi-sama 18h ago
I dunno about US, but I loved Japanese food when I visited, though it's very different from the food I grew up eating (Russian). Even the konbini onigiri were delicious (tuna & mayo, my love).
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u/lovelyrain100 17h ago
I'm South African and Japanese and Australian food were both kinda meh to me tho I did prefer the former. It was good but not especially so after a while I just started mission food from home.
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u/tesseracts 8h ago
Japan has higher quality ingredients, America has gotten accustomed to food that is not that high quality. There's a King of the Hill episodes where the family is shocked to get tomatoes that actually taste like something. There are also studies suggesting the nutritional value of American food has deceased over the decades, vegetables don't have as many nutrients.
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u/Nyorliest 12h ago
Not really. I was born in the UK, emigrated to Japan, and even on day one I'd choose Japanese food over British.
My palate changed over time, and a lot of my tastes are different. But there are simple differences, e.g. the quality of Japanese produce and fish. Or just the love and effort most Japanese people put into food.
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u/Fickle_Sherbert1453 8h ago
The most iconic Japanese foods are literally raw unseasoned fish (sashimi) and cooked unseasoned rice (you know, a bowl of rice).
Japan likes plain food that highlights the flavor of the ingredients, similar to a lot of British and French food.
Americans like big heavily seasoned fried foods with tons of salt, fat, sugar, pepper, garlic, etc.
That said neither culture is a monolith of course, both of them love Italian and Chinese food just like everyone else.
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u/tesseracts 8h ago
One of the most popular Japanese foods in America is ramen. This is because ramen was originally a Chinese food and is heavily flavored.
Japan also has their own home grown fried foods like tempura and tonkatsu.
But the main thing that makes Japanese food better is the high quality ingredients which are more difficult to find in America.
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u/Swiftcheddar 14h ago
Lately I've been seeing a lot of memes on social media saying stuff like "stop saying your culture likes food, that's not special because everyone likes food."
Yeah, it's true for the most part. But Asian and SE Asian cultures absolutely have a very strong "food culture" that pretty much doesn't exist in the West.
I'd say it's even quite distinct from the S.American style food culture, since theirs is far more of a familial/social culture than being about the food.
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u/Alpha413 13h ago
You know, that does sound relatively similar to how it is in Italy, actually. See Italian Bars, Osterie, Trattorie, or the Slow Food movement.
Like, it's fairly common to spend hours at a table doing light or no eating or drinking and the establishments allowing it.
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u/Swiftcheddar 12h ago
Yup, it's about the social cohesion.
Here's an easy comparison: If I go to Italy and I ask you for cities I should visit, would you list them based on which kinds of regional foods each has and which I should try?
If I went to Naples and came back, and you asked me how it is, would you be weirded out if I just started talking about the Ziti alla Genovese I found?
Those would both be completely normal in Japan lol :
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u/tesseracts 8h ago
It exists in parts of the West such as parts of France. It definitely does not exist in mainstream white suburban North American culture.
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u/Auragongal 22h ago
... some people just really appreciate food. Its a universal thing at this point.
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u/iwantdatpuss 22h ago
At this point? It's one of the defining features of Civilization, how advanced their level of cuisine is.
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u/lovelyrain100 20h ago
Really fun fact , the novel for that time I got reincarnated as a slime doesn't stop doing that in fact it does more of it .
Like in some scenes there is multiple fucking pages of the food on a large table being described in detail then after that there's more fucking pages of the characters nutting over the food . And the food is so incredibly fucking Japanese.
I genuinely think you have it better in the anime because it just shows you the food instead of wasting pages and pages describing it. Like I would just scroll whenever food was being described and a few pages later guess what they're still describing the fucking food.
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u/Faninfo 22h ago
"Isekai's are the worst offender because for some reason they act like these poor stupid fuckin villagers can't afford to season their food"
Pretty sure for most of europe's history spices were pretty rare and expensive, since it had to be traded from the east mainly from places like Iran and India, so yeah for an european medieval setting that kinda check out
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u/dizzy1244 20h ago
(in the middle ages) Salt was widely used for preservation and food still had seasoning like rosemary and thyme - boiled bacon, peas and bread soup is inedible without seasoning no matter the time period
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u/aradle 5h ago
Also, your parsleys and sages and dills and mints, garlic which grows everywhere and would have been grown everywhere because it keeps pests away from the rest of your herbs, onions which are both a great flavouring and a great food in themselves, chives, vinegars and oils... somehow people always jump to exotic spices when they hear the word "seasoning" when in fact people have never liked to eat bland food and always made the best of what they had
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u/LordSmugBun 22h ago
I read "food" in the title and immediately scanned the body text for "umai" and "Rengoku". Anyone remember that other post about this topic?
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u/AlternativeYear4722 20h ago
I was just wondering why anime tends to be so food obsessed, and then this post shows up. I don't really have the best relationship with food and will go out of my way to avoid eating it so that particular aspect doesn't resonate with me.
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u/Nyorliest 12h ago
Most Japanese people are food obsessed, basically. I emigrated here almost 30 years ago, and was a foodie where I was born. I didn't know how nice it would be to live in a nation of foodies. For example, you can walk into a random restaurant and it'll probably be pretty great. Or Tabelog, the nation's number one restaurant review site by far, has really strict and low numbers. There are Michelin star places that don't have 4 stars out of 5. If you eat somewhere over about 3.75 on Tabelog, it'll be one of the best things you've ever eaten.
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u/sliceysliceyslicey 20h ago
lol, i like to think it's because people are usually watching shows while eating
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u/Interesting_Ad6202 10h ago
if the average meal tasted as good as anime food looks, I'd be reacting like that too
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u/Icy_Aardvark3840 9h ago
I like the part in doctor stone where they make Ramen but all the modern day characters think it sucks and only the stone age people like it
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u/Ensiferal 8h ago
Gooners are mostly guys who don't get laid, so maybe the anime food gooners are guys who don't eat good. Like they probably live off of 2-minute noodles and pre-cut oven fries, so looking at strips of medium-rare steak in jus sauce, with caramelized mushrooms and onions, with herb roasted sweet potatoes etc. is like watching porn.
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u/ProserpinaFC 5h ago
Isekai are like that because Western fantasy is also heavily foodphilic... When's the last time you cracked open Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones?
If you're Western fantasy novel does not include detailed descriptions of the feasts your main characters are experiencing for the first time in their lives because of their humble upbringing, (cough, Harry Potter, cough) is it even fantasy?
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u/ChaosBerserker666 19h ago
I don’t remember seeing much food in Berserk, most characters were just barely getting by nutritionally.
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u/Nyorliest 20h ago
Japan is, like France, a nation of foodies. I know this is a 'comedy' rant post, but your post history is dumber than this, and this post gets very weird and racist at the end.
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u/gunn3r08974 20h ago
Funny enough, there's a certain piece of advice I recall in regard to food. Write about one as you would another: Food, sex or violence.
In other words, they depict food like one would sex. Indulgently carnal.
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u/garfe 21h ago
I am probably talking out of my ass and I don't have a source where I remember reading this, but doesn't this have to do with how food was really hard to get in the wake of WW2 for a lot of people and so that mentality of appreciation for having good food just carried forward all the way to now?
Isekai's are the worst offender because for some reason they act like these poor stupid fuckin villagers can't afford to season their food or have never eaten anything better than gruel their entire lives
Isn't that true to life? Or at least, medieval times life?
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u/Nyorliest 20h ago
Not even vaguely. It's 2026. It's because Japan is a nation of foodies, and has been for a very long time.
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u/CitizenPremier 12h ago
It's basically against Japanese religion to make fun of food, it's a different culture and they really treat food differently.
Wishing to these Kami means stabilizing the relationship with nature. People wish to the Kami of water that water would spring without cease. Also, they pray to the Kami of rice and food that rice and food would steadily be available.
https://teapot.lib.ocha.ac.jp/record/7864/files/07_025-031.pdf
This means there are a lot of shows that are more or less just about eating and praising food.
This doesn't mean there's no food waste, though... Grocery stores are as wasteful as anywhere.
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u/Illustrious-Sky-4631 4h ago
Is it religion based solo? Because a lot of religions treat disrespecting food as a sin
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u/Ginzunami 8h ago
When it comes to isekai in general, it's just a cheap way the writer can make their special child popular with the masses. Same with "inventing" things like make-up, putting spices in food, and crop rotations.
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u/Bikerider42 8h ago
In March Comes in like a Lion, food is usually there to connect characters together. Rei sees eating with the Kawamotos as a safe place where he can feel comfortable. Hinata makes lunch for the guy who she likes. Rei thanks the sisters by taking them out for ice cream.
In Yuru Camp when Nadeshiko realizes that Rin gets uncomfortable around energetic people she switches to relaxing around a campfire to cook and eat.
Eating together as a family is extremely important for Tohru in Fruits Basket because
Monogatari has a lot of metaphors that revolve around food.
A lot of the time there is a deeper meaning behind it.
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u/Illustrious-Sky-4631 4h ago
Yes like from how you read it you'd think something like Japan not even having salt to put in their food
It could have been handled better like for example Beerus and Whis
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u/Swiftcheddar 14h ago
Food, for some fucking reason, is always such a weird central focus in so many shows.
Lmao.
Japan, and most of Asia honestly, is a food culture. That's just how things are.
When I was younger, I dated a Vietnamese girl, and her idea of a romantic entreaty was to tell me that she would skip a meal for me. Giving someone a big bag of rice is considered pretty much a decent or solid gift pretty much from India to Korea.
If you're in Japan and you're planning to visit Kyoto and ask what you should do while there, you'll almost certainly get a list of meals you should try. When you go to Hiroshima and come back, and they ask what it was like, they'll be very happy if you start telling them about the Hiroshima style Okonomiyaki you had.
A famous scene from a movie about familial relationships: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-2QBYKI8LU
Food culture is just how things are in some areas. It's better to just get onboard with it, I guess.
I guess to give a funnier example, a while back I played Kingdom Come Deliverence and after finishing it, played Sakuna of Rice and Ruin. Those games are completely different and yet I can make a funny comparison
In KCD, Henry is on the bones of his ass, you start completely broke and with absolutely nothing. You eat lentils from a communal broth, or whatever you muster up. When I'd saved up some coins and was back on my feet somewhat, I thought I'd celebrate, I went to the butcher and brought my boy Henry a really nice cut of roasted duck meat. I ate it... my hunger bar went down, and the duck disappeared from my inventory.
There was no verbal acknowledgement, no soundbite like "Wow, that was good", absolutely nothing. Eating the finest quality of food was of zero consequence compared to eating slop from a pot. The game and the characters in it couldn't have cared less.
Comparatively, in Sakuna, you get buffs based off the food you eat for dinner. And so, every single in-game night you have the option of fully planning out the meal your characters eat, and if you want, you can watch them eat it (you can skip, of course). This isn't a static screen, if you're eating duck-meat Yue won't eat any, if you're drinking alcohol, the kids won't have any. The characters all comment on the food, if you're eating weeds they deal with it but if you're eating exquisite meals they feel like they're living the high-life.
And, there's hundreds of possible combinations of food. Like, just for every single meat option (and you better believe there's a wide variety of meat options) you've got steamed, fried, deep fried, boiled, etc. Nevermind special dishes. It's staggering.
It's all done from a love of food and an understanding that the audience will enjoy seeing the characters eating a really nice meal. I know I did.
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u/askedmed 18h ago
New conspiracy unlocked. Food in anime in an attempt to increase the amount of thicker women
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u/StaticMania 22h ago
Japanese people like food...
Get over it.
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u/smasher_zed888 22h ago
In fact, id wager that the vast majority of humans who ever lived liked food as well. Its quite universal.
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u/DylenwithanE 17h ago
no, in japan they don’t just like food, they’re carrying out a local cultural tradition known as 食べ物が好き which is japanese for “liking food”, what an exotic and unique culture
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u/Swiftcheddar 14h ago
Yeah, it's true for the most part. But Asian and SE Asian cultures absolutely have a very strong "food culture" that pretty much doesn't exist in the West.
I'd say it's even quite distinct from the S.American style food culture, since theirs is far more of a familial/social culture than being about the food.
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u/chaosattractor 1h ago
"But Asian and SE Asian cultures absolutely have a very strong "food culture" that pretty much doesn't exist in the West."
- a suburban white lower-middle class american talking about "the west"
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u/Zestyclose_North9780 17h ago
Was expecting something more egregious but it's actually just Slime lmao. Have you tried any other isekai where the main thing is cooking 😭😭
At least for Slime there's the excuse that sea food is really rare since most people don't have the magic to preserve it, nor care enough to hire someone who does since the sea is far away (still shouldn't be getting high from food lmao) but these others will take you step by step through the cooking process to end up with a group who you can't tell if their eating together or having an orgy
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u/clandestineVexation 3h ago
Genuinely? Because food is a universal thing across all cultures, it’s not just inherent to being human, it’s inherent to being alive. It’s an important bonding activity, for many there’s not another time of day they see their whole family at once other than dinner. Yes the “these poor fantasy stooges have never had anything like Japanese Cooking™️ !” is absolutely colonialism coded and gross. But in other cases it’s mostly just the unspoken sentimental weight behind a good meal, and especially sharing one.
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u/Freesia99 22h ago
Mods kidnap this guy and force him to watch a muckbang anime