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The staff ate it later

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Re: The staff ate it later

#101

Post by rtpg »

tokioyoyo wrote: post #97
lmm wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is similar to the Japanese concept of Shitsurei (失礼, しつれい). It is of course impossible to comprehend this unique idea that no other world culture has ever conceived of. What a remarkable society!

I did chuckle a bit, but the idea of mottainai is just way more prevalent within Japan, compared to Western countries. I can't speak for other Asian countries, but it's very easy to feel that compared to North America and Europe (places that I've lived in). Funnily, I've felt it in post-soviet countries as well, but that's coming from the feeling of scarcity in the beforetimes.

I’ve also lived in NA Europe and Japan and disagree with this sentiment.

“Don’t waste stuff” is taught by plenty of parents, people talk about using every bit of the buffalo in America. Everyone in my generation has the grandparent who threw nothing away.

There’s maybe more modern examples of cultural thrift in Japan due to the postwar experience compared to the US… but even then.

I feel like I’m talking to aliens when these discussions of “unique Japan” things come up that are, in my experience, plenty present abroad.

I don’t even think Japan is particularly that good about reuse and waste beyond its recycling programs!

Re: The staff ate it later

#102

Post by crazygringo »

alpinisme wrote: post #98
jfengel wrote: post #81

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…

That and nobody wants to eat a meal 40 times to get 40 takes.

This is the answer. The food is perfectly fine. It's fresh, there's catering on set, and it can be replaced as needed, unless it's something super unusual.

BUT if you eat the food in one shot you need to eat it in all the shots for continuity, so you can edit it together. Get ready to start barfing after 40 big bites of the same damn thing.

If you look closely, you'll also see the coffee/tea cups actors sip from are usually empty. Can't afford the risk of accidentally spilling liquid on the costume and delaying the shoot.

Re: The staff ate it later

#103

Post by rtpg »

Hamuko wrote: post #13
juancn wrote: post #4

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

Any waste as long as it's not plastic. Plastic's a free-for-all. There's really nothing you can't individually plastic wrap. An apple? Wrap it in plastic. A cookie? Plastic. A plastic straw? You can wrap that too.

This bugged me for a while but two things came to play for me:

- humidity and the generally mold-friendly conditions of Japan means that not doing wrapping of certain food in small packs means you’re risking food waste. And generally speaking food hygiene issues can be avoided

- if you look up how much plastic is actually needed to wrap something in plastic, it’s not that much material. A single Lego brick is more plastic than a loooooot of Saran wrap.

It’s good to reduce waste when possible, but I do get the health/food waste concerns. And to Japans credit, I’ve found that plastic packaging for like… products tends to be way less than equivalent plastic packaged products abroad in many cases IME. My Sony earbuds came entirely in cardboard packaging! No fancy thick printed box either, just some thin simple paper material.

Re: The staff ate it later

#104

Post by klodolph »

Pooge wrote: post #18
wk_end wrote: post #9

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…

English doesn't have rules as clear cut as Japanese's for politeness—especially nuances! I think it's fine to translate it to "ate". In turn, I'm not a native English speaker, but in the dictionary I searched in, "enjoy" isn't a synonym of "eat", whereas いただく definitely is—albeit a very polite one[1]. [1]: https://jisho.org/word/%E9%A0%82%E3%81%8F

“Enjoy” isn’t a synonym for “eat” in English but it definitely does carry the right meaning here. It’s a little poetic, but it’s idiomatic and native speakers will understand it.

Re: The staff ate it later

#105

Post by klodolph »

zahlman wrote: post #37
Pooge wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English doesn't have rules as clear cut as Japanese's for politeness—especially nuances! I think it's fine to translate it to "ate". In turn, I'm not a native English speaker, but in the dictionary I searched in, "enjoy" isn't a synonym of "eat", whereas いただく definitely is—albeit a very polite one[1]. [1]: https://jisho.org/word/%E9%A0%82%E3%81%8F

>"enjoy" isn't a synonym of "eat" It isn't literally , but it takes on this meaning in context. If you "enjoy" ("receive pleasure or satisfaction from; have the use or benefit of" per M-W) food, it's hard to imagine that you did anything else with it (er, let's not explore that here, please). It's much like how the primary, literal sense of いただく is more like "receive".

Itadaku is literally the kenjogo form of taberu (eat). It just happens to have multiple meanings.

Re: The staff ate it later

#106

Post by Aeolun »

decimalenough wrote: post #79
juancn wrote: post #4

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

This is why when you buy a book about mottainai in a Japanese bookstore, it comes with a detachable cover page, the bookstore gives you a cardboard cover so people can't see what you're reading, then puts the book in a plastic bag with a nice twist on top and then puts the bag in a branded paper bag. (I'm exaggerating, but only slightly.)

The people bring the bags home, fold them up carefully, and keep them around for the next time they need a gift bag.

Re: The staff ate it later

#107

Post by aidenn0 »

operator-name wrote: post #33

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!

One comedy (I think State and Main) had something like "Only 2 animals were harmed in the production of this film" as a joke in the credits.

Re: The staff ate it later

#108

Post by ajxs »

ern wrote: post #67
kelseyfrog wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We also have "No one was harmed in the making of this video" and similar, which has become so prevalent that its absence is sometime used to infer that someone was indeed injured or killed in the clip.

I've seen clips on Reddit where animals are harmed for engagement. Usually "nature is brutal" type clips, where one animal kills another. I mean nature is brutal, but typing down an animal to be consumed by another isn't natural. Anyway, I don't think movies and TV are the main source of animal cruelty anymore.

When Instagram introduced reels, I started to get exposed to these weird and horrible clips of people 'rescuing' sick and abused animals, and begging for donations. I don't know for certain, but there's lots of clues that these accounts are engineering these encounters. Seeing these clips is genuinely distressing, and it's hard to make Instagram stop showing them. Just another way social media is causing real harm to add to the list, I guess.

Re: The staff ate it later

#109

Post by aidenn0 »

rtpg wrote: post #85
johnea wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, waste is an English cultural concept, especially in the US. In this concept, waste is viewed as a sign of affluence. So ironically, the more one wastes the more "conservative" one is considered to be. Pretty much the opposite of the Japanese concept of mottainai.

The idea of not wasting food as a sort of baseline concept is a thing plenty of parents in the US teach their children.

Many Boomers may have heard something along the lines of "Many kids in Japan are starving and would love to have that food" even, bringing this somewhat full-circle.

Re: The staff ate it later

#110

Post by keiferski »

adriand wrote: post #87
kulahan wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't there some horrible story about the number of animals killed in the filming of Homeward Bound or some similar movie? I simply cannot comprehend the callousness of people towards animals back then. I guess our cultures are simply too different, but it genuinely seems like people saw all animals as "things" until, like, the 1950s or something like that. What the heck?

> I guess our cultures are simply too different, but it genuinely seems like people saw all animals as "things" until, like, the 1950s or something like that. There’s a weird disconnect where people ignore or are wilfully ignorant of cruelty to animals in industrial food production but are sensitive to it in virtually every other context. I saw a woman the other day who was tending to an injured pigeon and had called…

It is mostly just proximity and framing. A hurt wild animal is alive and right in front of you. Meat from the grocery store is a prepackaged product that isn’t mentally associated with the bloody process behind the scenes required to get it there. The commercial aspect is pretty dependent on this distancing.

Case-in-point: I once stayed in a small town in Morocco for a few weeks. There wasn’t a grocery store nearby, just a market, and if you wanted chicken, they killed it in front of you. Needless to say, being directly confronted with the process…I didn’t eat meat the entire time.

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