Africa and Epic Meal Time

For those who don't know, Epic Meal Time are a YouTube phenomenon where a selection of pseudo-personalities cook up insane dishes from lasagne constructed from 45 burgers to the bird-in-a-bird-in-a-bird-in-a-pig turbaconthanksgiving. I am a massive fan of Epic Meal Time; I've even got a few t-shirts.

However, this post isn't focused on Epic Meal Time itself. It's about something I often see in the comments - 'people in Africa' and 'disgusted' are the two main criticisms. While EMT's brand of food porn is undeniably distasteful, that's part of why it's so successful. It's a tongue-in-cheek approach to shows of gluttony we see on Man V Food and so on, but with a side-order of creativity and humour.

Returning to the matter at hand though - how can filming a man eating his own body weight in bacon be justified when approximately 4 million people in the UK alone are below 40% of the median income? That would be less than £8000 per year, yet that is still extremely affluent compared to the poorest of the poor, who would outnumber the UK's population by a rather large amount. In 2005, 80% of the world population lived on less than $10 a day. That's around 4.8 billion people. It would take these individuals at least 8 days to be able to afford the first purchase in EMT's video, assuming they forgo purchasing food, drink, rent, electricity, gas or whatever amenities they may have.

But let's move on from the constant barrage of figures we get so often in news - let's ask the burning question.

"Is Epic Meal Time able to justify their purchase, consumption and wastage of this much food, considering the poverty in the world? Yes."

Well, yes-ish. The fact of the matter is that Western consumption of resources is hugely damaging, particularly considering the environment and so on, but food is not oil. Food is a sustainable, renewable resource that is reasonably easy to get hold of with the right tools and expertise. From the wastes of Siberia to the American deserts to the English countryside, food can be grown or found. Saying "people in Africa can't eat like that" is an ignorant response to EMT and an ignorant and groundless criticism. US resource consumption is obscene, but it simply does not apply to food in the same way.

Unlike resources such as oil and precious metals that are non-renewable and largely pilfered from many African nations, food is scarce due to internal problems in nations. Furthermore food is not scarce in every nation. I won't go into the bizarre tendency of the Western people to discuss to vast continents such as Asia and Africa with blanket statements (which I myself am guilty of), but in any case it is an illogical conclusion that because I can eat well, I should not waste food that Ethiopia may need.

Ethiopia, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Niger, Tanzania - these nations are struggling for their own reasons and their issues are nothing to do with the UK throwing away 3.6m tonnes of food waste per year. So let's get to the nitty gritty; why.

Without the aforementioned skills and such, people cannot grow food. Agriculture is a mature technology since the green evolution, but only in the West where it can be financially and technically supported at such a massive scale. The population explosion in Africa and subsequent political problems that have plagued many nations have jeapordised any technological transit, and current technology cannot support agriculture when a crop fails. In the West, a harvest does not really fail, and even in the rare case when it does, there are thousands more fields in tens of other countries.

The Niger Delta

Take Zimbabwe for example; once white farmers were forced from the country, food production fell dramatically. While it has picked up, it is a good example of the effect of expertise. The white farmers knew what they were doing, while the new land owners did not. The result? A massive decline in yields.

Improving expertise is the basic objective - give a man fish, give a man a rod etc. - but it is also a three pronged problem. One, political problems are a considerable barrier. Two, getting the technology up to scratch locally, rather than other nations constantly sending tools and equipment. Three, educating people adequately and maintaining that level of education.

However, I won't delve into the theory or facts any further. Suffice to say that food wastage and excessive consumption in the West are their own problems with many causes and effects, while the African food crisis is down to a vast array of reasons - but absolutely nothing to do with the West's food consumption.

To conclude, rather than berating those who waste or consume excessively, more should be done to help these nations in question. Don't send them food aid unless they desperately need it; send tools, send machines, send expertise. Epic Meal Time shouldn't send food or money, despite the moral correctness of such an action. Perhaps it would be useful, but these problems are down to transnational corporations, political corruption and past government actions. I'd rather see Shell helping people in the Niger delta rather than creating a brutal war and ruining the nation, than Epic Meal Time playing any part - they are neutral in the matter, and this applies to anything that is verbally linked to famine in other parts of the world. Can they help? Yes. Should they help? Maybe.

Saying 'people in Africa can't eat like that' as a criticism completely ignores the far bigger issues at the very root of the problem, in the same way Kony 2012 ignores the tangle of problems within Uganda.

Kickstarter /rant

I read a friend's post about Kickstarter this afternoon, and I felt he made a fair number of valid points. This seems to be cropping up increasingly as of late; the question of whether a project 'deserves' to go on Kickstarter, and I think it's started to become worthy of serious comment.


There is a clear parallel to be drawn with projects on a game developer's forum I frequent, though I should mention the 'problem' isn't limited to video games. Anyway, speaking as a collective, we often get posts from modders along the entire spectrum of ability; from total noobs through to university educated designers. The Source scene's in a big decline at the moment, so they haven't been as frequent as usual. However, time and time again these people genuinely expect us to get involved in their projects.

Double Fine is an example of how good Kickstarter can be

Admittedly, the Source community at interlopers.net is "generally cynical, critical [and] routinely destroys newcomer's hopes and dreams through giving them a non-euphemised point of view about their suggested projects" as one friend put it, but there's reason to this. These projects are created by 'ideas guys', whose skillset is lacking and their understanding of the processes involved in games design minimal. We can spot a project that's going to fail a mile off because we've all been there. Many indie and amateur devs are often guilty of saying "I promise we'll finish this" and failing to, but the sad fact is we all know it's an empty promise. Devs lie to themselves more than the target audience when they pitch ideas.

We all expected Raindrop to be a success - and it wasn't.
Would you fund a project not knowing if it would work?

What's more, even projects belonging to people with an excellent set of ideas and skills can rapidly go down the pan. Consider Nightfall, Raindrop - mods that we all expected to survive and prosper.


So where am I going with all of this?


The posts that I've read, from the ideas men to the experienced modders, get torn to shreds on Interlopers. We cut them hard and cut them deep because that's what we do. We're hard-bitten, self-taught workers of a craft and we're not going to bow down to someone with an (admittedly decent) idea but no skill or knowledge of the effort involved. We don't get paid to do this, y'know. Once upon a time, these ideas would get our support or our criticism, and they'd go from there with knowledge, experience and refinement - or be rightly binned entirely. Ever heard of City 13 by MajorBanter? Of course you haven't, because it was an awful idea and it rightly got no quarter at Interlopers. So let's expand this to the general playing field of games design.


"You're not funding a project - you're funding an ego."


Now, any game dev who thinks he or she has a half-baked idea will look at Minecraft or Orion's success on Kickstarter and genuinely believe that they can do it. Perhaps they can, but what about motivation? Skill? Interest? Ability? Design? The key tenets are set aside for a self-masturbatory attempt at what is basically validation of an idea. You're not funding a project - you're funding an ego. I'm sure there are many excellent Kickstarters out there, but for every Tim Schafer there's a MyLittleBronycon. One is a heartfelt attempt to build something, and if it fails then it dies gracefully and with our respect, as Raindrop did. The other is a bizarre, sickening and pointless moneygrabbing venture that wouldn't last five minutes on a public forum.

Feel free to debate this with me - this is a superficial conclusion, and there's plenty of health in this argument. Is Kickstarter a menace as much as a positive thing? Do these successful and honest projects outweigh the delusional ones? Let me know. But right now, I feel that instead of opening these projects to the much needed criticism and support from fellow individuals is analogous to the almighty playtest. It fixes fundamental problems, or gives you the knowledge of whether to bin the whole thing or not. By just skipping to Kickstarter, amateur devs undermine their own project and undermine the positive values of Kickstarter in search of a quick buck, motivation, or as far as I'm concerned the positive feedback they crave. And at the back of their heads will be a niggling doubt asking that big question - is this idea really as good as I think it is?