5 Annoying Ways TV Characters Pretend To Eat Food

If someone walked through your office treating coffee with such little care, they'd have Super-Soaker'd the entire HR department with piping hot lattes to the eyes. If you saw a stranger behaving like this with a cup of coffee, I bet you'd intervene.

There are other times when a character will take their very first sip of the "coffee" and slap the cup down on the table, at which point it'll make the hollow pop of an empty cup. This is such a noticeable issue that a writer at Slate seems to be as consumed with it as I am, and has been keeping track of the worst offenders.

It's time for Hollywood to start putting some liquid in their cups. That way, when a Gilmore Girl whose personality is mostly based around a love of coffee decides to get a cup of her preferred Joe, she isn't suddenly breaking the laws of fluid dynamics.

Hollywood adores taking big ol' expository dumps around King Arthur's Round Table, where characters talk and share telling glances, but never once touch the lavish courses sitting just a few inches from their perfectly made-up faces. Here's a meal from Wedding Crashers that will remain in pristine condition throughout the scene:

New Line Cinema

Imagine being invited over to dine with this crew of weirdos and looking around, just wondering if anyone's ever going to stop talking for long enough to even manage to cut the glistening buttery ham sitting in the center of the table, or take a spoonful of the golden mashed potatoes beside it. It's a feast big enough for a fucking NFL team, which means that, whether they intend to or not, someone will inevitably interact with the food. But nobody's eating. WHY IS NOBODY EATING? Are they waiting for someone to start? Take a bite, Vince Vaughn. Free me from this purgatory.

Even when the scene is centered around the feast to end all feasts, Thanksgiving, they still won't stop talking for one second to chug a gallon of gravy like normal people. Some might take a quick bite of turkey or sip some water, but sustained, natural eating? They act like the cranberry sauce will burn a cross on their tongues:

This is a food-based occasion. The lack of eating even among the non-talking characters is maddening. It looks like somebody spent half the week and all of their paycheck putting that meal together. Eat it, you assholes! It's getting cold!

You probably never would have noticed this without it being pointed out to you, just as you've never noticed a thousand other characters doing the exact same thing. But trust me, you will from now on. That's my gift to you. The guy takes a starter bite of the eggs, as if to say, "See? It's food!" He then spends the rest of the conversation teasing us, a hunk of egg on his fork as he gestures with it, repeatedly returning that bite to the plate.

Imagine if you were eating across from such an unhinged lunatic, forever halfway between eating and not eating like he's a character in a video game and someone needs to press the big glowing "X" above his head so he can do the action. And it's especially egregious when you're dealing with a meal like breakfast, which is meant to be eaten like you're a POW in a Popeye's (but more on that in a moment).

Besides the bite tease, the other extremely common and infuriating fake-ass Hollywood "eating" technique is the push-around. Apparently, nobody had that down like the folks over at The Big Bang Theory. Pay close attention to the two in the middle of the couch and the maniac behavior going on with their forks.

Does a single fork even make it from takeout tray to mouth? The way they're lightly poking at their food but absolutely never shovel it into their faces like a proper person shows you how far we are from entertainment capturing the human experience. HBO will "bravely" march a million flaccid hogs in front of the camera before anybody figures out how to make an actor look like they're really enjoying a meal.

Yes, we're back with these scumbags again. Generally, these cartons contain a mixture of things that are designed to be emptied out onto a plate and shared and mixed and matched to complete the meal. But in Hollywood's vision of Chinese takeout, there's always going to be one person who paid their share for the dinner but got the unlucky draw and is just stuck with a carton of plain white rice for the evening, while the guy next to him sucks back a pound and a half of General Tso's.

Then we get to their use of the chopsticks. One of the most maddening things you'll see is when an actor decides to kill time pretending to eat Chinese by stabbing into their carton like they're performing a food-eating idle animation:

I think you'd need to be Jackie Chan to be eating Chinese near someone behaving this threateningly with their food, because shit's about to pop off. You're gonna have to fight for your life using nothing but chopsticks in about two minutes.

Related: 5 Dumb Things Movie Characters Do Only To Advance The Plot

They then proceed to completely ignore it, either sitting down to do something other than eat, or just walking right past it.

ABC

Forget even mentioning the fact that Mom poured the orange juice INTO some fancy container to make sure the colors really popped for their arrival. Nope. Nobody gives a shit.

To someone watching such scenes over the last 30 years of film and TV, they'd get the idea that all Americans eat like this. That before school, the sun is inexplicably already on full blast, and kids and fathers alike give no respect to the work the mother put in for them. One teen MIGHT grab a piece of toast and head out the door in a rush for school (these people are always "going to be late"), but other than that, it's just fodder for flies. These scenes are a fucking fever dream.

The staggering amount of prepared and uneaten food being presented as your average weekday breakfast is buck wild. In reality, if your regular working mother prepared a buffet like this for her family and they hardly took a bite, let alone didn't thank her, she'd have all her bags packed and out the door before noon. But she's not in the clear either, because why is she making so much? What kids need to eat 3,000 calories in nothing but fat, protein, and carbs before they get on the school bus? Some people just aren't super hungry in the morning, Mom.

Hollywood, my plea is simple: Step it up. You're doing pretty well with the CGI and breaking down all kinds of technical and social boundaries on camera, and that's great. But everybody eats, and actors have been doing it the exact same kind of wrong since the invention of the camera. It's a lot easier for me to identify with "Hungover Guy Who Scarfs Down Bacon Egg & Cheese Sandwich Like He's On Death Row" than whatever HGH-ridden flying laser god you're going to throw at me this summer.

For more, check out 6 Ways The Food Industry Tricks You Into Eating Garbage - The Spit Take:

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