Epic Meal Time: (Postmodernism)

Epic Meal Time is a weekly updated Canadian-based YouTube cooking channel hosted by Harley Morenstein, an ex-substitute teacher from Montreal and co-founded by Harley and the cameraman Sterling Toth. They are most well known for their excessive use of bacon and alcohol in their meals, and their disgust of vegetables and haters. Their videos usually follow the same formula. Harley and his friends go shopping for their assorted meats/fast food. Then they return to their home-front cooking station and create large portions of aesthetically appealing dishes. After the meals have been literally constructed, the group devours them in a sloppy, barbaric fashion, often utilizing unusual serving utensils. They are a postmodern text in the way they go against the universal goal of a healthy lifestyle. They also blur some lines between their show and the real world and reject the conventions of cooking shows. Lastly, they show rejection of the sacredness of food as they tie their inglorious eating habits to their hyper-consumerist society.

                Harley Morenstein said that, "In this day and age, I feel like there's a big emphasis on organic foods or a lot of negative media in regards to obesity and stuff like that. We are there eating this, and [viewers] are eating vicariously through us." Here he describes both their popularity as an escape from reality, and how their popularity demonstrates the real desires of society, being freedom of the body. By rejecting healthy living (insofar as calorie intake levels), they reject the message of the authorities related to health, such as Health Canada, and the World Health Organization. However, they still agree with the importance of exercise (an imbedded contradiction), as one of their episodes featured a massive protein bar, where the audience learns that the beloved character “Muscles Glasses” is the personal trainer of the group.

                In a few episodes we see the EMT cast go to real-life restaurants, such as Restaurant Nupur, and other locations, such as Queen’s University, and have scripted interactions with the workers/students. By taking real world sites and people (i.e. Deadmau5 in “Cheesy Grilled Cheese Tower”) and incorporating them in their cooking show, Epic Meal Time dips into the “diverse voices” attribute of most postmodern texts. While they may not have lines, EMT allows their creations to be influenced by the different cultures and designs that the people they feature represent. Their meals include Canadian cuisine (“Sugar Shack”, “Angry French Canadian”), Indian cuisine (“Epic Indian Experience”), Chinese cuisine (“Epic Eggroll”), Japanese inspired cuisine (“Fast Food Sushi”), and Mexican inspired cuisine (“Tequila Taco Night”). Other dishes are festive, such as the “TurBaconEpic”, “Chocolate and Hearts”, and “Special Delivery” episodes, as they take inspiration from everyday life.

                Being a parody- and satire-based series, Epic Meal Time finds nothing sacred in the world of cooking and etiquette. The previously mentioned “Special Delivery” episode featured a turkey giving “birth” to a rabbit. The two cooked animals, attached with a bacon umbilical cord, completely took the innocence and beauty out of birth. The People for Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) have expressed their disgust in Epic Meal Time through their website, which praised the parody, “Vegan Meal Time” in opposition to the meat marauders. Ironically, Vegan Meal Time seems to be a parody of both EMT and the vegan lifestyle itself, as it presents vegans as aggressive and histrionic animal lovers/protectors.

                Epic Meal Time is the soil in which flowers of intertextuality bloom, but rarely are they intertextual themselves. A noteworthy mention is that they have referred to themselves as the “Jackass of food”, and have admitted that is where their “skull and knives” logo originates from. However, their lack of intertextuality does not make this unique show any less postmodern, as they exhibit more than a few characteristics of postmodernism.