It didn't occur to me until recently that our fetish is a perfect example of why other countries hate the United States (yes, I know not all of you reading this are in the US).

Our country produces enough food to feed nearly the entire world, and here we are pouring it on ourselves and flushing it down the drain or throwing it in the trash. It's not going to stop me (maybe because I'm an asshole), but it's not something I had thought of until recently.

Well, I'm from Uruguay, I have a WAM fetish for pies in the face and don't worry about it. So...?

I think this has been covered already, but no guilt here - I wasted enough time with that growing up Catholic. Imho, with sex, as with food, neither one makes a whit of difference in the bigger scheme of things. If you pitch food, something, somewhere will inevitably eat it, and back into the system it goes. The people who truly need the guilt are wrapping it in eleven layers of unnecessary plastic used for marketing.

What? Not even close, more like ten percent, from what I've been reading. (To be fair that is a good bit larger than the % of the world population the US takes up.)

Anyway, this was gone over last spring in a fairly long thread started by Angelface. It's difficult to feel bad about wasting food when the issue of world hunger is caused by improper subsidies, dysfunctional governments, busted distribution systems, etc. etc. Even to say that we're just a drop in the bucket is to exaggerate our role in all of this.

I am not saying you should feel bad about your/my/our fetish, but I don't understand why you didn't think about the consequences until now.

To those in the "let's just ignore it camp": that attitude makes our fetish and the UMD look bad: MUCH worse than any WAMdawg sexually explicit comments on YouTube.

I've thought and worried about the consequences for as long as I've had the fetish as a kid in the 1970s. One of the major themes and passions of my life: how to reverse entropy (e.g. grow food).

That's one of the major reasons I don't buy wam videos any more,
although I BELIEVE, but cannot prove, that our fetish contributes nothing to world hunger. I don't feel comfortable buying wam videos until I can prove that statement true.

In general, I really don't believe that anybody would eat the food stuffs that are used in a wam video.

Recently, where I live (a retirement community - even though I am not of retirement age - I simply inherited my property from my deceased parents)
some bakery company would make random donations of breads and goods to the residents of the community. I took advantage of as much bread that I could store. However, most of the bread was un-nutritious white bread. Many residents took most of the good breads (whole wheats, ryes), muffins, etc.
But, at lot of the cheap white bread simply went to waste.
(Well, not to discourage anyone - it's possible it was taken away later and given
to some even poorer people or to feed birds! (eeks!) )

They made a delivery 3 weeks ago of 2 huge VERY messy sheet cakes
with a birthday message already inscribed on them! Obviously, some customer ordered them but then changed their mind.

They sat in our clubhouse for about 4 days. Some resident must have picked up one of them. But, I just could not stand by and see the other rot.

So I took it home. Just getting this huge sheet cake
(about 1 foot by 2 feet by 4 inches) into my car was a problem.
It slides around in the plastic contained and messed up the front seat.
As hungry and poor as I am, I knew that eating this whole cake would NOT be good for me: i.e. going hungry would be better for my health than eating a pile of essentially sugar and frosting.

I THOUGHT about having myself a private-wam session. But, why bother, I thought? I can't videotape myself.

I imagined: wouldn't this be awesome if I could ship this cake to Lenny or Filthyrich and have them use it in their next wam video?
But - what will THEY do with it? Keep it in a huge freezer until their next shoot?
And Lenny will carry it on an airplane to California or Florida 6 months later,
defrost it, and toss it onto a model?

I also considered: why not at the very least BURN it as biofuel in the gasification unit my boss is trying to get going? Well, he doesn't have it up and running yet.
That, also, may not be for months. (Producer gas is basically carbon monoxide and hydrogen gas that is used to power cars.)

That's the problem with barter: the "coincidence of wants".

I ate about 1/8 of it. Not good for my teeth or waistline.
The rest went to the birds outside my house and my compost pile to feed new plants.

Remember: one video producer making one video for 1000 customers
produces 1000X less waste than 1000 customers each physically engaging in wam. Of course, some people still are not satisfied unless they can get the real experience.

And, I am especially conflicted, since - although I love mud wrestling, as long as there is total facial coverage - my preference is for pie in the face, with real cream pies, yet I oppose the breeding of cows confined in factory farms.

I still keep hope (because psychologically I have to) that I will invent a technological solution to reversing entropy by figuring out how neurons in vertebrates (sentient beings) move atoms around based upon how green plants and those chemosynthetic archaea around hydrothermal vents do it.

I view everything as a technical problem to be overcome.
Sometimes that technical problem includes my/our collective psychology.

Well, a couple things.

First: most of the food used for WAM isn't really that nutritious. Sugar, sugar, sugar, and more sugar is what it boils down to.

And second: do you know how much difference it would make to world hunger if we all stopped getting messy with food? Absolutely none.

If Rich didn't buy all that sugary, bleached-flour, no-nutritional-value-whatsoever cake mix to pour on his models, one of three things would happen: 1) Someone might actually bake a cake with it, and possibly serve it to some kids. And since, if you look into it, sugar, not fat, is to blame for the childhood obesity epidemic, Rich may actually be doing some kid a favor (besides, let's face it, mix cakes are never as good as from scratch). 2) It would sit on a shelf until it went past its last sale date, at which point it would be donated to a food bank (see #1) or 3) be thrown out and spend the rest of eternity in a landfill somewhere.

Personally, I'd rather see it poured over a pretty girl's head.

I thought grocery stores weren't allowed to do anything with food that's passed the expiration date but throw it out. That's one of the reasons I've used to justify WAM (in my mind at least--I don't self-wam and don't have a partner). I figure if I ever start getting into the WAM game, I'd just make good with the local grocers and get stuff they were about to throw out anyway. It's still wasteful, but it's a more "useful" waste. And that's how the kids shows used to do it.

Let's look on the bright side: the gross consumption (I mean that term in more ways than one) of food for WAM means that the food companies and those who work for them can stay employed for just a little bit longer. I'd like to think that Rich's efforts alone have prevented at least 5 workers at some whipped cream factory from getting laid off during the recession.

Eh, no different from any other use of resources for fun. Replying to this thread wastes energy, yet we do it. Buying a cake and eating it is exactly as wasteful as buying a cake and having fun with it. Food is a renewable resource, and it ends up not feeding everyone because of politics, not because people choose to use it suboptimally.

I don't think CoolWhip qualifies as "food".

yea im not saving the world with chocolate pudding....

Since I mentioned the old thread I figured it would be best to link to it:

http://umd.net/forums/idtitle/a_lot_of_people_seem_to_be_ang?start=0

I doubt we'll see any new revelations here that weren't mentioned there.

Dr. Zoidberg



Seriously? To whom? To you? To anyone?

Consider that the effort fretting about this is effort not being spent worrying about scrap-food waste (i.e. stuff that was actually intended to be eaten). Back when I was living on my own, I hardly had to throw anything out; I used leftovers very efficiently. Now that I have roommates, I KNOW what we toss from the refrigerator is more than I would actually use for wamming. It's not even close. Maybe that sounds like a copout to you, but it's also diminishing returns. One doesn't even have to invoke the international food situation. Improved food management within one household (certainly mine, and I'd bet most people's) would easily compensate for several wammers.

Also, keep in mind that amount of the food slung around here is equal to or exceeded by the amount of not-food slung around, and much of the food that is slung around isn't appropriate for feeding the hungry.

most of the time i feel that i haven't wasted enough.

I WAM with mud and I return it re-arranged but otherwise unaltered to Mother Earth, so my activities have a very minimal impact.

But for the food folks, if anybody feels any guilt, I would suggest that when buying WAM materials at a grocery store, chip in for the food shelf at the same time. And when buying WAM videos, perhaps you can also use your charge card to donate a few bucks to a Feed-The-Hungry charity of some kind.

As a mud woman, I do in fact donate to the places I visit. Many of the parks I WAM at have donation boxes at their visitor/nature centers. I'm not rich but I can dig in and find something to throw into that box for their trouble in keeping some public land nice, natural, unpolluted...and muddy...for me.

Nessie

Many generations ago, a well-intention preacher by the name of Thomas Malthus came to the conclusion that human population growth would soon occur at such a pace that it would be mathematically impossible to produce enough food to avoid widespread famine. History proved that he was a Chicken Little figure, spreading alarmism about a subject he did not actually comprehend to any useful degree. In modern times, rising life expectancy has blown the doors off Malthus's population estimates, as his fears stemmed chiefly from the numbers of children in typical families of his time.

Yet the world has known only preventable famines in modern times because technology makes feeding the world viable. Motorized equipment made it possible for a single farmer to work much more land. Chemical fertilizers and pesticides dramatically raised crop yields. Refrigeration inhibited spoiling processes. Truth be told, simply converting every American lawn into a small field of crops would be enough feed the world if modern agricultural technology were applied to the challenge. Whether or not there is enough to go around has nothing to do with global resource scarcity. Typically it is a lack of funding or a lack of secure roads and shipping channels that produces actual famine in modern times.

This attitude of concern about depletion makes perfect sense when applied to fossil fuels. The Deepwater Horizon disaster insures only the stupidest or most dishonest commentators could argue that we are not already reaching beyond our grasp to answer the demand for petrochemicals. Oil deposits form over millions of years, and most of the Earth's oil actually traces back before the dinosaurs to a time the dominant form of life on our planet was cyanobacteria. No matter how much it is in demand, new deposits of oil will not form at a useful pace.

Cream pies et al. are a different story. If a tycoon WAMmer were to buy 100,000 cherry pies for a record-breaking event, this may indeed make it hard to find a cherry pie in the local area for a day or three (though not so if sensible business practices were combined with ample advanced planning by the supplier.) It may even cause a blip in the price of cherries. Yet it also funnels money into the hands of bakers, who in turn spend money on labor and ingredients. Ultimately, the economy's ability to produce cherry pies is enhanced each and every time one is purchased. Given high enough demand, orchards and bakeries will expand. Whether the pie is ultimately eaten or smeared all over a beautiful woman's schoolgirl ensemble has no bearing on how the price paid for it is used by suppliers.

We do live in complex times. Global population continues to rise. Climate change may make land inarable far more quickly than new opportunities for farming can be developed. These truths can be scary. Yet if understood and taken in context, they can be seen as providing zero justification for any course of action that promotes human death or prohibits the procreation of two consenting adults. Welfare states are much easier and less costly to sustain than militant empires, with the side effect that they tend to stabilize national populations (and they also tend to do a fine job stamping out domestic malnutrition.) The softening of intellectual property laws as applied to seeds could do much to improve farming outcomes in economically underdeveloped nations.

There are constructive ways to address hunger. There are also constructive ways to address concerns about growing global population. However, not buying WAM supplies with the idea that somehow someone else will get fed is backward. The unbought foods do not then become free for someone else. In fact, less revenue for suppliers may inhibit growth that would promote efficiency and, ultimately, lower prices. So, if you catch yourself having an epic foodfight while starving children look on, by all means give them some sustenance. However, if you worry about starving children while buying you WAM supplies, realize that more is actually better than less when it comes to the long term impact of your spending on foodstuffs. It is only wasteful if you fail to enjoy what you do with it once you get it, and even then it is not wasteful to the disadvantage of starving people.

Regards,
messydom

The statistic I heard included a lot of major diet changing for people. i.e. we'd all be eating the bare minimum (which is far more than some people eat in a week), and this included a lot of the gain we use to feed animals for consumption. Kinda beside the point. Whether either one of use is grossly under/over estimating, the point is we have a lot of extra food in the US.

Furthermore, in the Us sugar is mostly high fructose corn syrup which is (obviously) is corn.

And history has proved that Malthus was right.

Correction: Malthus was proved to have not been dire enough.

Since you're going to spout anti-science libertarian propaganda,
I have the right to express MY viewpoints and to state the facts.

What's REALLY ironic, messydom, is everything AFTER what you say about Malthus -well, I don't know if Malthus was a wammer - CONFIRMS everything Malthus said regarding finite limits! Which REALLY makes you seem like a lame hypocrite, coming 160 years too late to the game with your ideas, instead of giving credit to a great visionary like Malthus.

We (the world) are past global peak oil. We need to outlaw coal now to prevent serious climate change. So, I hope you enjoy starving to death when there is no more oil to power the farm equipment to grow food to eat, let alone to get food to stores, let alone to get people to food stores.

We (the world) should have and could have switched entirely to solar and wind (and some geothermal and hydro) power 30 years ago, as many of us have lobbied. Of course, in America, people could have and should have elected Ralph Nader for President for life. He would have done the right thing with an aggressive program. But, voters didn't because 99% of voters (and media) do not have the mental capacity to comprehend the consequences of actions. They are absolutely no different on average than the prisoners they hold hostage in their prisons.

Instead, they yap about all kinds of idiotic bizarre conspiracies and yap about the most irrelevant causes of world hunger e.g. blaming some incredibly rare instances of corn being used for ethanol to power vehicles, or the Illuminati or "New World Order", instead of focussing on the 90% of crops needlessly fed to cattle and chickens - when meat should have been banned - also for its effect on climate change, which was predicted 30 years ago and we've been fighting ever since - and world overpopulation.

Since 1980 I have lobbied to mandate vasectomies for all males throughout the world. China made great headway with its one-child policy, but USA, Mexico, India, Egypt, Africa ALL need tough laws like this.

And, just so you know, all that talk in other threads about what is not legal for others to put on their own websites and YouTube channels -
which is just free speech and words -
and not action like consumption and breeding -
is just a lot of lies and propaganda and fearmongering by the lawyer-judge- prison-guard industry which makes billions of dollars by extorting people's money and kidnapping them and forcing them into prison.
Just in case some idiot gives me any crap about ME spouting "propaganda".

But, I think it's a scientific consensus :
we in the wam world do not contribute to world hunger.
Our usage of crops for wam is miniscule compared to whatever is burned for biofuels - which nobody even seriously proposes anyway! Anyone doing work in that area - like my boss - makes units that burn waste grease and cellulosic waste, not virgin corn!

I just remembered: when I was 14, I did two of these stupid "CROP" walks to raise some pathetic amount of food for world hunger. Back then, I thought it was the right thing to do. Other people, notably in my Methodist church, were doing it. Basically, I did a silly and pointless "stunt": to walk 10 miles. Collected a dollar for each mile I walked.

But, I finally grew up and grew out of that mode of "charity" thinking (and religion, too). And did so by the age of 20. What I don't get is: why hasn't everybody else by the age of 20?

I now no longer give any money to "easy" popular charities, e.g. medical charities - i.e. the kind of thing that everybody can agree on.
For one thing, governments already fund a ton of medical research.
So, medical charities already GOT the money.

Instead, I give ONLY to political causes to FIGHT injustices and logical inconsistencies which are the MAJOR cause of most poverty and starvation.
Not recognizing that there IS a food shortage for the current number of people, as well as distribution and scheduling problems, is one such massive logical inconsistency with reality.
BY DEFINITION, because it's a "political cause", it will be a ZERO-SUM GAME for somebody. That means: having to take away from somebody (certain freedoms, money) or force them to do something they don't like. Ok - politics won't cure cancer. For scientific problems that CANNOT be solved "by politics", that DO require innovative engineering and science - that's what my own work and degrees are for.

Not that I am into a food fetish, but I work at a nursing home. I would say that easily 50% of the food used to feed 280 residents is thrown out every meal. I can't imagine how many tons that is.
If someone wants to throw a dozen pies once a month or whatever I don't think it matters much on the scale of things.

Good grief, Zoidberg. Why don't you go ahead and promote concentration camps "to get rid of all that horrible excess population ruing mother earth" while you are at it?

Sorry; but who are YOU to start demanding to take away the rights and freedoms of others, to "make better choices for them" if they don't kowtow to YOUR ideology? If YOU want to not eat meat, not use coal, not have kids (or more than one), or whatever else YOU believe will save the planet, then by all means, feel free to do so.

But when you talk about demanding YOUR right to speak your opinions, and then condone stuff like forced vasectomies, banning OTHER PEOPLES' choices and rights, etc., then you'll just have to get over it when some of us dismiss your views with the cavet that those types of societies already failed miserably in Germany and Russia in the last century, and SOME of us damn sure don't want to repeat that sort of thing here in this one- even IF it offends you, "mother earth", or anything else you want to rationalize for taking away the rights of others to enforce your own beliefs on them against their will.

I will grant the existence of finite limits. Congratulations to Reverend Malthus and all others going back many thousands of years, who have observed that not all things are limitless. That really was never a point of contention. I grant that the world has limited surface area, and I grant that only a subset of that can be used to produce huge quantities of food for human beings. So far, there is nothing surprising, impressive, or even non-obvious in these insights.

What was important about Malthus was not his meaningless echo of sentiments almost certainly much older than writing itself. It was his forecast that food production could not possibly increase faster than a linear rate. It is an early example of an author correctly explaining the distinctions between an arithmetic progression and a geometric progression. Unfortunately, his analysis of the underlying phenomena thought to adhere to these progressions was ignorant pontification pumped through the megaphone of doomsday alarmism. Imagining that the end if nigh may fill some void in the lives of the gullible, but apocalyptic thought is another notion that is thousands of years old. Unlike finite limits, it has consistently, even as pertains to Malthus's predictions, been wrong.

Heck, acknowledging the situation with U.S. fuel ethanol production should be insight enough to drive this point home. Presently our nation produces around 10 billion gallons of corn-derived ethanol per year. Depending on techniques of analysis, between 60-80% of the energy produced by that fuel is required in order to farm the corn. We could immediately end all subsidies for corn-derived biofuels and liberate vast tracts of land for food production at the cost of increasing our oil production or imports by a very small percentage. In addition to all our lawns, all our golf courses, etc. we have all the land used for ethanol fuel corn feedstock as a buffer between the present and what a non-histrionic person would regard as a crisis.

That is not to say that we should simply shrug and run through that buffer, finish razing the Amazon, etc. It is to say that talk of population disasters in 2011 is no more sensible than having faith in that deranged interpretation of Mayan timekeeping that prophesies doomsday late next year. Sure, the story of humanity turning on itself in the struggle for the last few scraps of terrestrial resources is compelling. If you want to depict it in sci-fi form, best of luck to you. However, if you want to import that notion into any kind of an adult discussion about the reality we inhabit, it is unhelpful, misleading, and kind of kooky to speak of this doom substantiated only by crude pontifications.

Some credible-sounding people like to share analyses like "in fifty years, the four Earths would be required for the entire population to enjoy the modern American lifestyle," never mind something as absurd as the implication that in the aftermath of oil, all farming will be done once more with livestock and hand tools. It is true that if the whole world lived like Americans, it would quickly become a very crowded place. Yet the American ecological footprint is not 99% food production and 1% all that other crap. Just the fact that we have such a deeply entrenched automobile culture probably matters more that the total of our gluttony and waste when it comes to food.

Speaking of which, I also must take issue with the initial premise insofar as it seems to suggest this fetish is an American phenomenon. I believe it is a global phenomenon, though obviously rarely expressed in the world's less prosperous and tolerant societies. The UK contingent here seems almost as strong as the U.S. roster, which would imply that this interest is more common per capita over there than over here. Europeans, Asians, Australians, South Americans -- I suspect all the continents would be well-represented if Africa did not struggle so for sustenance (never mind Internet access) and Antarctica had any substantial population of its own. My nation deserves the blame for treating bacon like a condiment, but I believe there is no blame to be apportioned for utilizing condiments in sexual foreplay . . . though if there was a fault to find here, it would not be a distinctively American fault.

Apart from the misconception that buying food somehow promotes starvation elsewhere, it may be that some people have trouble with the quantities involved. Most people would never eat a whole pie at once, but somehow one rarely seems enough when those same pies are splattered onto a playmate. Though it is possible to WAM on the cheap with chemical gunge, cake batter, etc.; it is not uncommon for the supplies in one session to cost far more than one might normally spend on a complete dinner. However, sex is one thing and dining is another. There is no rational reason to expect one application of food should involve the same quantities and costs as another. A trick of the mind may make appropriate sploshing munitions seem wildly extravagant.

Of course, if you are really flustered about the whole thing, you could just stick with paint . . . unless you fear that some impoverished person's home might go unpainted because you dared to buy some paint for yourself. I suppose for folks that demented, there is at least still the mud.

Regards,
messydom

They're going to take our splattguns away!