Stop Eating From Jumbo-Sized Containers of ‘Mayo’ at Sporting Events

As the rejected jumbotron proposals have proven time and time again, if you want to do something dumb in front of thousands of people, you do it in front of the watchful eye of the sports game video camera. That's why, to our great and constant horror, people keep pretending to eat spoonfuls of mayo at sports games, hoping for that glimmer of internet fame, but instead being remembered online as that person at the game eating globs of mayo with a spoon. (Congrats, you played yourself.)

This weekend, Sports Illustrated reported, a man at a Memphis Redbirds game was caught on video eating from a whole damn industrial-sized jar of mayo, the kind that's big enough that if you tried to spoon some out with anything less than a jar half-full, you'd inevitably end up with mayo all over your hand and arm. Luckily, this dude brought a spatula, and he had the distinct pleasure of eating from his gallon jug of Kraft Real Mayo in no fewer than five videos tweeted by the Memphis Redbirds.

We, however, can have the distinct horror of watching it all unfold, and be reminded that few foods seem more repulsive to eat alone than a big glob of mayo. Imagine: cold, jiggly gloop filling your mouth like a smelly and vaguely sour marshmallow. People have obviously not been stoked about the video.

The thing is, the joke has been done before. In May 2018, two women at a basketball game shared spoonfuls from a jar of Best Food mayonnaise, while another dude did it back in 2017. Sure, we can assume all these folks are just weirdos with bad taste, sick humor, and probably some gnarly stomach aches—if not for the fact that the trick of refilling a jar of mayo with vanilla pudding and eating it in public is a pretty well-established food prank, going back to 2012 at the very least. While it's certainly better than mean-spirited pranks like tricking people to eat doughnuts filled with mayo instead of cream, it's a reminder of a truth all too often ignored: Pranks are bad.

There is, of course, precedent for food stunts like this to result in some success—though that term, like fame, is clearly in the eye of the beholder. After a clip of her dipping a chicken tender into soda (and then eating it) made the rounds online, the woman now known as "Slickenfingers" got a song, an extremely cursed music video, and inexplicably, a cola-flavored dipping sauce out of it—really leaning so, so hard into those bizarre 20 seconds of fame. The man in a fedora who drank a half-gallon of milk in the crowd at the World Series now suddenly seems so normal in comparison.

I get it: life is short, we all die eventually, and some of us want to be remembered. But is this really the way???