The Amazing Race showed no mercy for vegetarians

Amazing Race – in the last Saturday’s episode of the competition program, the contestants had to prepare traditional Romanian food, i.e. pig’s brain and ram’s testicles – and, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, also eat their cooking.

This was surprising because at first the assignment only talked about preparing food in an acceptable way at the local restaurant school.

The eating task was not revealed until later, and it again proved to be a problem for those contestants who are vegetarians or vegans.

To the competition participating actor Adelina Arajuuri has been a vegetarian for ten years, but he ended up eating brain and testicle food – reluctantly and feeling unwell.

Instead Willamo Mimosa avoided the eating task with the express pass he received earlier in the competition. Maria Nyqvist left the task unfinished and received a two-hour time penalty as punishment. As a result, Nyqvist dropped his partner, ex-competitive swimmer and coach Jani Sievinen with about the competition.

“Yes, the task was left to think about, and we discussed it with the production that same evening,” says Adeliina Arajuuri on the phone.

“The assignment came so unexpectedly and I didn’t have time to prepare for it, that’s why it stuck on my mind. It was assumed that there would be an eating task. However, we had decided in advance that if meat came up, Paulus would handle the eating. It came as a surprise that we couldn’t influence this,” says Arajuuri.

He participates in the competition with his brother, a football player Paulus Arajuuren with.

Amazing Race is an American television show format in which pairs of contestants travel to different parts of the world and complete tasks related to the culture of that country as quickly as possible. At the end of each period, the pair that reaches the finish line last is typically eliminated.

Over the years, the program has seen a variety of food-related taskswhich often have an exotic and sometimes disgusting character from a Western perspective. The American contestants of the program have had to eat, for example, grasshoppers, raw octopus and cow’s lips.

On the other hand, for example, the task of eating caviar does not immediately seem very demanding – until you hear that the contestants had to eat a kilo of it at once in the fifth season of the US version.

Like this the problem with the food competition is that it repeats the cultures the contestants visit, says the professor of food culture at the University of Helsinki Taru Lindblom.

“Foreign cultures are looked at through such a lens that for them this is normal, for us this is disgusting. Making such a confrontation is a bit questionable and artificial,” says Lindblom.

“That already brings another layer to this, in addition to not eating meat for ethical reasons.”

According to him, food itself is good material for an entertaining competition, as you can see, for example, in cooking shows.

“But I was left wondering if this same task could have been done with some plant-derived substances.”

Now using the seen foodstuffs, i.e. brains and testicles, for food is related to the idea that the animal is used for all possible good if it has once been decided to kill a human for food.

Instead, competing with eating does not care about respecting food, says Lindblom.

“Now we went to the culinary institute, and the professionals were showing us how to do this. Then it was judged whether the food was well done. Until then, this worked just fine. But then forcefully eating food became a competitive situation, and the appreciation of food was lost.”

Long Adeliina Arajuuri, who followed a vegetarian diet, says that her stomach was upset for many days after suddenly eating meat.

“I’m not sensitive in such a way that it would have bothered me at all to eat something disgusting of plant origin. I could have easily taken it as a fun challenge. But this meat-eating task involved a question of values, which made it particularly difficult,” says Arajuuri.

Nelonen, which presents Amazing Race, and Helsingin Sanomat belong to the same Sanoma group.