We all know that reality television is really good at making things that aren’t so glamorous look very glamorous, but the extent to which real reality is being covered up can sometimes be too much to bear, as fans of the reality competition show Supermarket Sweep are realizing .
Corners should not be cut when food is involved, but apparently the showrunners did not agree.
*Supermarket Sweep* ran from 1965 to 1967, and then again from 1990 to 1995, and then AGAIN from 2000 to 2003.
The show consisted of a mix of team-based trivia and a race through a supermarket set that frequently involved contestants frantically hurling food into their carts and trying to answer trivia.
When 15 episodes of the show were brought to Netflix, fans were ecstatic, but some fans did some digging and found out that things were not how they seemed .
When it came to the food on the shelves, things were actually pretty gross.
“We shot for about five months, six months every year, and they used the same food over and over again,” revealed show host David Ruprecht , “So by about the third month, the hot dogs had sorta started to ferment in the package and the package swelled up.”
“A lot of the food, having been thrown in and out of carts for three, four months had gotten pretty beaten up,” he added.
“Buying fake meat was too expensive,” Set designer Scott Storey explained , adding, “Everything was just rotten, because there’s no refrigeration. It’s just scenery.”
I can’t imagine that that supermarket smelled very good by the end of filming!
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Fortunately it seems like that changed as the show went on.
“Everything that was meat, cheese — all that was fake because they’d get the meat juices on their sweaters,” Mike Futia, a contestant on the show in 2001, revealed .
Thank goodness! I don’t think I could handle it knowing I was watching people chuck rotten food around the whole time.
