10 Food Rules for TV Characters (satire)

1. Your characters may never finish a meal, unless on a date at a restaurant. If they are at a Thanksgiving dinner, the show will end as someone is first cutting into the turkey. If they order a hot dog on the street, half of that hot dog is going in the trash.

2. Chinese food may only be eaten directly out of the carton and with chopsticks, and never during the day. Someone should always ask someone else to “pass the Kung Pao Chicken.”

3. Despite the glorious array of pizza enhancements available to us in the modern world, the only pizza topping your character may ever ask for is “extra cheese.”

4. The only fruit your character may ever eat is an apple. They never wash it, and, pursuant to Rule One, never finish it, unless they show up to the scene with one bite left, in which case they can take that bite and forcefully discard the core in a nearby wastepaper basket.

5. If your character leaves food labeled with their name on it in a communal refrigerator, another character will always eat it with no remorse whatsoever.

6. If one character is cooking for another, that meal will always include a large pot of some kind of sauce that the other character must taste with a wooden spoon and announce “needs salt/too much salt.”

7. If your characters visit a morgue, the Medical Examiner must always be eating to show us how immune he is to being surrounded by corpses. The sloppier the meal, the better.

8. In Sci Fi shows, alien food must always be disgusting.

9. “Chekov’s Peanut.” If a character announces he or she has a food allergy, he or she will always accidentally ingest that food before the end of the show..

10. The more distasteful a food is to 9 out of 10 of the characters on a show, the more that 10^th character will love it.