The chilling is the result of the transformation of the ice from solid to liquid water. I don’t know nearly enough physics to say which form of water is functional in this case.

You’re positing that the only function of my cocktail is to inebriate me. But it also delights my senses, and a warm Mojito is far less delightful than a chilled one. Chilling the cocktail could be achieved by other means, but ice is both effective and readily available.

I agree with you that eating competitions are a miniscule ill in this world, but this is The Takeout, where food and eating are the focus. And maybe a dissenting voice about overeating for its own sake would carry some weight. Or not. Bon Appetit.

To ease these concerns, Kroger promised to reinvest half a billion dollars from the merger into cost-saving measures for customers

I suppose that it would have a higher pH than plain water with lemon, so there’s that.

Even if the claims had some basis in reality, no company is going to pay for the research on something that they can’t control and monetize through patents.

Ice is the only real form of non-functional water.

‘No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public. ‘

Because that eating competition is part of the reason why millions of people cannot get enough to eat?

So it’s not exclusive to the West, it’s a first world disorder. That doesn’t change the fact that consuming absurd amounts of food in some sort of competition or to show off is offensive.

OK, so it’s a problem of first world society, making consumption for consumption’s sake into a competition with prizes awarded. Seeing this sort of stuff when you don’t have enough to eat on a daily basis has to really burn.

And we can move the island. Here, hold my beer...

Twitter is one of the clearest demonstrations of the First Mover advantage.

You’d need billions of dollars in financing to even produce movies that can compete with the major studios

JJ starts with clues for the cool value and then hopes to figure out a solution eventually realizes that his clues don’t really support a cool value, and just kind of gives up, hoping that everyone was so caught up in the clues that they won’t care about the cool value anymore.

11 year old me really liked Trix, which is about as close to fruit as I suspect Count Cholula is to chocolate. But even 11 year old me was starting to realize that Palmer chocolate wasn’t really chocolate, it was chocolatey.

It’s the result of learning, as a male, that every feeling you reveal can, and will be, used against you. I honestly don’t know how females survive that when young, and learn to accept it, while young males just learn to box up those emotions.

No, because ‘chocolatey’ is a weasel word, intended to deceive.

I don’t get what is so much fun about people training and competing to see how much food that they cram down their craw in a set amount of time. It just seems like celebrating consumption for the sake of consumption. Most sport competitions are at least celebrations of human activities that have intrinsic value, like…

All of those things you mention are more awful than eating competitions, but they aren’t generally celebrated with trophies and positive news coverage.