What It's Really Like To Be In The Background Of A Man V Food Taping

"Man versus food! Man versus food!" Surely you've seen (and heard) them –- those crowds that "spontaneously" materialized in the background whenever Adam Richman took on a food challenge in the Travel Channel show "Man v. Food" (the original version). Did they all just happen to be in the restaurant, realized there was an event going on (the TV cameras might have been a tip off), and all congregated on the sidelines to clap in rhythm (more or less) and chant in unison?

Well, it is "reality" TV, after all, which means ... Yeah, those crowd shots were totally staged. One Redditor went online to tell her story about how she played crowd member # whatever in Season 2 Episode 18 of "Man v. Food" (via Daily Motion). The show was filmed at Lindy's on 4th in Tucson, Arizona, and in case you want to watch the Redditor's bravura performance, she described herself as "the girl in the yellow blouse awkwardly clapping and looking around for the majority of the video."

The Redditor said that she and her family were aware that the taping would be taking place at Lindy's, so they went down to watch and she wound up being the one member of her party chosen to go "right in front of the cameras." She thought the worst part of her ordeal was the heat level in the over-crowded restaurant, adding that watching Richman devour a giant cheeseburger didn't make her hungry at all since she was so hot she only wanted a glass of water. She also found it tiring to look upbeat and keep clapping, which was something the producers insisted the crowd members keep doing for the entire hour it took to tape the segment.

Richman, however, she found to be "genuine ... a really nice, bubbly person." She appreciated how he would joke with the crowd, relating how "every few minutes ... the producers [or] directors [or] whatever they were would kind of yell at us to be happy again," but Adam would try to lighten the mood by saying something like "You must be happy at all times!" This was meant to poke a little fun at all the staged merriment and show that he, at least, wasn't taking it as deadly seriously as the producers seemed to do. All in all, however, the former crowd member summed up her experience of watching Man wage his epic battle against Food as "a pretty lame time."