Still Buffering · Sydnee McElroy, Rileigh Smirl and Teylor Smirl

Still Buffering: Jawbreaker (1999)

January 19, 2026·54 min·2 clips

Sydney and Tay dissect the new food pyramid that encourages more red meat, questioning its evidence and political motives.

The year is barely awake. Sydney and Taylor open by laughing at how January already feels like it has lasted a full month, even though only 12 days have passed. Time is being rude. A school-calendar mix-up, Taylor's almost-birthday, and the upside-down food pyramid give them plenty of loose runway. The food pyramid probably had it coming anyway. They agree the old version had stopped making sense, then let that small weirdness carry them into food habits and the assumptions people inherit without noticing. The larger point lands gently. Food, for them, is more than fuel or trend material. It holds family memory, sick-day rituals, and the ordinary comforts people trust because they grew up with them. Chicken noodle soup becomes the easy example. One host notes that a lot of people have some version of hot, comforting food when they are sick, even when the ingredients and meanings change from culture to culture. That comparison makes travel feel a little more reachable. Since most people cannot constantly go everywhere, they talk about the Internet as a messy stand-in for travel when it helps people spot echoes between their own customs and someone else's. Respect is the hinge. They separate being curious about unfamiliar food traditions from using another culture for cheap shock value. Their annoyance is specific: videos where someone wanders through an Asian grocery store, mangles names, laughs at labels, and treats everything unfamiliar as gross. They have no patience for that. The point is not that every food or custom has to appeal to everyone. It is that difference deserves curiosity before mockery. Even old TV gets a side-eye, with Bizarre Foods folded into their frustration with entertainment that treats other people's normal meals like a stunt. The ending slips back into friendly grievance. After the theme-song wrap, they joke that celebrities could maybe leave a few smaller, made-up spaces for non-famous people, while admitting Amy Poehler's Good Hang is annoyingly good.

As heard by us

A warm culture chat about food, curiosity, and the line between cultural exchange and spectacle.

Still Buffering uses Jawbreaker (1999) as a doorway into looser, sharper culture talk, with Sydney McElroy and Taylor Smurl moving from January disorientation and food-pyramid fatigue into bigger questions about food, class, access, and respect.

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Why you'd press play

Sydney and Taylor open the year twelve days in and somehow wind up at the food pyramid, chicken noodle soup, and what comfort looks like on the other side of the world.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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