Survivor is known for the grueling slog that is being stranded on a remote island for weeks on end.
Players are forced to perform to the peak of their physical abilities by diving through mud or standing on a thin strip of wood or swimming through choppy waters. But one type of challenge hasn’t been seen in several seasons.
Gone With the Wind
Food based challenges were once the norm of “Survivor.” Players would chow down on local cuisine wherever the season was taking place. The “piranha feast” was featured on three different seasons of the show in “Survivor: Amazon,” “South Pacific” and the show’s current home of Fiji.
During the “Blood vs Water” season in the Philippines, players took part in eating mealworms, pig intestines, and live grubs.
The show has done everything from cow blood to balut (fertilized bird eggs) to fermented fish (farfaru). However, these types of challenges have been gone for some time. Host Jeff Probst offered up an explanation.
During a 2023 episode of the official “Survivor” podcast, “On Fire,” Probst answered listener questions regarding the show’s production. Questions included general rules and regulations players have to follow while on the show and what the host does off camera.
One question concerned the food based challenges. A listener sent in the question “I remember in the earlier seasons, they would eat bugs and other gross things. Will you bring them back?”
Probst expresses he’s very much interested in more food based challenges but, due to the show’s current static nature on Fiji, they no longer have the luxury of trying the varying foods of other cultures.
“…They were based on this idea that when we would go visit another culture, did they have things that on a daily basis they ate the same way we might eat a potato chip or an apple or something, but to us would seem really gross,” Probst responds. “And so that’s where it started. So that we were trying to show the contrast of ‘here’s a culture who does this.’”
Same but Very Different
Probst added that the show tried to keep the element of food challenges by doing a simple gross food eating competition by blending a bunch of foods into a nasty smoothie. However, the host wasn’t satisfied with that direction.
Probst revealed that for season 45, he emailed the producers in order to get them to fly in balut and grubs from Asia to Fiji. He also angled for a “best of” that would feature food from all the previous settings of the show.
“Turns out you can’t ship those things from one country to another, I’m sure for very good reasons,” Probst informs listeners.
For now it seems that food challenges are out of the question.
On a similar note, however, the memory of them is still alive in a reward challenge on the show. The “Survivor” auction – where players are given real world dollars in order to bid on mystery items – returned in season 45.
While players had chances of buying fried foods and alcoholic beverages, a couple of players won fish eyes. The challenge also returned in season 47 with similar prizes.