FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

Shoenice Will Eat Anything To Solve World Hunger

Never before has the internet seen such wanton gluttony.

There are thousands of awful clips going up on YouTube today. The reply girls, endless acoustic covers and existentially pointless troll videos fly up on the site that boasts 72 hours of uploaded content per minute. Blogger Brad Feld once attributed such massive amounts of useless internet content to the ‘Signal Vs. Noise’ argument.

Sometimes, the clips that seem most ridiculous, most infuriating, most depressing and most disgusting have deterred us from the most redeeming of their better intentions — but even those are rare. Enter Chris Schewe, a man that could forever reshape the way people think about ending global starvation. Gobbling down entire bottles of 409 cleaner, rubbing alcohol, shampoo, and rolls of toilet paper, Schewe wows a viral following under the endearing moniker – ‘Shoenice.’ While this appears to be a desperate, depraved cry for attention, what sparkles about Chris is his devotion to solving hunger.

Advertisement
The man in action.

Schewe was enlisted in the army during Desert Storm (Where he describes carrying massive rations of Dinty Moore to the troops). YouTubers cheer him on as he scolds billionaires and rich people to stop bogarting their cash and begin to help by using the same techniques of military food delivery for starving Africans. He’d prefer not to raise money from those who work for a living, exhorting to Yacht owners who cruise along, musing at the third world coastal scenery to, “Pull over bitch, feed some kids… The last time I checked, eternal life was free.”

Some might remember Schewe’s three day hunger protest at the University of Albany to bring back Fountain Day in 2011. The school called it off in trying to better facilitate their notoriously festive student body. Considerably less whelming than the task of chewing through an entire stick of Old Spice, his iron stomach remains the center of attention, just inches below the mouth from which the most tender voice flows. A mouth that swallows just about anything commenters could request, along with their imaginations.

Shoenice is more than just eating deodorant sticks.

He says he developed his talent to eat anything as a middleschooler, often eating piles of sawdust and pieces of metal to appease bullies in shop class. Later, in highschool he discovered his abilities as a wrestler. In his life story video he remarks on the turning point: “All the bullies that were pickin’ on me before I had hair on my penis, were now just my friends.”

Sure, it’s disgusting, depressing and torturous to watch him eat the last flaming candle on his 43rd birthday cake, but it drives home an emotional hole-in-one when comparing Shoenice’s daily feats to miraculous acts of humanitarians in history. It has to be the least ironic way that someone could solve hunger. Not that it isn’t satirical, but eating non-food products in raising awareness of those who can’t have food is just plain ballsy. Of course there are the non-believers, or Schewe’s ‘haters’ who rip him apart with YouTube comments, requesting that he make a list of shout outs following each ingestive stunt — to better prove he isn’t running off cam to vomit.

Advertisement
It doesn’t get more intense than this.

I remember thinking that guy from the Cove was a hero when he strapped that video monitor to himself and interrupted the International Whaling Commission conference. I even made some fan art about it, but that stunt couldn’t have potentially caused blindness or sudden death. Shoenice replaces all heros, conquers all myths, and multiplies all divided.

Never before has the internet seen such wanton gluttony.

I reached out to Chris a number of times in the last couple of days in praise of his movement, telling him it would be an honor to speak with him. Unfortunately, fetching an audience with him might be harder than getting David Hockney to look at my GIFs; Shoenice just announced via his wall:

I GET OVER 3000 PM’S A DAY NOW ON FB..IT IS TOO MIND DRAINING..I CANT ADD ANYONE BECAUSE I AM ON RESTRICTION !! I CANT POST ANYTHING PERSONAL ANYMORE BECAUSE THEN 400 ASK 5 MINUTES LATER…I DID IT FOR AS LONG AS I COULD BUT JUST IMPOSSIBLE..IF I CANT ANSWER ONE..I WILL ANSWER NONE!

As he launches another Facebook account with aims of collecting more than a measly 5,000 friends, I instantly added him and am anxiously awaiting a reply. Let’s just hope he lives that long to get back to me.