The "Shell-On Challenge" Is The Latest Craze Sweeping Teenage America: Eating Plastic Packaging and Cardboard Boxes and Banana Peels
NY POST – Teens are daring each other to eat plastic packaging, cardboard boxes and fruit peels — and posting videos of themselves doing it to Snapchat — in a bizarre new social media trend called “shell on.”
While not as dangerous as the potentially fatal “Tide Pod challenge” which involved eating laundry detergent pods, doctors still advise against eating anything that isn’t food.
Hell yes, we got a new trend sweeping Teenage Nation, and it’s one of the sickest yet: the Shell On Challenge, where you eat everything with the “shell” on (you’ll find out why that’s so funny later on in the article.) Plastic bags, cardboard boxes, peels and rinds. You thought literally abducting yourself for 48 hours was sweet? You haven’t seen anything close to the level of popularity you get from eating an entire cardboard sleeve of Ritz crackers.
Of course the nerd dork doctors and scientists are frowning at the latest trend, saying it’s “bad” and “dangerous” blahhhh blahhhhh blahhhhhh:
“Organic material like fruit peels are typically not dangerous. Zest is often used in recipes (lemon zest) which is the shavings of the rind,” Chicago-area physician Max Plitt told The Post. “Eating plastic, on the other hand, can be dangerous. BPA has been suggested to influence hormones. Chemicals in PVC like vinyl chloride have been linked to cancers.”
Tell Liam from Arizona how “bad” it is after he went from 0 friends to 1 million friends after eating a plastic bag of carrots.
Liam Hamm, a sophomore at McClintock High School in Tempe, participated in the challenge by biting through a plastic bag of carrots. His friends captured it in a Snapchat video.
Hamm said there is a national Snapchat story that includes clips of people all over the country performing the shell on challenge. Most people just bite into an orange peel or banana peel, but some teens, like Hamm, are taking it a step further, he said.
“It just looks funny, because it’s not really a shell but people are calling things shells. I guess that is what’s funny about it,” he said.
Hamm said the funniest shell on challenge he’s seen so far was of someone biting into a lemon peel. The lemon juice squirted into their eye.
And Liam is the perfect example of a socially responsible Shell On Challenger, a smart kid with a good head on his shoulders who should stand for all Gen-Z’ers who just want a way to be super dope without the danger of eating laundry detergent:
He said he doesn’t know how the challenge originated, but he’s glad to see it replace the Tide Pod challenge, which he said he would never participate in.
“It’s the Tide Pod challenge minus the fact that it’s not dangerous,” he said.
Hamm conceded that ingesting plastic, as he did, is probably not good for you. But just eating the peel of a banana, as most people do, isn’t harmful.
Eating plastic and cardboard and banana peels won’t kill you like the Tide Pods will. You’ll just have some really really uncomfortable poops. And also the cancer from the plastic, but by the time that sets in, this same generation of brainiacs will have probably cured it already.
Seriously you can’t win with these adults. Always telling you to eat your fruits and vegetables – now they’re mad you’re eating TOO MUCH of the fruit and vegetables?
Not to mention all the complaints about the damage plastic does to the environment – we’re not even allowed to have water bottles at work anymore! We’re all dehydrated! And these kids are reducing plastic waste by 1000000% by just swallowing all of it. They should get a presidential medal for curing global warming not scorn and mockery from the internet. IMO.