It has been five months since Beef Battle, the Fans del Vacuno (Beef Fans) program that (surely) has made you love beef, aired its first episode. If you need a refresher, here it is: this platform launched a series of 45-minute live programs on Nil Ojeda‘s Twitch channel, a content creator, with the aim of providing accurate information about beef to Generation Z. As you might expect, the title of this space is not coincidental: two guests face off with their arguments, and the audience, through the chat, decides the winner of this fierce battle. Beef plays a leading role: Miguel Ayuso Rejas, a chef and director of DAP, adds flavor to each encounter with dishes made from beef.
But how did Beef Battle come about? In case anyone is unaware, we remind you that it is an initiative by After and Webedia, a company focused on bringing entertainment content to as many people as possible. We created the creative proposal, the strategic approach, and the transition to the digital environment, while Webedia focused on developing the format to make it relevant to its audience and work in the Twitch environment, executing the live production, and managing the guest strategy and talent contacts.
Now, after 5 episodes and more than 25 million views, the first season of Beef Battle has bid farewell to the audience, but it did so in style: Ceci Army, the most mysterious Instagram profile with the most well-known entertainment channel in Spain, faced off against Omar Montes on October 16 in a head-to-head battle. Omar came to the show with two very defined objectives: to knock out his opponent and to “drive the audience and chat of this Beef Battle crazy.” We cannot ignore the media significance of both: they have, between the two of them, over 7.3 million followers on Instagram and TikTok.
The winner of this season-ending battle, with 78% of the audience votes, was Omar Montes (he certainly drove them “crazy”), and the dish that Miguel Ayuso chose to surprise everyone with was some delicious beef and vegetable tacos that these exceptional guests enjoyed almost without taking a breath (and for the skeptics, they can check it out on Nil Ojeda’s Twitch).
The rest of the programs witnessed the beefs between Marina Rivers and Jorge Cyrus; Adri Contreras and Ari Geli; Jorge Casanovas and Paula Gonu; Galder Varas and David Puerto Sanson; and Sr. Cheeto and Darío Eme Hache. All the profiles are easily recognizable to any member of Generation Z, as from Fans del Vacuno, they aimed, from the beginning, to connect with young people and explain that beef is a source of minerals and vitamins, and a very easy-to-prepare food with a variety of cuts that provide a perfect solution to inflation. All of this, integrated into a completely disruptive format.
Bonus Track: This is the origin of “beef”
Although now we all like to think we’re hip by using expressions like “throwing beef” in our vocabulary, the truth is that some people didn’t use it until Shakira gave Piqué a piece of her mind in the legendary session with Bizarrap that we’ve sung until we were hoarse. This business of throwing indirects with full names and even ID numbers has been going on for ages. Who can forget that sonnet by Quevedo to Góngora in which he publicly and conspicuously pointed out that the poet had a nose like an Egyptian pyramid? Well, there you have it.
If we pull on the thread a bit more, we discover that the specialized medium I am Rap suggested a couple of theories about the origin of the term “beef” in its figurative sense. The first one refers to the memoirs of a mid-19th-century New York thief. In those, he recounted discovering that his sister had been robbed and wrote that, depending on the amount of money stolen, there might or might not be “beef.”
With the second theory, we go back to World War I when soldiers used the term “beef” to complain about the poor quality of food, an usage that became popular as a synonym for discontent.
In the United States in the 1990s, particularly in the hip-hop scene, we find confrontations involving artists like The Notorious B.I.G, Puff Daddy, and Tupac Shakur. The rivalry between these artists is what is known as “beef.”