Pokémon! Pocket Monsters. You gotta catch 'em all, as they say.
*reluctant pause*
But in the world of Pokémon, there are an abundance of creatures,
and certainly not every of them will be caught and cherished by a trainer.
Some may stay wild, or fight fires, or become surrogate fathers for 10-year-old protagonists with hot moms.
But is that the extent of their use in the Pokémon universe?
Today, I’m going to solve the number one most requested question I get in my twitter mentions
and emails and in skywriting above New York City. Today, I am finally… I am…
I cannot do this. I can’t do this. I-
-can’t do Pokémon edibility, Tara, because...
I literally said after the first episode, “Don’t ask me to do this again,” and the
only reason we agreed to do more Unraveleds is because we specifically said I would never ever
ever have to do Pokémon edibility. Right? Like, I can’t reveal... I- like, if I do this, there's no
more worlds to conquer. This is it. This would have to be the final Unraveled.
Tara: Well, then I guess this is the final Unraveled.
*silence*
Today, for my final Unraveled,
I am ranking Pokémon by edibility.
*cheerful synth music*
But can I first just say, that this question is flawed.
When people ask for an Unraveled on Pokémon edibility, it’s always:
“Can you rank Pokémon based on their edibility?” RANK.
No, I can’t rank Pokémon on edibility, because edibility is a boolean function: Either something is fit for human consumption, or it is not.
Pizza is not more edible than salad, they’re both just edible. So asking me to find “the most edible Pokémon” is a fallacy.
There’s no such thing as the “Most Edible Pokémon,” so don’t try to find it.
I’ll stop complaining. I’m just saying that y’all are asking one question, but meaning another.
So let’s unravel what you actually mean by finding which Pokémon are fit for human consumption.
And by the way, I’m not arguing the ethics of eating Pokémon. If you slice a sirloin from Mama Kangaskhan and fry it up while her baby watches,
is that morally reprehensible?
I don’t know and I don’t have to, because apparently that question isn’t important to you sickos.
Kangaskhan meat is edible, and that’s all there is to it.
So let’s talk about how we find this info. First, we start with a list of every Pokémon,
including variations and regional forms, just in case a Pokémon is only edible in one specific state.
Then we start finding equivalents from our world. This is easy enough for Pokémon like Miltank,
which is just a big milky dog, but it becomes a bit more difficult with abominations like Aromatisse. What is that?
A sexy bird? A piece of sentient cotton candy that started doing local burlesque shows?
At that point, we must turn to the Pokédex to decide if we’re free to chow down.
This is also important for clarifying things like Exeggcute, which might seem like a bunch of eggs,
but according to the Pokédex are actually seeds.
In Aromatisse’s case, the Pokédex says “Its scent is so overpowering that, unless a Trainer happens to really enjoy the smell,
he or she will have a hard time walking alongside it.” Sadly, even this does not paint a clear enough picture on noshability,
so it’s time for the final step: using my years of experience as both a gamer and human who has
survived multiple encounters with dubious food to decide if I could eat that Pokémon.
Aromatisse is basically an overpoweringly stinky owl.
I could eat that.
So Miltank, Aromatisse, Exeggcute, and Kangaskhan are all edible, but that’s just four of the 969 Pokémon.
Considering how vast a task it would be to qualify the edibility of every one of them, I originally tried to disqualify entire types, like Poison.
But EVEN THAT DOESN’T WORK!
The problem is that when the Pokédex says “Poison,” it sometimes means “Venom.”
And the difference between poisonous and venomous is extremely important in edibility. Here’s a diagram to explain it.
Basically, if you want to eat a King Cobra, you’ll not only have the easiest “fun fact” for any future ice breakers, but you’ll also be fine
so as long as you cut off its head, which is where the venom glands are.
But if you get a hankering to lick up on that tasty looking Golden Poison Frog, you’re buying a one-way ticket to ground town,
which is what I call the cemetery.
What I’m saying is that if Pokémon can somehow differentiate between Ground and Rock type, they could have a Poison and Venom type.
Anyway, here's all the poison types that are edible.
Now let’s talk other ways to narrow this down, like the Ultra Beasts, who are beyond human understanding and probably not organic in nature,
so it’s pretty safe to say that they wouldn’t be fit for human consumption. Similarly, the steel in Steelix would most-
Can I just say that the reason I never wanted to do this Unraveled is because it’s so overdone?
Like, if you google “eating Pokémon,” you get 43 MILLION search results.
You could find hundreds of articles and videos and podcasts and wiki entries discussing Pokémon edibility.
But no, you still insist on me doing it. Like, this isn’t even “research into things that have very little meaning,”
it’s the research equivalent of a baking soda volcano. I’m not doing anything new, and that’s a waste of both your and my time!
Why do you even want to know the Most Edible Pokemon? You don’t want to know that. You DON’T.
Here’s the list of every inedible Pokémon. It took me a couple days to run through my
process for every one of them, but I’m glad I did, because there were some interesting ones.
Like how Slowking and Slowbro are both edible, but their Galarian counterparts are not.
And the Porygons are one of the only Normal types that are inedible, because they’re made of code.
And I had originally thought that Reuniclus would be a nice Jelly Boba, but it turns out
that if you drink the liquid surrounding it, it grants both wisdom and immediate death,
making Reuniclus the Pokémon equivalent of a tide pod.
On the other hand, roughly three quarters of all Pokémon are edible. And I reiterate: this is not new knowledge!
It’s literally written into the games. “Children used to have [Appletun] as a snack.” Basculin are
“remarkably tasty” and have “often appeared on the dinner table.” In Drampa’s Pokédex, it says “If a
child it has made friends with is bullied, it will find the bully’s house
and BURN IT TO THE GROUND.”
That doesn’t have anything to do with edibility, but it is metal as hell.
Also you can still eat Drampa.
But this still isn’t what you asked me for. You wanted me to rank Pokémon by edibility.
And the closest I can get to that is ranking Pokémon type by edibility, based on the percentage of Pokémon that are edible and have that type.
Poison is the least edible. Normal is the most edible.
WOW! WHAT A REVELATION! Who would have thought that normal things are good to eat and POISONOUS THINGS ARE NOT-
But that’s not good enough for you, is it? Because you want a full ranking. You want to know the most edible Pokémon.
But as I mentioned previously, that’s impossible, and if, hypothetically, it was possible, I can promise you wouldn't want to know that,
so maybe what you actually want me to rate is deliciousness.
I wanted to find a baseline for something completely devoid of taste, like pure water. And surprisingly, that’s not a water type,
because most water types are delicious!
From succulent Kinglers to light, flaky Magikarp to...
Palpitoad.
So our baseline for “completely devoid of taste” is actually Castform, because its “molecules were found to be just like water,” which is another way of saying,
"It’s water.”
But let’s talk about the worst and the best tasting Pokémon since no one cares about the middling ones.
Pokémon type does help us a little in this regard, because we can assume that Rock type Pokémon like Cranidos would be a little less texturally pleasant
than say, the Fairy type Cleffa, which I want to stab with a stick and roast over a bonfire.
Also, all Normal/Flying type Pokémon are basically the pheasants, turkeys, and chickens of this world, so they probably taste pretty good.
Now, do I feel comfortable saying that Farfetch’d nuggets would be the most delicious thing in the Pokémon Universe?
Yeah, I do.
On the opposite side of the scale, we have the humanoid and hyper intelligent Pokémon.
And I’m not entirely convinced that Sawk isn’t just a Blue Man that got separated from his group.
A lot of our experience with food is how we conceptualize it. And sometimes a delicious food,
like Haggis, becomes less delicious when we think about what it is and where it came from.
But that’s getting a little too close to ethics for my liking. So just shut your eyes and chew that Alakazam meat.
Oh, and speaking of Alakazam, there's a little loophole in this whole deliciousness thing.
“If [an Alakazam] trusts someone deeply, it will let them have one of its spoons. And anything you eat with that spoon is apparently delicious.”
And if theres a spoon that makes anything delicious,
what’s the point of me ranking every Pokémon by deliciousness?
Seriously, what’s the fucking point?
“Which Pokémon are edible?” is not a novel concept.
In fact, I’d be willing to bet that it's up there in the top three most theorized things about video games, alongside “What’s the real Zelda timeline?”
and “Are Banjo and Kazooie married?” By the way, they are, but it's purely for insurance purposes, and it’s an open thing.
And “which Pokémon tastes the best?” isn’t that much better! It’s like the second step after your first “deep thought” about a video game!
And the third step would be “What if the protagonist is actually in a coma and has been imagining the whole story?”
Guess what, you can say that about every single fictional story, because someone HAS imagined it.
They’re called THE WRITER OF THE STORY.
THAT’S WHAT FICTION IS.
And what would you even do with the knowledge of the Most Edible Pokemon, right? Like, you can’t uncrack that egg…
If it’s not “most edible” or “most delicious,” then what do you want to know? Like, maybe
which Pokémon is the most calorically dense? Let’s, let's rank them by that!
First off, let’s define a calorie. It’s the amount of energy needed to raise one gram of water by one degree Celsius,
except when you’re looking at most American food labels, it’s a Capital "C" Calorie, which is
actually a kilocalorie. And why do we call it a CUH-alorie as opposed to a kilocalorie like
the rest of the world? Well, because if Americans have a chance to make something more confusing,
they will take that chance. I know this, because I’m American,
and I made THIS FUCKING SERIES.
So let’s discuss how much energy is stored in the meat and leaves and goo of Pokémon.
Once again, we consult the Pokédex, except the problem is that the Pokédex entries are bonkers.
Literally every other Pokémon has a description that breaks the laws of physics!
Pyroar is said to have a “fiery breath of more than 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit.”
The surface of the sun is about 9,940 degrees fahrenheit.
This Pokémon has a fucking FUSION REACTOR in its belly, and you’re telling me I need to determine the caloric density of a Pyroar rump roast?
What’s the caloric value of THE SUN?
Don’t actually tell me, I don’t care.
And that’s not even taking into account what happens AFTER you eat it. If you serve your family Pyroar steaks as a special treat,
you're gonna end up with a toilet experience that gets dramatized by HBO in 40 years.
It’s just so FRUSTRATING because the only reason I’m doing this Unraveled is because y'all won’t stop asking me for it.
I have actively avoided doing this for more than two years because it is a fool’s errand.
Pokémon edibility has been asked and answered so many times and trying to find a new clever angle or a hot take is just... it's not gonna work!
They ask me for the “most edible Pokémon,” but they KNOW NOT WHAT THEY ASK.
It’s like… You remember back in the Castlevania Unraveled, when I said that I originally had a cut that was an hour long and terribly boring,
and then people still asked me to release it?
Why? Why would you want that after I specifically said that it was bad?
I didn’t even enjoy it, and you KNOW I love to hear myself talk! Right?
Like, y-you, you think you want it, like how you think you want the answer to Pokémon Edibility, but you don’t.
Let me show you a clip of what you're missing from the unreleased Castlevania Unraveled:
"So Olrox's motivations, as described by the Castlevania wiki, um, are all about thrills and curiosity.
And that's not evil. That's just fun!"
That-that is what you have been requesting for all these years. That, THAT, THAT. THING!
Alright? You say you want to know the truth about the most edible Pokémon because it's
gonna make you happy, but I know the truth and it hasn’t made me happy…
Shit. Shit. Haha, um,
that was… I didn't-I didn't mean to say... I misspspoke- I misSPOKE. That was...
I didn't... 'Cause obviously, 'cause I spent the whole video talking about how it's impossible to
know the most edible Po...poke... so it would be... so I wouldn't.... know it... Okay, look.
I do know the most edible Pokémon. I’ve known since before I started Unraveled.
You see, I was used to be a normal-type person, like you. I was unburdened with
the knowledge of video game lore. But then one day, I asked my friends an innocuous question,
“Do you think you can eat Pokémon?”
And they said, “Who cares? Pokémon aren’t real. What a meaningless thing to ask...”
But I didn’t think it was meaningless, and I wanted to prove them wrong.
So I began researching. And the more I dug into the question the more there was to discover.
And suddenly, the question changed from, “Do you think you can eat Pokémon?” to “What is the most edible Pokémon?”
There was a shell of mystery surrounding it, and I wanted to break in and find the golden yolk of truth.
I spent years learning everything I could about Pokémon from a gustatory standpoint, and at the end of this journey, I finally cracked it.
I found the most edible Pokémon. And I told my friends, and they…
still didn’t care.
I thought that having the answer was going to make me happy. That it was going to prove the worth of my quest—prove my worth—
and show people that what I was doing had meaning. I cared so much about knowing the truth,
that I completely ignored how much fun I had finding it.
Spoiler alert! Unraveled has never actually been about proving the answer to surreal questions.
In fact, it’s mostly about proving the opposite.
Sometimes, creators intentionally leave blank space and it’s fun to speculate what bizarre truths could fill that space,
but it’s less fun to carve those into canon.
There are rarely, if ever, any foolproof answers to subjective questions like "What’s the best Skyrim book?"
or, "Should we be allowing Brian to spend so much sponsor money on milk?"
And that’s why it’s so great to ask them.
The joy I’ve gained from these Unraveleds has never been about the final answer. It’s always been how I got there.
And it might appear at the start that it’s all a lot of research into things that have very little meaning.
But no matter how small and niche and insignificant something might seem,
the very act of researching, or spending time with, or caring for it imbues it with meaning. To you, and to the people you share it with.
Except for my asshole friends.
And that’s why I’m so reluctant to tell you the Most Edible Pokemon.
The best gift I can give you is the chance to search for yourself.
But as this is my final Unraveled, I still have a contract to uphold. I will tell you the most edible Pokémon,
but before I do, I want to give you a chance to pause this video and leave. Go now,
and you can still have those fun arguments about how Psyduck would taste better than Slurpuff.
Or you can stay, and we can be crushed under the unbending, immovable mass of truth… together.
I hoped you would have left, but I respect your decision.
The truth must be revealed. The most edible Pokémon is...
TOGEPI! You can fry ‘em up, boil ‘em, make a nice souffle, crack ‘em over rice, heck you can even
slurp ‘em down raw! And that’s not even counting the ways you can use them in baking cakes….
Now, legally, you can't ask me to do this again. Just wanted to point that out. Legally.