…the Food Network, basically a good-hearted organization still fundamentally clueless about itself (TV or non-TV) and its audience (cooks or kitchen idiots)

So I’m leafing through the latest New Yorker when I’m met with a lovely looking piece on what used to be my favorite cable channel. It may still be my favorite cable channel, but we no longer get cable (well, we get broadcast channels + TNT via cable, but that’s it, and only because they give us a great deal for having cable internet). So, I’m humming along as I read about Julia Child and the Beginning of All Food TV when all of a sudden I find my face scraping along the ground, mouth agape, scooping up pebbles. What happened!?

The Food Network is weeding out the Old Guard real-chef cooking shows like missing Molotovs–’Molto Mario,’ Sara Mouton

I have to back up a couple of paragraphs to see what it was that sent me crashing to the pavement and Mario and Sara packing. Oh, here it is. Judy Girard, President of Food Network from 2001-2003, says, “You can’t run a network with chefs.” Hmm. That’s funny, seems to me they’ve been doing just fine. The author of the piece rightully asks Girard “what quality does [Rachel] Ray have that, say one of the Molotovs doesn’t?” Well, it’s fairly obvious to me. First off, Sara Moulton would never be seen flashing cleavage on her show. And she talks about her children and family rather than “the girls,” and she does it in a normal voice rather than in a fake pal-sy wal-sy, girl from the streets, sort of drawl. Moulton would most likely balk at marketing her patter or even changing it for that matter whereas Ms. Ray (and others we could name) shameless sell their linguistic selves to the highest bidder (Put your Yum-o in the G.B. along with Sammy and the guys. Delish?) Furthermore, well, let’s be blunt here, I seriously doubt that any of Moulton’s dishes could be regularly be done in less than 30 minutes.

Now, before the loads of flaming email come streaming in from all quarters, let me be the first to say that it’s a great thing to have a show about making supper in 30 minutes. If we’re going to have any chance at fighting the growing obesity problem in this country, we’re going to have to start taking more responsibility for cooking our own food, and for many people, that means squeezing cooking into a very busy day. Also, I’ve prepared recipes from Ray’s books and enjoyed them immensely. Furthermore, in Ray’s early days, she did demonstrate a facility for, you know, actually cooking. (Don’t even get me started on that Barefoot Contessa.) And, if we’re being honest, Ray is alot sexier than Sara Moulton. However, Ray could have gone either way in Girard’s hot-sauce-endorphin-rush induced dichotomy between television personality and chef. And that’s what makes her a symbol for all that’s wrong with Girard and the direction Food Network is taking.

There were hamburgers and bacon, but scarcely any other red animal tissue except skirt steak, probably, it occurs to me now, because of its two unique qualities: its texture and its name. It cooks fast (two minutes on each side, according to Rachael Ray–less, according to Robin Miller), and it sounds like something you might pick up at the Gap.

In a frightening moment of self-reflection, I realize that my own proclivities of FoodNetwork watching back in the day may have contained the seeds of this destruction. One of my favorites was Two Fat Ladies. While it is true that these ladies could actually cook, and did, and that these ladies never cooked anything in under 3 hours, it is equally true that what really made the show was their characters: one the hard living smoker just this side of alcoholic, the other nicer and sipping water. What attracted more than learning to cook was watching them invade various quarters in England, cooking with outmoded cookware, and dumping lard all over the place. In other words it wasn’t the cooking that made it fun to watch them, it was the schtick.

We can see the degradation of food television tracing the development of another FoodNetwork’s big stars, Emeril. He started off with a simple show wherein he simply prepared dishes and showed us how, no audience, no band, no BAM. Then, he got his big show with the lights and the razzle and the dazzle. At first, he was still cooking, and he even made fun of other shows for relying on pre-made finished dishes while he slammed pans into the oven. But as time went on, the amount of pre-prepared items grew so that he could spend more time dusting people with flour and getting them to cheer like drunken frat-boys whenever he waved a bottle of tabasco. In a recent show I watched, he essentially described how to cook a roast and only finished the sauce, never actually cooking anything. But everyone was having a good time.

Never in our history as a species have been so ignorant about our food. And it is revealing about our culture that, in the face of such widespread ignorance about a human being’s most essential function–the ability to feed itself–there is now a network broadcasting into ninety million American homes, entertaining people with shows about making coleslaw.

What trying to run a Food network without chefs reveals is that we’re more interested in the culture of making food than the actual thing. We’re attracted to the idea of making food, but would rather not get into the messy side of things. I recently watched Jamie Oliver’s Jamie’s Kitchen. Oliver gathered 15 kids off the streets and tried to educate them in the ways of the chef and opened a restaurant where they could work. As we follow the training of these 15, it quickly became clear that a certain percentage of them had no real idea about how much WORK being a chef is. One restaurant owner said quite plainly that the interns she had trained might be good at the fancy stuff, but they had no ability or patience for the actual work. We want the glamor, but we’ll pay the help to give us most of it up unti the last little bit. We’ll buy the Thomas Kinkade print, and then pay some mall-store lackey to splash some fresh paint on it so that we can say we’ve got an original.

Give me Mario Batali, Sara Moulton, America’s Test Kitchen, and the host of other “chef-heavy” shows. Give me shows that show me how to take dirty skin-on veggies and turn them into something amazing. Give me something that will teach me about where my food came from, what it’s doing now, and where it’s going when I’m through. And somewhere along the way, give me some Iron Chef fun as well. The New Yorker may be wrong when it says that Food Network is “clueless about itself…and its audience.” It may simply be that folks like me are no longer part of that audience; we’re just being tossed with the Molotovs.

And, boy, doesn’t that make me want to rush out and sign up for more cable TV.

Not interesting was the monstrosity that appeared in my mailbox yesterday. Wrapped in a plastic pouce were my New Yorker issue AND a second magazine that turned out to be a full-length publication devoted solely to CBS’s Fashion Rocks television special: an entire magazine devoted solely to the fashion and music being featured on a show celebrating, um, fashion and music.

The whole thing was packaged like one of those TV infomercials that looks like an actual newscast or talkshow. There were articles and glossy paper and advertisements (INSIDE THE ADVERSTISEMENT!). In fact, it took me a few minutes for my confused brain to figure out what this monstrosity was. And I still don’t know why it was packaged with my New Yorker. I mean, sure, the New Yorker has always carried advertising, and its advertising has always been for insanely expensive things that I could never afford, but that’s why I liked it. I’m never going to spend a full-year’s salary on a brooch or a watch or a special hat. But what the dueces is CBS doing in my New Yorker?

Egads.

On the same day, I received a complimentary copy of Paste magazine which includes a CD full of sample tunes. There was a note attached that I was receiving this as a thank you. I guess because I’ve ordered some Over the Rhine CD’s from them this year. That’s marketing I didn’t mind because, you know, it actually matched the market segment indicated by my purchase.