Foodie fever

by tess

Foodie television is my frenemy. The Food Network, Fine Living, and the assorted cooking shows inundating every network and basic-cable channel (less Gordon Ramsey who is unwatchable in all incarnations!) intensify my obsession with all things food-related.

I want to know about it and cook it. I need to study it, smell it, and swim in it. I want to taste each nuance and every flavor of the dishes being prepared. I don’t necessarily want to understand the chemistry behind it although I bow to Alton Brown’s superior erudition and acknowledge that one can’t become a good cook without a moderate understanding of how components interact chemically.

But because I watch so many food-related shows, I have reached Maximum Overload on a few ingredients including, but not limited to: foam, beets, polenta, figs, panna cota, gelée, fennel pollen, mole, duck confit, trotters, truffles, pâté, squab, celeriac root, venison, and geoduck. The world is a big place. There must be something we can cook with besides these ingredients!

Trends that I’m so over: direct-to-plate sauce applications that resemble multi-cultural baby poop smears, Thai food, spaghetti squash in lieu of actual pasta, Hawaiian pizza, wedding cake competitions, and Bobby Flay’s ancho chile peppers in adobo sauce. Enough. Let’s progress collectively to new fads.

Then there’s the talent. I’m willing to give Marco Pierre White more time since he’s new to my living room but his edginess veers into nastiness a little too often. On the other hand, the restaurant business doesn’t exactly reward chefs for being sweethearts. I’m a huge Tom Colicchio fan. His patented Sniff-n-Sneer is my favorite part of Top Chef and I emulate it whenever The Hubs stumbles his way into the kitchen. If I were to admit to any personal fantasies (which I’m not!) they would certainly include both Tony Bourdain and Mario Batali. Yeah, I know, too much information. But among his other god-like features, Bourdain’s disdain for all things Rachael Ray further elevates him to the realm of deity.

I’m not a fan of the cult-of-personality talent we see on FoodTV. I understand that it’s a business and that they’ve achieved enormous success with Emeril and Rachael, but must we be inundated 24/7 with Emeril- and Rachael-wannabes? Perhaps we could cast our nets far and wide to find The Next Big Thing which is, after all, what the copious cooking competitions are about. Or, if we must look back, let’s time travel to the good old days of food porn. Knowledgeable chefs and semi-likeable cooks illustrating how to prepare food that looks so delicious you want to lick your television set. A more satisfying time when 21 minutes were spent on the preparation and beauty shots of tasty, enticing food rather than giggling, BAMming, and mugging for the camera.

While I may not be overly impressed with every ingredient and trend demonstrated in the cooking shows du jour, and I don’t believe that every celebrity chef should be proffered rock star status, I’m amazed that Julia Child so thoroughly changed the way Americans look at and think about food. I’m pleased that children are learning about nutrition, kitchen chemistry, and cooking skills. I’m thrilled that there are more breads in our local markets than white and rye. Cooking is what we choose to make of it, drudgery or hobby, chore or entertainment. It’s trite but true: cooking can be an expression of love for our families. And if foodie television offers us nothing more than that message, then it’s still a well-spent 30 minutes.