Food Network Smackdown

Anthony Bourdain, author of Kitchen Confidential, guest-blogs at Michael Ruhlman's eponymous blog Ruhlman. The subject: Bourdain's impressions of Food Network celebrity cooks.

RACHAEL [RAY]: Complain all you want. It’s like railing against the pounding surf. She only grows stronger and more powerful. Her ear-shattering tones louder and louder. We KNOW she can’t cook. She shrewdly tells us so. So...what is she selling us? Really? She’s selling us satisfaction, the smug reassurance that mediocrity is quite enough. She’s a friendly, familiar face who appears regularly on our screens to tell us that “Even your dumb, lazy ass can cook this!” Wallowing in your own crapulence on your Cheeto-littered couch you watch her and think, “Hell…I could do that. I ain’t gonna…but I could--if I wanted! Now where’s my damn jug a Diet Pepsi?” Where the saintly Julia Child sought to raise expectations, to enlighten us, make us better--teach us--and in fact, did, Rachael uses her strange and terrible powers to narcotize her public with her hypnotic mantra of Yummo and Evoo and Sammys. “You’re doing just fine. You don’t even have to chop an onion--you can buy it already chopped. Aspire to nothing…Just sit there. Have another Triscuit…Sleep….sleep….”

Bourdain's entertaining rants tickled the back of my mind. Hadn't I read something similar not too long ago? Yes! The simple expedient of typing "new yorker food network" into the search box at Google yielded Bill Buford's report on watching a marathon of Food Network shows.

The two essential premises of “30 Minute Meals”—no one knows how to cook and everyone is in a hurry — now inform most instructional cooking shows. If you have time to watch a Saturday morning of the Food Network, you will learn that you have time for nothing else. There’s urgency even in the names — “Good Food Fast,” “Quick Fix Meals,” “Semi-Homemade Cooking,” “Easy Entertaining,” “Good Deal” — and a reassuring friendliness in the ingredients, which, like Rachael’s, so uniformly come out of the fridge sealed in plastic wrap that it is impossible not to suspect an executive order. You don’t have to know how to cook, just how to shop; and everyone knows how to shop. The appeal of squash is that it’s a limited time investment, Robin Miller says on “Quick Fix Meals,” illustrating how to prepare one in under fifteen minutes. Sandra Lee recommends pre-peeled carrots — the ones sold by Dole. (Who has the time to peel carrots?) In the supermarket, you can get your melon already cut up—it’s over there by the salad bar. Near the meat section, Dave Lieberman tells us on “Good Deal,” you can buy an already cooked rotisserie chicken. (Who knows how to cook one, anyway?)

I found myself taking stock not of what I’d seen during the preceding seventy-two hours but of what I hadn’t. I couldn’t recall very many potatoes with dirt on them, or beets with ragged greens, or carrots with soil in their creases, or pieces of meat remotely reminiscent of the animals they were butchered from — hardly anything, it seemed, from the planet Earth. 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.

(via Jerrod Ankenman)