Now in the UK — the Food Network phenomenon

Spouse Mouse and I watch two television channels when we travel to the US: Fox News and the Food Network.  Now one of them is on the UK’s Freeview (free digital channels) — the Food Network (Freeview 49: 6 – 10 p.m.).

On these US trips, after Neil Cavuto and, until recently, Glenn Beck signed off, Spouse Mouse would call out, ‘Food Network!’

For a couple of years, we were able to watch Alton Brown make his own sweets, including  marshmallow, which is quite messy and difficult, although it looked a treat.  When we went to the US last year, the network was no longer showing those reruns, and we settled for his hosting Iron Chef, which had a brief run on Britain’s Channel 4 last year, presented by our own enthusiastic oenophile-journalist, Ollie Smith.  Alton Brown was better left to his own devices in the kitchen.  And Iron Chef — here or in the US — is pretty pointless, really: it’s the Gladiators of cooking.  If you want ideas for supper, this isn’t the show.

We also watched a few episodes of Duff Goldman’s Ace of Cakes, which also seemed a bit silly to me, but, hey, it’s food, so we took it in.  However, unless you’re a pâtissier with talent for recreating customers’ requests (building — and it is that — cakes which are replicas of biplanes, hospitals, islands, animals and so forth), forget it.  Fantasy television.

Then there is Rachel ‘E-V-O-O’ ['extra virgin olive oil'] Ray who recreates her mum’s recipes using a noticeable amount of tinned food.  Seriously?

And let’s not forget Paula Deen, the Southern lady, who also takes shortcuts à la Rachel Ray.  Hmm.

For those living further North along the East Coast, Ina Garten — The Barefoot Contessa — also cooks dishes that we probably wouldn’t eat at home. Too elaborate? No, quite the opposite. Yes, like the other ladies on the Food Channel, she is wildly successful, but doesn’t show us much classic cooking, although we did like her 40th wedding anniversary show which aired here several days ago.

A few other Food Network shows I can happily live without are The Best Thing I Ever Ate (who cares?) and Kid in a Candy Store (way too much sugar).

However, along with Alton Brown, there is another Food Network presenter whom we quite like, Guy Fieri of Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives and Guy’s Big Bites.  Guy reminds me of the blokes I knew in high school — friendly and larger than life with a great appetite for food.  He owns (or co-owns) two restaurants in California.  Guy has demystified brine for me and has shown a number of great cooking tips on Big Bites.  And Triple D — as he calls it — also reveals some chef’s secrets for spice mixes, batters, sauces and food combinations.

However, what is the Food Network’s objective? Is it for the home cook or is it for the diner?

I ask because, in our household, we watch reruns of Antony Worrall Thompson’s Daily Cooks’ Challenge on ITV3 every afternoon.  Long may they continue.  Two well-known chefs are on each week — yes, there is a rota — who prepare various dishes for celebrities, most of whom do not cook very much.  From those shows, my better half (who also cooks) and I continually refresh our taste combinations and techniques.  For the home cook in Britain, I cannot recommend a finer show. (Disclaimer: I have no financial or promotional interest in either ITV or Antony Worrall Thompson’s productions.)  We’re dealing with British ingredients here, although combinations and cooking techniques vary.

I grew up with Graham ‘The Galloping Gourmet’ Kerr’s and Julia Child’s shows on PBS (as they were broadcast in the US — Kerr’s was originally on CBC in Canada).  I started watching Kerr before Child, only because he was a new ‘sensation’, and Child was still too East Coast for women who lived elsewhere in the US.  Try to find a duck in Flyover Country even today and you’ll be lucky.

Renowned food writer Michael Pollan wrote an article for the New York Times Magazine, ‘Out of the Kitchen, onto the Couch’, wherein he analysed televised food shows in America over the past 40 years.  What you read — particularly for those living outside of North America — might shock. Highlights mine throughout:

I spent an enlightening if somewhat depressing hour on the phone with a veteran food-marketing researcher, Harry Balzer, who explained that “people call things ‘cooking’ today that would roll their grandmother in her grave — heating up a can of soup or microwaving a frozen pizza.” Balzer has been studying American eating habits since 1978; the NPD Group, the firm he works for, collects data from a pool of 2,000 food diaries to track American eating habits. Years ago Balzer noticed that the definition of cooking held by his respondents had grown so broad as to be meaningless, so the firm tightened up the meaning of “to cook” at least slightly to capture what was really going on in American kitchens. To cook from scratch, they decreed, means to prepare a main dish that requires some degree of “assembly of elements.” So microwaving a pizza doesn’t count as cooking, though washing a head of lettuce and pouring bottled dressing over it does. Under this dispensation, you’re also cooking when you spread mayonnaise on a slice of bread and pile on some cold cuts or a hamburger patty. (Currently the most popular meal in America, at both lunch and dinner, is a sandwich; the No. 1 accompanying beverage is a soda.) At least by Balzer’s none-too-exacting standard, Americans are still cooking up a storm — 58 percent of our evening meals qualify, though even that figure has been falling steadily since the 1980s.

But, there’s worse to come:

Erica Gruen, the cable executive often credited with putting the Food Network on the map in the late ’90s, recognized early on that, as she told a journalist, “people don’t watch television to learn things.” So she shifted the network’s target audience from people who love to cook to people who love to eat, a considerably larger universe and one that — important for a cable network — happens to contain a great many more men.

It’s all about ratings and advertising.

As Pollan explains, yes, the Food Network presenters and cooks do use classic cooking terms and sometimes even the techniques.  However:

for anyone hoping to pick up a few dinnertime tips, the implicit message of today’s prime-time cooking shows is, Don’t try this at home. If you really want to eat this way, go to a restaurant. Or as a chef friend put it when I asked him if he thought I could learn anything about cooking by watching the Food Network, “How much do you learn about playing basketball by watching the N.B.A.?”

What we mainly learn about on the Food Network in prime time is culinary fashion, which is no small thing: if Julia took the fear out of cooking, these shows take the fear — the social anxiety — out of ordering in restaurants.

With Antony Worrall Thompson (AWT) and his chef duos, you are likely to impress your family or friends with what you have learned on the first try. Such is not necessarily the case with the Food Network.  Yes, of course, a website exists, as it does for Daily Cooks’ Challenge, but the Food Network’s not a step-by-step televisual tutorial for an aspiring home cook who wants to create simple yet classic meals cooked from scratch.  And there, the AWT team has it beat.

As Pollan explains:

Traditionally, the recipe for the typical dump-and-stir program comprises about 80 percent cooking followed by 20 percent eating, but in prime time you now find a raft of shows that flip that ratio on its head, like “The Best Thing I Ever Ate” and “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives,” which are about nothing but eating. Sure, Guy Fieri, the tattooed and spiky-coiffed chowhound who hosts “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives,” ducks into the kitchen whenever he visits one of these roadside joints to do a little speed-bonding with the startled short-order cooks in back, but most of the time he’s wrapping his mouth around their supersize creations …

At least Fieri’s Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives will show you the dish from start to finish.  The Best Thing I Ever Ate often skips over a raft of details.  I don’t care how good a dish tastes; I assume it is great, otherwise, it wouldn’t feature on the show.  What I want to know is how to recreate it at home.

There’s a lesson here, as Pollan observes:

It’s no accident that Julia Child appeared on public television — or educational television, as it used to be called. On a commercial network, a program that actually inspired viewers to get off the couch and spend an hour cooking a meal would be a commercial disaster, for it would mean they were turning off the television to do something else. The ads on the Food Network, at least in prime time, strongly suggest its viewers do no such thing: the food-related ads hardly ever hawk kitchen appliances or ingredients (unless you count A.1. steak sauce) but rather push the usual supermarket cart of edible foodlike substances, including Manwich sloppy joe in a can, Special K protein shakes and Ore-Ida frozen French fries, along with fast-casual eateries like Olive Garden and Red Lobster.

Having watched the adverts in the UK, that’s also true here.

And it gets more banal:

The Food Network has figured out that we care much less about what’s cooking than who’s cooking. A few years ago, Mario Batali neatly summed up the network’s formula to a reporter: “Look, it’s TV! Everyone has to fall into a niche. I’m the Italian guy. Emeril’s the exuberant New Orleans guy with the big eyebrows who yells a lot. Bobby [Flay]’s the grilling guy. Rachael Ray is the cheerleader-type girl who makes things at home the way a regular person would. Giada’s the beautiful girl with the nice rack who does simple Italian food. As silly as the whole Food Network is, it gives us all a soapbox to talk about the things we care about.” Not to mention a platform from which to sell all their stuff.

Pollan makes an important observation about cooking in the home.  Many of us, even men and boys, have watched our mothers and grandmothers prepare meals:

Even when “everyone” still cooked, there were plenty of us who mainly watched: men, for the most part, and children. Most of us have happy memories of watching our mothers in the kitchen, performing feats that sometimes looked very much like sorcery and typically resulted in something tasty to eat. Watching my mother transform the raw materials of nature — a handful of plants, an animal’s flesh — into a favorite dinner was always a pretty good show, but on the afternoons when she tackled a complex marvel like chicken Kiev, I happily stopped whatever I was doing to watch.

Yes, I, too, recall when every dinner the ladies in our family made was a minor miracle of goodness on a plate.  Others around the table would marvel, ‘How does she do that?’ ‘That’ could be some learned genius with fried chicken, pie crust or homemade bread.

Yet, Pollan explains why — and it’s not just because of feminism, although that plays a part — we are less likely to cook from scratch:

For many years now, Americans have been putting in longer hours at work and enjoying less time at home. Since 1967, we’ve added 167 hours — the equivalent of a month’s full-time labor — to the total amount of time we spend at work each year, and in households where both parents work, the figure is more like 400 hours. Americans today spend more time working than people in any other industrialized nation — an extra two weeks or more a year. Not surprisingly, in those countries where people still take cooking seriously, they also have more time to devote to it.

The sad reality is that:

all American women now allow corporations to cook for them when they can …

After World War II, the food industry labored mightily to sell American women on all the processed-food wonders it had invented to feed the troops: canned meals, freeze-dried foods, dehydrated potatoes, powdered orange juice and coffee, instant everything. As Laura Shapiro recounts in “Something From the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America,” the food industry strived to “persuade millions of Americans to develop a lasting taste for meals that were a lot like field rations.” The same process of peacetime conversion that industrialized our farming, giving us synthetic fertilizers made from munitions and new pesticides developed from nerve gas, also industrialized our eating.

Let’s pay attention to what’s happening here! Food isn’t entertainment: it’s our means of survival.

This I did not know:

People think nothing of buying frozen peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches for their children’s lunchboxes. (Now how much of a timesaver can that be?) “We’ve had a hundred years of packaged foods,” Balzer told me, “and now we’re going to have a hundred years of packaged meals.” Already today, 80 percent of the cost of food eaten in the home goes to someone other than a farmer, which is to say to industrial cooking and packaging and marketing. Balzer is unsentimental about this development: “Do you miss sewing or darning socks? I don’t think so.”

A shameful analogy.

Another insidious side to ‘cooking’ shows is the relationship the presenter-cooks purport to create with the viewer — something, I might add, that AWT and his crew do not do.

Glenda Shaw-Garlock has written an analysis of cooking shows to appear in a future publication, Simulation in Media and Culture.  In ‘Simulating Supper: Serving Up TV Dinners’, she writes:

… the illusion of a face-to-face relationship between spectator and performer (also called a ‘persona’) is constructed.  It is illusory because the relationship is inevitably ‘one-sided, nondialectical and [controlled] by the performer’.

She discusses television chefs past and present; the home-like atmosphere of the studio kitchens; the resemblance to pornography.  There’s much more at the link, which is well worth reading.

I know a number of women who think because they rustle something up — throw some frozen hors d’oeuvres onto a baking tray or punch a few holes in a plastic microwave-suitable film — that they’ve ‘cooked’ a meal.  They couldn’t be more mistaken.

God has given us the gift of food.  Let us prepare and eat it with respect and thanks.  A meal is much more than a 2,000-calorie dynamo meal served off a truck which works only through social networking sites.

Properly-cooked meals are our sustenance — our daily bread.

Yes, by all means, enjoy the Food Network.  Take it in, but don’t be (too) taken in by it.

More about the Food Network coming soon