Over the last twenty years or so, there has been a proliferation of food shows on television. The Food Network has led the pack since the 1990s, but a host of other channels also dabble in the genre.
It’s not going out on any kind of limb to say that these shows tend to be somewhat reductionist in their approach to food. Therefor, I feel perfectly justified in being a little reductionist in my approach towards these shows; turnaround’s fair play, after all. And in that vein, it seems to me that all of these many shows can be divided among three basic categories that I’ve come up with to describe them.
Exotica– You’ve never heard of many of the ingredients. If you have, you probably can’t afford most of them, and lord knows where you might even find them. Only the finest kitchen implements are used to prepare dishes with skill and panache, and the result is mouth watering perfection. Viewers are invited to live vicariously through the food. Yes, you want to eat it. You also want to write poetry about it. Something inside says you must paint it. You want to make love to it.
Some people are wont to refer to this type of programming as Food Porn. I think the term’s a bad fit. Food Romance Novel might be a more accurate, albeit clumsier moniker. With an emphasis on eroticizing foreign food by casting it as an idealized version of The Other, or perfecting domestic food to a generally unattainable degree, the Exotica approach is more about romanticizing with supple caresses, whereas real pornography is about mindlessly cramming random, over-sized monstrosities into various orifices. And that’s actually a pretty apt description for our next category.
Dumb Gluttony– For the person who wants it cheap and hot, and served up by the shit load, there’s the Dumb Gluttony approach to television food shows. All you need is a handheld camera and an overweight host in a battle worn shirt, then it’s off to the diner, the taco truck, the hamburger stand, or the place where they serve a steak so large that it’s free if you can eat the whole thing in one sitting and not puke.
This populist approach to food shows eschews the exotic, the expensive, and the complex, opting instead for man-sized portions of everyday fare scarfed down by everyman hosts (women are a rarity) who are cheered on as they consume calories by the thousand and carry on teary-eyed love affairs with chili peppers and hot sauces. Designed for consumers with less refined pallets who do not aspire to the food bourgeoisie but are rather put off by epicurean class barriers, this approach is also a lure for gawkers who either stare in dumbfounded silence or are apt to scream: Dude! Check it out! He ate the whole fuckin’ thing!
Celebrity Chef– When it’s not about perverting the food, but rather sublimating it to the dominant personality standing in front of the camera, we’re dealing with the Celebrity Chef approach to television. This type of program features a host who aspires to transcend the Food Show ghetto and take the world by storm. They may have a deep and genuine affection for food on a personal level, but within the context of their program, it’s no longer really about the food. Indeed, food is merely a tool for levering the host towards wider fame. In the broader popular culture then, this person’s association with food can border on the tangential, as he or she may be known more for their personality than any particular cuisine. Perhaps most TV food show hosts aspire to this status, but they don’t all make it. If successful, the Celebrity Chef will skyrocket to national or even international stardom, maybe even leaving the kitchen behind altogether.
Some examples can illustrate these categories, and also reveal their limitations.
Leading the way in Exotica these days is the BBC 4 program Exquisite Cuisine, a series of food documentaries that has added another layer to the formula. Not only are viewers treated to the preparation of stunning delicacies, but the show also intellectualizes food, or perhaps pseudo-intellectualizes it. The rarified ingredients and their masterful preparation are complemented with a high falutin’ discourse. In this way, the show caters to a modern foodie culture that often glorifies and overstates the importance of food. Each episode of Exquisite Cuisine develops a specific topic that often serves as an entrepot to overwrought grandstanding, such as a writer from The New Yorker turning a critical eye on the supposed superiority of French cuisine, or restauranteur and author Antonio Carluccio touring Italy to investigate the food featured in The Leopard, the 1956 novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa.
Haute cuisine is often subjected to various criticisms, ranging from the shallow (“How can you luxuriate in food when people are starving in Africa?”) to the devastating, such as this recent B.R. Myers piece in The Atlantic. Thus, lovers of fine food sometimes feel compelled to defend upscale cookery by linking it to pressing social issues ranging from environmentalism to public heath to socio/economic class divisions. Exquisite Cuisine encourages this sense of over-inflated importance. Examples include episodes that relate food to British class conflict, Medieval social history, and yet another fictionalized rendering of Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation. At a base level of course, nothing is more important than food. But paying a lot more money for higher quality food in and of itself neither swings a moral compass nor establishes one’s credentials as a thoughtful global citizen. And so in some ways, mythologizing the importance of great food is almost as ridiculous as some of the complaints against it. Feel free to enjoy an exquisitely prepared meal; it has no role in explaining why you are or aren’t a decadent, narcissistic asshole.
Exemplifying the Dumb Gluttony category is Travel Channel’s Man v. Food. At it’s core, the show is about funneling gender construction through a food show. It goes something like this: Real men eat lots of greasy, spicy, fatty, meaty food, and host Adam Richman is a manly Brooklynite who can eat a shit ton of anything you put in front of him. The show itself is kind of like road movie meets hot dog eating contest. The preparation of food is secondary at best. Lip service is given to the food being fantastic, but anyone who actually likes food would have their doubts, and anyway, that’s hardly the point. Rather, this is about manly consumption, as Richman travels America accepting challenges to devour copious quantities of pedestrian food, sometimes within a set time limit: 50 chicken wings in under a half hour in Colorado; an 11 pound pizza in Atlanta; 422 oysters in Mobile; a gallon of milkshake in St. Louis; and of course the requisite 72 oz. steaks in Nashville as well as in Amarillo.
I suspect Man v. Food isn’t called Man vs. Food because Richman ate the “s” on a dare from one of his colleagues.
When it comes to a Celebrity Chef turned pop culture icon, FoodTV host Rachel Ray is arguably the consummate example. From the moment she stepped in front of the camera, she eschewed all traces of Exotica, instead focusing exclusively on building an accessible TV persona. Unwilling to let the food compete with her for the spotlight, she beamed, bounced, smiled, and flirted as she offered up one uninspired dish after another and quickly rose to the top of the FoodTV heap. Eventually, of course, food was rendered completely negligible when she gained full-on celebrity status with her own syndicated daytime talk show. 
Her Oprah-lite program now typically relegates cooking to a hurried, closing segment where she quickly half-asses it through uninteresting recipes that sound like they came from an intern’s aunt, like Stale Bread Lasagna or Pigs in Ponchos: Quesadilla Wrapped Franks and Beans.
In the next post we’ll see how some shows and chefs transcend these contrived categories, and we’ll also take a look at the commodification of food into mass spectator entertainment.