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 tools and 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.
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 barf.
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.
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 their particular pursuit by attaching it to something important. 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. Of course nothing is more important than food in some ways. 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 i
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. F
As is the case with all contrived social categories, boundaries between Exotica, Dumb Gluttony, and Celebrity Chef can shift and blur. Many TV food personalities evolve over time, moving from one category to another, and maybe inhabiting more than one at a time.
Emeril Lagasse is an example of someone who moved through at least two categories, and maybe all three of them. Nowadays, it’s difficult to think of Lagasse as anything but a full fledged Celebrity Chef. In 2000, he even had his own network sitcom, a fiasco entitled Emeril that was canceled after only eleven episodes. But if you go back and watch his early appearances on FoodTV from nearly twenty years ago, you might be surprised to see just how understated and even uncomfortable he was in front of the camera. This is not yet the vivacious, dramatic Emeril with an in-house band, annoying tag lines (Bam! and Take it up a notch!), his own line of mediocre, pre-packed sauces, and a doe-eyed audience of unquestioning adulators who would give Rush Limbaugh’s “Ditto Heads” a run for their money.
As Lagasse’s ratings grew, so did his personality. His success would eventually balloon to the point that highly paid NBC executives thought it a good idea to give him a sitcom. But while Lagasse’s dalliance with prime time comedy was an embarrassing disaster, his path to stardom revolutionized the upstart FoodTV channel. His show put the small cable network on the map with ratings that had been unheard of for a food show. Latching onto that success, the network quickly embraced the Celebrity Chef model, de-emphasizing food in favor of people with star appeal. And Lagasse himself made out like a bandit, using the show as the platform to craft an empire of restaurant chains, pre-packaged foods, and endorsements that by 2005 were estimated to be grossing $150,000,000 a year.
There are plenty of other boundary-crossers out there. Anthony Bourdain mixes faux tough-guy bullshit (Ooooh, he has tattoos and used to do heroin) and a prestigious New York restaurant lineage to straddle the Exotica and Celebrity Chef categories. Similarly, Guy Fieri’s already impressive Dumb Gluttony credentials became absolutely bona fide when he starred in a ubiquitous series of commercials for the 
repulsive restaurant chain TGI Friday’s, an act which also threatened to earn him Celebrity Chef status, something his god awful haircut couldn’t do on its own. And Nigella Lawson has traded on her sexuality to attain trans-Atlantic celebrity status while specializing in over the top desserts that range dangerously close into Dumb Gluttony territory at the same time she uses her distinguished lineage (father was a Baron and member of Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet, mother a wealthy heiress and socialite) to develop an air of Exotica that is more about her persona than her food. Of course here in America, where she’s now expanding her media presence, all she really needs is the accent.
Obviously there’s plenty of room for debate about which of the countless TV food shows out there go into which category. And one may challenge the nature these particular three categories, seeking to refine them, broaden them, or even come up with different ones altogether. And that’s perfectly fine. But details aside, what seems a bit beyond contention at this point is that these many shows do in fact conform to broad categories.
Why? Because in the same way that earlier generations of entrepreneurs turned games into professional sports, songs into chart-topping hits, and sex into pornography, TV producers over the last twenty years or so have figured out how to use mass media to successfully commodify food into spectator entertainment. And once something is successfully commodified through the mass media, purveyors will develop tropes that investors so dearly crave because among other things they signal a proven track record of success. If one show becomes a hit by emphasizing the exotic nature of food, others will follow. The same for shows that harvest big ratings from a charismatic host, whether that charisma is based on looks, personality, or an ability to eat a 6 lb. sandwich in Anchorage, Alaska.
But just as sports announcers prattle on about organized athletic competition “building character,” adoring critics and DJs flush with payola compare The Beatles to Beethoven, and pornographers attempt to hide behind tripe about “empowering women,” the shiny veneer that accompanies the commodification of food can also lead to silly reflections.
Likewise, plating up some tremendously tasty food does not automatically endow someone with daring style, intellectual prowess, or superior ethics; and swallowing a heart attack’s worth of it in a single sitting certainly doesn’t make you more of a man. Well, literally it will, I suppose, but anyway . . .
Bon appetit.