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I'm flying to Vegas tomorrow morning to satiate my perpetual gambling bug. The original plan was to fly out today, perhaps not the best course of action considering the date. Anyway, in my absense, please enjoy guest blogger, Passenger 58... Guest Blogger, Passenger 58 The most unfortunate aspect of the Food Channel, besides the weirdly fetishistic Stepford-esque nature of the channel, is the way it has made cult idols out of undeserving idiots, and glorifies its own undeserving hosts and "stars". Take Rachel Ray, host of "$40 a Day". On this program, this weirdly/scarily chipper ditz travels to a city, showing how to get a day's worth of dining on $40. She winds up blowing it on crap like alcholic beverages, useless snacks, and sometimes barely makes it. Give me a break, I could get better dining on $30 or less. And if you really know where to go, as little as $15. Then there is "Almost Home Made". Basically, all this woman does is open cans and bottles of prepackaged sugary instant desserts and dump it on plates and into "nice looking fluted glasses". How this turned into a TV program, how this woman earned a reputation, boggles the mind. "Iron Chef", the original Japanese series, has always been fun. I was watching it years before Food Channel and America co-opted it, and dubbed it with stupid-sounding American English. The Japanese Iron Chefs (Sakai, Morimoto, Chen Kenichi) for the most part, are actually deserving, even though I do not believe they have ever matched up against truly great chefs from other parts of the world, or even the rest of Southeast Asia. (Trivia fact: whenever Iron Chef Chen Kenichi has a few minutes with extra ingredient, he always makes fried rice with it. Always. And the judges always swoon anyway.) After one tacky American version of "Iron Chef" (with William Shatner as the host) has already come and gone, What does Food Channel do but create its own version of the program, "Iron Chef America" pitting Bobby Flay, Wolfgang Puck and Mario Batali against Sakai and Morimoto. To say the resulting program was racist is an understatement. Flay, Batali and Puck won every contest overwhemingly, scoring ridiculous advantages over the Japanese chefs on "taste". Do not tell me that these results were anything but rigged and biased. The panel of judges consisted of biased American TV stars with no brains and palates of stone (including one of the dumb-as-stone "Sopranos" cast member goombah/gangster, who refused to touch some of the food because the "fish was uncooked"), and a prickly Vanity Fair food critic who was clearly predisposed against the Japanese chefs, and Asian-influenced cuisine. They loved the "familiar flavors" (American/western food) and deep fried shit. That's what won. A very George W. Bush production. Bobby Flay. What an asshole. Don't tell me he's a great chef, he isn't. I do not call blue corn tortilla flour and guacamole great cuisine, no matter how fancy and effete the variations. His rep is built exclusively on winning twice (and lost once) on the original Japanese "Iron Chef" series. I insist that both of his wins were undeserving, and his cooking is garbage. Anybody graceless enough to jump up and down on table tops celebrating his "victory", particularly when not in one's own country, is nothing but a pure asshole, and the ugliest American. Food Channel is the only network that still broadcasts the criminal Martha Stewart. That speaks for itself.
©2004 Ron Lim unless noted |
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