Slave Patrons

Between my wife and I, at least one of us is thankfully in tune with the contemporary TV entertainment landscape of today. My wife might join me for an indulging leap into some great old full-length, obscure prime-time presentation of the late 1970’s on YouTube now and then, but she’s the one to refer to about what’s just hit the platforms in the last few.  And, like any TV consumer, she has her favorites. At the top of the A list, which means Now Playing on the i-pad in our living room or kitchen for continuous showings, is one or more incarnations of the Chef Competition shows branded and made famous by Chef Gordon Ramsay. Among them are Master Chef, Top Chef, and Hell’s Kitchen.

These shows don’t need my endorsement. Folks who for some reason never liked The Beatles are inclined to keep their lack of enthusiasm to themselves, lest they be uncontrollably excoriated by the nearest human. I’ve always had a respectful appreciation for the art of cooking, and those who master it, even if I’m not riveted to recipes, visual demonstrations, or motivated personally by the challenge of kitchen range efforts.

The odd thing is, the tone and directive of these smash-hit Ramsay shows don’t seem to have any of that base respect. To spend some screen time with any of them, it’s evident that the food, the creations and their ingredients are little more than the equivalent of props in some Animal House cafeteria scene.

If you’re not familiar with these shows, some clarification would help: they aren’t traditional cooking shows. Graham Kerr in the late 1960’s would spend twenty-five minutes in a glamorous designer kitchen setting, focusing hard on completing one course or dinner. He may have been the eye candy, but the star was the entrée. Julia Child on PBS was strictly business. She shared the gears on how to make that gourmet dish actually happen in your kitchen.

The Ramsay gallery is a reality-show format, using a very hyper jump-cutting documentary approach to capture the heightened drama and impulsive energy behind the competition amongst pedestrian kitcheners chasing their wild dream to become America’s Next Top Chef.

It’s essentially designed as a voyeuristic approach to what goes on in the challenge to become what Ramsay and his fellow judges are, professionally. Unlike the panel however, the contestants haven’t necessarily spent a decade or more studying with the Great Chefs of Europe on a pile of scholarships. Take a bunch of U.S. civilians with lots of kitchen experience and a love for food, pit them against a tribunal of dour elitists as well as each other, and voila..! The world’s first Culinary Gong Show..!

In a world of fear, with broadcast presenters petrified over any misapprehensions or behaviors their presentations might provoke, you’ll be sure to see redundant and sometimes almost unnecessary disclaimers flagging these reality shows at all times. But these smug “Chef” competition shows bear none of those. They wouldn’t dare. It’s tacitly understood as to what the purpose of the show really is, and what it really isn’t: The star of the show is the outwardly toxic behavior. The food is a mere prop.

But as a prop, it’s skillfully used, in conjunction with the directing, editing, lighting, and every other artistic element so exquisitely combined to bring home this symphony on your device.

The template for the show is the crafted design of It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad World. The indoor version. No car chases or biplanes. No basement explosions. When they do the movie, that might get added. But if they did this show in 1963, Ethel Merman and Dick Shawn would have been perfect casting.

They of course were actors, and these Chef shows are populated only with non-screen civilians, of a more local fame in their own right, perhaps. But for a bunch of civilians who have never acted, boy can they erupt on camera..!

The directorial style, again, is not in any way linear. A passionate, involved, on-site showdown to create a masterpiece can only be effectively depicted within a forty-minute format in bite form, something akin to those little teasers we used to see in the cold openings of Mannix, Cannon and The Love Boat. The only linear process elapsed in the presentation is the competition itself, and the behaviors and anger of these determined grillers. Food flies off chopping tables, tools and containers get dropped or broken, people fight and sulk, and it’s really good diet management TV. For a food show, you don’t really ever get hungry watching this.

But food is legitimately part of the plot, so at some point, it’s spatulas down, and time for judgement. And herein lies the predominantly antisocial component of these ultra-chef competition showdowns.

As each contestant’s finely crafted dish meets the tribunal, it faces a brutal scrutiny, based primarily on visual appearance. If it doesn’t look as artificial and spray-painted as an entrée in Gourmet magazine, it’s put to the slaughter, on national television, direct and in color, for all eyes adult and youth to bear witness. A public execution.

King Ramsay himself will angrily disparage the plate and smugly cite the particulars of its perceived grotesqueness, voiced over an extreme closeup of the culinary submission, shot under some clinically intense lighting, something akin to a forensics lab training video, rendering any possible subject immediately toxic. Under that lighting, an Entenmann’s Devil’s Food Crumb donut could pass for debris from Three Mile Island. Music swells, then falls to a deep, orchestral diminuendo, bass strings at a low moan, as the sheepish judges under the King’s domain quietly and submissively concur on the outrageously obvious unacceptability of the ugly trash before them. Upon the sacred tasting by each, the heightened response speaks to the visceral olfactory experience mitigated by the moistness of the crust or lack thereof, the offset of the parsley sprig deemed congruent or not, and whether or not the perfectly layered cheese melt envelopes each bite of the crepe in the perfect oral sensation.

I’m not about to get into or tamper with the great Ancient Roman Spectacle of gourmet chef competition scrutiny. Like a piano competition at Julliard, it’s rightly based upon a set of criteria unattainable, an approval achieved only when the submission is known to provoke a profound wonder across the panel, unanimously. That’s the kind of on-screen subtitle disclaimer those judging scenes could use. Because as industrially attuned as that level of scrutiny might be, in the decisive kitchens of Italy or France, when elite competitions behind closed doors are electing the artists that will feed a population of elitist bistro patrons, also very much behind closed doors, in a world functionally detached, galaxies away from the people waiting ninety minutes on a register line with their three children at Target on a Tuesday night, hoping they can get to Family Dollar on the way home before they close, a very dysfunctional message is being teleconveyed.

The thrilling object of the game show known as Master Chef and its counterparts is in that inarticulate catharsis, the inner vulnerability exposed, of seeing these heart-set goal strivers have their dreams shot down with one single bullet by the Arbitor of Great Taste. There’s something quite gothic about it. If an illustrated version hasn’t yet been unveiled at Comic Con, it will be, before long. All the elements are there: Evil Lord, disciples, supplicants, scenic locales, the works..

The TV programming makers of today clearly are not in the broadcast game anymore. As the late, great sage Fred Silverman once presaged over fifty years ago, it’s now an industry mostly of “narrowcasting”, a telescoped effort to create a mix that will reach a particular and presumably large audience in the most immediate and visceral way possible. A can’t-miss recipe that makes no apologies for itself. It’s the Diana Christensen formula from Chayefsky’s Network, so long ago.

It's long known that food, and the most succulently presented, elite-gourmet-prepared, bears to a mass population, one so removed from the balconies of privilege, an impulsive and almost sexual power, one that ignites the most Freudian imbalance in the cortex. One hundred years of advertising research has established this scientific fact. Master Chef and it’s counterparts are a one-hour story of romance, hope, vulnerability, betrayal, and the intense eroticism of naked rejection in the bedroom with all the lights on. An edible Harlequin series.

That’s what gets the eyes riveted and the Arbitron meters tabulated. But this show does not play strictly to adults on the Playboy Channel. It’s a Gong Show no less ubiquitous at dinner tables nationwide as was Chuck Barris’ original The Gong Show, forty-five years ago. That formula hasn’t changed either.

So with families, grownups and children alike, all gazing at this handsome, immaculate presentation together each night, believing it in many ways to be educational, sophisticated, and perhaps a voyeuristic journey into the world of food-making competition, what is the take-away doctrine..?

Basically, the gift-wrapped message is that food any less than visually and tasteably exquisite on the very first bite, in the eyes and mouths of professed experts, is worthless, and fit for nothing but the trash. Propagated is the dictate that if it’s not sexy enough on visual sight and oral contact, it’s unworthy of anyone.

Again, the scrutiny within the gourmet competition game is an elite puzzle. If that twenty-four-year-old who just blew me away with that Mozart sonata at the Steinway told me he’d lost the Juilliard competition by four notes, I’d never have known, and still wouldn’t care. The kid’s a knockout. And his performance was stunning.

Our nation is fed primarily by the services that provide the courses and treats we thrive on, good or bad, predominantly healthy or not, every single day. It’s a nation of short-order cooks, wrap-rollers, deep-fry shufflers, pizza tossers and couriers, Chinese take-out kitchen boilers, cold-cutters, sandwich-makers, hash-slingers and egg-scramblers. Those people are the daily providers of breakfast, lunch, dinner, to a ravenous and satisfied America. A trucker at road-stop diner will likely not take exception to the fact that the edges of the scrambled egg were almost unnoticeably charred, or that the hash browns touched the edges of the bacon strips on the plate. He won’t likely be inclined to question or analyze how well the ratio of cheese-to-egg in the omelet is balanced by that slurp of coffee in his mouth. On the whole, that trucker, student, mom, commuter-in-transit will be fitfully nourished and placated by their offering, and they’ll know it’s value in their daily lives. These are the Slave Patrons of America who can only find excitement, and in some ways a relatable vindication in the spectacle of the Master Chef competitors vying for the palettes of the One Per-Cent.

And these are often the same gratuitous souls who will find themselves keeping rapt score while watching this yummy gong show, concurring with the conviction of that smarmy head chef from that Chicago restaurant about how the layout of the cheese over that crepe is something no one in their right mind would do anything with but fling in the trash.

But in the concern that lest our patrons lose their perspective in the process, on the intrinsic and critical value of food in our lives, one and all, all these chef competition shows will usually include some public-service message for those food-for-the-hungry organizations, or maybe a full episode that presents the cooking challenge in conjunction one week with one of those soup kitchens across this great heartland of ours. Then, once penance has been done, back to our elitist comfort zones, eating and disrespecting.

A friend of mine told me of how he presented a sandwich he’d wrapped for himself to a begging vagrant on the train one day. He graciously handed it over and said as a rejoinder, “Well, I don’t think Gordon Ramsay would give it five stars, but, y’know it might be pretty good..” The humble vagrant thankfully accepted and said….”Oh yea, y’know I’ve seen him….that guy’s totally a food genius..!!

Noah F.