One of the… privileges… of more-than-a-week-long residence in a care facility (like happened to me pretty recently, multiple times) is basic cable. In particular, cooking shows, which — if one has a roommate — may be about the only thing that doesn't cause distress or an argument. Even when there are individual TVs, frequently a hearing issue will cause one of them to be really loud!
But even through druuuuuuuuugs — or maybe especially through druuuuuuuugs — that leads to some serious questions about some of the unstated assumptions on the shows. I've mentioned a couple of them before (such as the artificial 20/30 minute "limit" that means the only rice that could be included is either cold and precooked and therefore nasty, or perconverted long-grain white rice and therefore nasty). Here are a few more, especially as they relate to the classism and too-often downright racism hiding in the producers' — and, all too frequently, creators'/presenters'/stars' — rules just for TV. In no particular order:
- Do your own damned dishes. Especially between segments of a show like Chopped and Cutthroat Kitchen, the rule should be — unless the producers actually show (and pay and credit!) the army of minions washing that expensive cookware and those custom plates and the celebrity chefs' personalized cutlery — "If you use it, you clean it to Health Department standards before you (or anyone else) can use it again."
- With the possible exception of the Iron Chef Kitchen Stadium, no kitchen or cooking station should be designed for the convenience of 1970s-era TV crews and equipment. One of the worst offenders is the so-called "farm kitchen" that appears on several shows and has a square footage (once one accounts for the out-of-sight storage, let alone the camera/production area) roughly equal to the whole damned farmhouse. And it's perhaps even worse with many purported "restaurant" kitchens, which in reality for all of their size are dominated by storage for the food and plates (and high-speed, high-temperature dishwasher and personnel) necessary to feed people. Camera technology is now good enough to rig a mid-level smartphone on an old-fashioned microphone stand and actually get better video in tight spaces.
- Cost is an issue. Period. At a minimum, any segment that assumes using a butcher or fishmonger needs to be balanced with "using the trimmings" and economical accompaniments. I'd love to see an episode of Iron Chef in which the secret ingredient was a $100 bill… and that had to suffice for all five courses, with a zero awarded for going over budget. I strongly suspect that all of the Iron Chefs would get that zero, because they all have obsessions with expensive ingredients that are seldom available except by special order to the restaurant trade (about fifteen years ago, I dimly remember one working foie gras into every meal).
- Health and dietary restrictions are an issue. I've mentioned the obsession with salt on the part of a few "judges" before. So is sugar. So are other dietary issues, ranging from "one judge is a diabetic" to "one judge eats halal only" to "one judge (or contestant) is violently allergic to shellfish." That last one is particularly annoying: No contestant should ever be asked to prepare dish that he/she medically cannot taste before presenting it in a competition! That's more than just disrespectful and counterproductive — it's abusive. Even more abusive than Gordon Ramsey's frequently misguided rants. Especially since the producers have complete control over what mandatory ingredients are matched to any particular contestant. So, basically, producers, you're bigger assholes than Gordon Ramsey when you force a contestant who is allergic to shellfish or religiously does not eat pork to use those in a dish prepared under time pressure to be judged by strangers.
- Every piece of equipment needs to be provided equally to every contestant. No more fighting over the single ice-cream machine, please. (Not to mention that it's a particularly goofy piece of equipment to make into an artificial bottleneck when every cooking station in Kitchen Stadium has its own deep fryer, convection oven, and gas grill.) And then cleaned, within whatever time limit has been imposed.
- Speaking of equipment, if your sponsor/affiliate sells an endorsed line of (usually crappy and almost always inconsistent from batch to batch) equipment "from" one of your chefs, all appearances by that chef should be limited to using that endorsed equipment. To pick on a past example, Paula Deen's kitchen should have been limited to "Paula Deen" brand equipment… including the thin and substandard plastic-handled nonstick pans (and she almost never used nonstick or other coated pots and pans, even when it was most appropriate or even necessary to do so). Endorsement = use… unless, that is, you don't care about the strength and protectability of the marks in question, let alone unfair trade practice statutes and regulations.
- My proposal for a real-world, but absolutely crippling, additional challenge: A four-year-old whom you cannot banish from the kitchen… but whom you must keep safe. And occupied. Go ahead, Iron Chefs: I'd like to see you do an exquisite presentation or intricate butchery with that kind of assistance… and have it come out consistently on four or five plates. Before, of course, doing the dishes and keeping the knives away and the fingers from getting burned and…
In summary, producers, your upper-middle-class, Upper-West-Side bigotry is showing, even when you're supposedly celebrating the richness and variety that immigrants have brought to American cuisine. For the home audience who can't shop at your specialist suppliers in the first place. Your offerings, with rare exceptions, aren't close enough to reality to be merely surreal.