TV Food

There isn't a television series or movie that does not have a food scene.  Why? Because so much of our lives revolves around food.

The romantic dinner date, a secret meeting in a diner, business lunch, the breakfast in bed, a wedding banquet, or the temper tantrum that flings food on the floor all are how we communicate with food in media. My biggest pet peeve is the old trope of the action movie chase through the restaurant kitchen with equipment being used as hurdles to slow down the bad guys. Who's gonna clean this up???? But this is my second most hated media food clique, the ruined the wedding cake stunt! I am sure that these images have added to my anxiety about delivering my wedding cakes to sites. Before I finish the set-up of your wedding cake, I am a nervous wreck, these projects are treated like my newborn child coming home from the hospital. After I take the pictures of your beauty in place on the table in your decorated room, I am done and exhausted. It's your newborn to protect after that, if your unsupervised child walks face first into the cake, I am not responsible and while I will be saddened by the news of its destruction, I have to be emotionally distant, otherwise I would never allow anyone to cut and serve them.

There are quite a few movies that focus on the life of the chef and therefore food becomes the "invisible" character in the cast, the MacGuffin that propels the story forward. Using the backdrop of a commercial kitchen often springs forth in dramas about the lead characters in the "will they, won't they" scenarios. Cinematic offerings such as Soul Food, 100 Foot Journey, Ratatouille, Eat Pray Love, Tortilla Soup, and many more all have a food center at the story, yet none of them have accurately depicted the life of a chef. Burnt is an attempt at the life of a chef and it is the second time that Bradley Cooper has played a chef in a movie. I have yet to see this depiction and looking forward to talking about this later.

Twenty four hour food television stations have brought about the new term "food porn". YouTube channels are filled with glutenous offerings that are over the top, beastly, recipes of

Viewers are no more likely to cook the foods they have been presented with on the broadcast and this type of television is no longer about food education. It is much more likely that the point of the shows are entertainment rather than education. Growing up, lots of us watched public television, this included the Great Chefs like Julia Child, Jacques Pipan, Justin Wilson, were the trailblazers that taught cuisine and technique to the masses of housewives and young children who were home during the day.

While media exposure of the profession can elevate and educate the public about this life we lead, these days it isn't much to separate its offerings from soap opera themes and game show audiences. Most of the offerings are just another style of reality competion show. Competition shows are abundant in food television. The Supermarket Sweep has birthed everything from  Chopped, Master Chef, and Great British Baking Show. Timed challenges of all sorts, build a bridge made of cereal treats and licorice, mystery boxes of foods to challenge the chefs, artistic wedding cake constructions using techniques such as fondant, molding chocolate, chocolate figurines, pulled sugar art, and the like.

The individual's culinary talent often takes a backseat to the selection of the right personality. Paula Deen, for example, first got her show due to her friendship with a producer of reality television programming. While he was correct that watching her was entertaining, her culinary accumin was spurrius at best. Most viewer have no idea how these sausages are made, no idea what has to go on behind the scenes in order to make a successful show of things. I was once called to test a recipe for a cooking show. Multiple outlets will be used to test a recipe for accuracy and quality. On set, a team of chefs do all the preparation and design so that the stat can come in a make magic on camera.

What a chef does is not what a celebrity chef does. When you become a brand, a bankable product, you begin down a path that takes you away from the production kitchen.  You can go from broadcast, to an interview, to a book signing, to a convention, all of which are designed to capitalize upon your cache. Watching television can broaden your understanding of how things work or what type or work a chef does. However, just like watching a medical show doesn't teach you how to be a doctor, watching a cooking show doesn't make you a chef.

Conversations About Food - Podcasts

As a companion piece to this blog, I have launched a podcast of the same name. There I will explore the roots of, the relationship of, and the changes of people's relationship with food. Everyone has a history of eating, cooking, loving, and hating some foods. There are all sorts of traditions, religious restrictions, feasts days, fasting days, dieting, likes and dislikes surrounding folks intimate connections with eating and cooking. It's aim will be to talk to professional chefs, homemakers, athletes, musicians, the whole gambit of professions and phases of life.

I will update this list as I post the broadcasts. Please subscribe and tune-in regularly: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/giantforkandspoon

Ep#1: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/giantforkandspoon/2016/01/18/conversation-with-chef-yehoshuah-yehudah

Food Movies

Bradley Cooper's Burnt, Helen Mirren's The Hundred-Foot Journey, Ratatouille, Adam Sandler's Spanglish (this one is mostly about the chef's personal life), Meryl Streep's Julie & Julia, Katherine Zeta-Jones' No Reservations, Tony Shalhoub's Big Night, the Asian movie Eat, Drink, Man, Woman or the American version with an all Hispanic cast Tortilla Soup (exactly the same plot), Johnny Depp's Chocolate, or one of my favorites Like Water for Chocolate (a Mexican Romance), no matter which of these you find tempting, these all represent strong food and culture influence.

As with many professions, such as police or doctors, the chef life and sometimes the production of foods can be high drama and perfect meat for feature films and television series. Lots of character development involve chef characters, Two Broke Girls the main characters open a cupcake business after a stint in culinary school, Micheal Ealy plays a chef in his upward cling within the industry in two movies Think Like a Man and Think Like a Man Too. Naturally, not all representations center around the food or the hard work of the chef, most of time the chef persona is merely a framework to build in the drama in the character's life. There have been some television series about chefs, and I don't mean the reality show cooking or baking competitions, but those are for another discussion.

Since food is a universal human experience and pursuit, its naturally a story that everyone can relate to no matter what language the story is told. You can change the city and the race of the actors, and the story will still hold up and be understood.

The story told by both the movie version or its inspired television series Soul Food communicates the saga of one African American extended family woven together by means of the tradition of Sunday dinner. No matter the challenges they face as individuals and individual households, they all come together through the bonds forged with the matriarchal teachings of a loving elder.

Sharing a tradition centered around shared food or having a peek into the cultures around food can lead an audience into interesting revelations and insights to cultural norms. Food procurement is in fact the root of civilization. Every group of people, tribes at the beginning, changed from foraging and hunting for food, being nomadic and following their hunted herds, to learning agriculture techniques that tied their lives to a particular geographical region. Once agriculture stabilized the lives of the tribes, the beginnings of barter and trade sprang out of a need to diversify available dietary resources. From trade came economies and money, tribes become villagers, and civilizations are formed. Therefore, food is the heart of all cultures and traditions, and much like mathematics, it speaks a universally understood language. The only movie that I have listed that I have yet to see is Burnt. Hopefully I will soon, and perhaps I will review it here.

No matter how strongly the movie or series tale is dependent upon food to communicate, few cinematic offerings are completely devoid of food scenes. Romances and romantic Comedies all have the ubiquitous date scene in a restaurant or at home dinner for two. Tons of family dramas come around the dinner table for holiday feasts and even some racy offerings, like 9 1/2 Weeks, have some food play scenes.

No matter what type of storytelling you like, you will be hard pressed to find one totally without a mentioning of food. Life is not sustainable with out food, the pursuit of food and the elevation of food to artistic levels is what chefs stride to accomplish.

Back to the Celebrity Chefs issues.....

This may not be your issue and you may not agree with me, however, the concept of a celebrity chef is often a separate thing from being a A-list chef. Most world class chefs are virtually unknown to most of the American public.

This morning the nominees for the Oscar award were announced, most nominees were expected and some expectations were not met, as usual. Living in Chicago has always given chefs a great place to work and learn the craft but it is only recently that we have just been acknowledged as a world class culinary city. The James Beard award ceremony was held here and a Michelin Star was finally given here. It is my opinion that there are two classes of this type of publicity rich name dropping realm of the celebrity chef. The first, and often most important realm, is the realm of the hard-working award winning professional chef. These unsung brave knights of the kitchen are superstars and revered but aren't exactly household names. The other realm of celebrity chefs are those television culinary stars that some of us can name and watch often.

Among the television chefs are some well versed real trained chefs that got noticed because of their cookbooks, or from doing some local television segments, or former contestants on a cooking competition. Then there are some that sooo are NOT chefs in any way but have a cooking show due to their persona which was pitched and groomed for television. Once their show was accepted by the viewing audience then the cookbooks, product lines, and other offerings became popular at your local outlets.

I am not a fan of all food centered television and some of the most popular ones do not teach much in way of technique, food knowledge, or culinary exploration. The advent of the Food Network is both good and bad for my industry, for example, Duff Goldman's show Ace of Cakes, brought attention to sculpted fondant cake creations increasing the demand for these type of cakes. Awesome right? Well not completely, some customers who would inquire about getting one of these types of cakes often were victims of sticker shock. These types of cakes can take several days of designing, baking, ordering supplies and/or shopping, and then creating which is why some of these can cost $4 per person and upwards. What is astonishing, to some, is the amount of times spent on these projects because if they were a fan of the show, they saw these items get produced in a half hour or hour show not realizing that it was more than a week of taping that got edited. This would get customers to ask questions like "don't you just order this or that?" not realizing that what they have requested had to be handmade originals and therefore had to be reflected in the pricing.

Champagne dreams with Kool-aid money is an obstacle for some folks but as a well-versed pastry chef I have been able to share with those clients how they can afford to have the showpiece cake they are seeking at lesser pricing by downsizing the cake and adding matching cupcakes to have enough to feed the guest without braking the host bank.

If you are a avid watcher of the food porn now available on the Food Network, ABC, NBC, PBS and many more, just keep in mind that all of these shows have teams of chefs doing the research, prep, and hard work behind the scenes that you never ever see in order to produces these offerings for your viewing pleasure. Hopefully, whomever you watch on television is actually showing you things that you can take into your own kitchen. The fad nowadays is for every actress, actor, singer, dancer, or television personality to have a food line, kitchen equipment, and/or cookbook for sale at your local K-Mart.

Everyone has a relationship with food, if they are in fact a human, but not everyone has a good relationship with food or has had any significant lessons in the kitchen producing good food for others. The companion podcast of this blog, coming very soon, will be made of conversations with all sorts of people about their food relationships including my chef friends. Follow who you like, hopefully I am one that you will follow, but also find out if they actually know what they are doing on your screen or if they are a manufactured celebrity who knew a producer and where blessed to be given a show.

Enjoy  

Reality TV, the Celebrity Chef, and the Popularization of the Culinary Industry

The biggest remote influence upon my chef life and career was the nurturing image of Julia Childs coming into my home every weekend via PBS. She was later joined by greats like Justin Wilson, The Frugal Gourmet, and Jacques Pepin. I spent an endless number of days just enjoying the show, and marveling at their work, not even thinking about joining the brigade of the talented culinarians.

These titans gave a glimpse of a life unfamiliar to my Chicago West side experience. While I am the recipient of skills passed down in a long line of ancestral excellence in the kitchen, most of what I saw on the flickering screen was different than our dinning room fare. Since that time, many many more have stepped up to share culinary education and entertainment shows. As with just about anything in this world, there are pros and cons to this development. We now have a whole host of television food celebrities, a wide range of shows, and representations in many forms in the reality show format.

The Food Network, ABC, BBC America, CNBC, and many other television networks have some type of food show. Chopped, The Chew, Restaurant Startup, Kitchen Nightmare, Hell's Kitchen... you get the idea. As a chef in the industry, I have plenty of mixed feelings about this subject. I am here to tell you that now all of this glitter is gold. I love that there is much more exposure to the subject, however, not all that is seen on television is good, not all personalities are culinarians. So as a viewer who may not have had a lot of food training, how can you rely on what you have seen as 'reality' or not? It can be tricky.

When I announced that I wanted to enter culinary school, the imagery that was conjured was that of a cook or fry cook. None of the adults in my life understood what I wanted to embark upon, even still, all these years later, I still find other professionals that look down their noses at me when I am introduced as chef. There is still a misunderstanding of what chef means and when I say that my work is applied chemistry, with elements of art and construction, on top of all the other aspects of any other business such as P&L, ROI, HR requirements, and contract knowledge, for example, then the picture is a bit clearer.

So many shows are not good information or good example of what food business is all about. Many bakery related shows take over a weeks worth of taping and make it a half-hour or one hour show giving viewers a false since of the time needed to create the masterpieces and very little about the cost of these projects, for example. I find that often the savory cooking shows expose many of their viewers to food stuffs that are expensive or hard to find in their grocery stores leaving them unable to make the meals at home. I am not advocating that this isn't valid cooking but I am saying that it may lead to the viewer having a lack of confidence that they could produce a wonderful meal at home.

It was recently revealed that 2015 was the first year on record that American's spent more money in restaurants then in the grocery stores. This is not great news both from a nutritional point of view and socially. When we divorce ourselves from the skills of cooking and the control of our nutritional needs, we begin to put the most important aspect of our health, food intake, in the hands of others and corporations. A HORRIBLE IDEA.

I will talk more on the subject later, but my time is short today....

Peace

Sunday's Weekly Wrap Up

I am determined to do a weekly review on a consistent basis there on this blog, kind of reminds me of the Sunday dinner ritual that my family once kept. I am thinking that it's purpose is to clear away the mental clutter of the week and start renewed for the next week.

This week has not be as routine as expected and I am not yet sure if that is a good thing or not. The work I do at the youth center has changed and it is expected to continue to change for the next couple of months. As my time spent at that location is just a few hours a week, I am finding it difficult to understand the whole dynamic of the organization, despite having been there for a few months now.

Yesterday was an extended session for the Act-so scholarship program. It went very well. We had guest speakers come and talk to our high school students about college selection, student loans, scholarships, and applications. We began the work to pair our competitors up with mentors and a few of the judges came and spoke.

You must crawl before you can walk....
So, a large amount of time was spent with one of our new teens to the Act-so program. Chef Y and myself have gotten to know this young man over the last few months, and while some of his accomplishments have been good, his drive and passion about culinary is excellent, however, he is fixated upon the big picture of winning international acclaim for his future restaurant, instead of researching all the steps to get to this dream goal. I admire his drive and his ability to dream big however it is the one bit at a time that will get your path going. An elephant can only be eaten one bit at a time. Along with his mother, Chef Y and I, talked to him trying to get him a clearer picture of what it is that he wants to embark upon. We served him the sugar and the salt of the chef life hoping to assist him. I laid out a generalized picture of what his next 6 months needs to look like in order to begin to leap over the hurdles; get the academic grades up, buckle down and prepare for our culinary competition, and we two chefs said we would assist him in finding a industry summer job.

Make your vision plain. I love the dreamers and the artists but we all must ground ourselves in order to gain traction in this long race. Pie in the sky, doesn't always pay the bills and I am a strong believer that it is the journey that's important, not the end goal. I have spent over 20 years honing my craft, seeking my goals, and being open to accept opportunities that have been given, even when I was not fully sure that it was directly upon my dedicated path as the road less traveled can gain more than expected.

Hopefully, our student chef, has heard a fraction of what he laid before him and wants to return for seconds and thirds.  When I was in his position, I had the opposite issue, I had little in way of mentoring resulting in me having to try and position myself with uncertainty as to if the next move was wise. In either case, nerves and second guessing decisions is commonplace. This kid is both a participant at the youth center that I work at and in our scholarship competition giving him and I ample opportunities to be guided and consulted.

My 10-day smoothie fast is going well and is on day 6. I have had some solid foods, once because I had been gone longer than expected and I was getting that hunger headache, but it was just a bit to keep me going. I think I will have to continue starting my day with a smoothie forever as it is a way to combat some of the effects of my medicines and my condition. Consuming a kale, spinach, fruit, flax seed, and protein powdered breakfast that is easy to take on the go, has been having a great shift in the positive direction.

Now that the holidays are completed, I am experiencing the typical first of the year slump in business, which is okay as I can focus on other efforts for a while. My other class, for my high school audience, doesn't start back up until the end of February. I have to set a new syllabus and start planning for that soon, while my time is somewhat open.

I will be beginning the companion podcast for this blog today. I have sorted out a few technical issues and they will be available to hear this week sometime. Giant Fork & Spoon podcast: Conversations about Food. I will post that information as soon as I can, stay tuned.