The Death of the Celebrity Chef

Here in America, the celebrity chef is a relatively new phenomenon. And, as so frequently happens, we are screwing it up incredibly badly. Rather than have it be about the quality of a chef's cooking, here it is more about who can get their face put on the greatest number of items readily available at Target™. As does most of our celebrity-worshiping culture, this treads a fine line between wasteful and completely ridiculous. These people are elevated more for how they look in half-hour segments than for how their food tastes, and this has created a television food culture that is somewhere between nauseating and embarrassing.

This is not to say that putting chefs on television is some sort of quixotic endeavor. Julia's ghost would probably turn all my rouxs to ash for even suggesting it. But rather, that we as a country are doing it wrong. In fact, the two best food shows currently on television are actually run by food personalities rather than chefs. I speak here of Anthony Bourdain and Alton Brown. Bourdain cane up through the ranks as a chef, though he has since left the profession for a lifestyle that he would probably call significantly easier and more opulent. Brown attended culinary school for the purpose of creating a tv show, and spent years making the wonderful Good Eats, a show which has now sadly ended, leaving Food Network with exactly zero shows worth watching. Most of the chefs we have running things on the magic box these days are more of the Guy Fieri "Watch me indiscriminately shovel things into the hole in my fat face while yelling vacuous catchphrases" school of television. There is an air of condescension that you do not get with Bourdain and Brown, who do not seem to feel the same contempt for the audience's collective iq that seems to accompany most other food-related programming. Which brings us to the current nexus of the problem: Paula Deen.

This is a fairly old story by this point, so forgive me for the rehash I am about to go into. Paula Deen has become of of Food Network's biggest stars by pandering to her audience with a big ol' Southern accent that has become more exaggerated and cartoonish over the years. She cooks good ol' down home food, which she seems to define as massive portions of fatty, sugary food drowned in butter. She is a wonderfully succinct symbol for most of what is wrong with the American diet, a woman whose recipes are the best possible solution for the Social Security crisis.

Yes, that is exactly what it looks like

So when the news came out recently that this symbol of ridiculous American excess has diabetes, it was somewhere between obvious and not at all surprising. If you spend years foisting what she has on the general populace, there are obviously going to be severe and painful health issues. If you can look at the above image and not understand the ramifications, well, I'm going to file that under natural selection. No, the surprising part was that she was diagnosed with diabetes years ago and has been hiding it, so as not to hurt her business. That's pretty slimy stuff right there. So why the change of heart? Well, it had been a long-running rumor that she had diabetes, so it was probably going to come out sooner or later. So why not put the story out there to pre-empt a messy revelation, as well as try to put your own spin on the matter? That's not how it happened.

No, in the end the Butter Queen made public that she was afflicted with the only possible endpoint for her own cooking because she signed a multi-million dollar deal with a drug company to promote their diabetes drug Victoza®. Part of the deal for her getting these millions was making her condition public. That is borderline despicable. But it gets better: Victoza® causes thyroid cancer in lab rats. Don't you go to hell for this sort of thing? Immediately after the announcement Deen's publicist, a job which requires you check your soul at the door, quit over moral issues with what Deen was doing. Making her the only person involved in any aspect of this mess who has a conscience.

In Bourdain's book Medium Raw, there's a scene where the author overhears two celebrity chefs discussing a potential endorsement deal for a new product. Not once is there any mention of the quality or usefulness of the item. Rather, the only aspect of it that is talked about is what the company is willing to pay the chef, and what the chefs are willing to put their name on a product they clearly have no intention of ever using for. This is where we stand. The entire celebrity chef culture has gone past the tipping point, and is currently striding the line between self-parody and actual destructive institution seemingly hell-bent in actively hurting us. Welcome to America, circa 2012. We're doing it wrong.

I Love My Smoke Alarm

Back at the dawn of time, prehistoric man would commonly wake up to find his cave on fire just before dying in the inferno. This eventually led mankind to move from caves to apartment buildings, which are equally flammable, but feature a device called a smoke alarm specifically designed to let you know if you are in impending danger of being cooked to medium-rare (Doneness may vary due to the strength of the blaze and the mass of the individual in question. Always use a thermometer to ensure precision). Simply by inserting that 9-volt battery you found in the bottom of the drawer where you keep your winter gloves under the hat your great-aunt knitted for you into the machine after first touching it to your tongue to make sure it still has a charge, you can be alerted of danger in time to escape to the great outdoors. But this clearly was not enough. Worried that the batteries might die and remain unchanged in the now-lifeless machines, someone came up with the idea of tying the smoke alarms into the power lines, ensuring that we apartment-dwellers shall always be safe.

As you may have guessed already, my apartment features one of these miracles of modern technology, and while I have not yet stress-tested it due to a desire to not burn my apartment down, I am certain it will alert me should that become a possibility. I believe this due to the impressive number of things it makes sure to alert me to on a daily basis. For example, I can always count on my smoke alarm to let me know that my oven is on. Smoke is not required for it to perform this vital task. I suspect that somewhere in my smoke alarm is a thermometer, and when it registers any sort of temperature, as heat is not native to Duluth, Minnesota, my alarm decides to warn me of this unnatural development. As it is hardwired into the wall, I do not even need to give it a nine-volt for it to perform this function, and I cannot prevent it from doing so, short of taking an axe to it. Which I have certainly debated doing from time to time. However, it does many other things too, this amazing multi-tasking safety device. For instance, last night it decided to alert me to the fact that it was 4:57 a.m. It did this, not by going off to signal any sort of danger, but by emitting an ear-piercing chirp that the Official Girlfriend somehow slept through for no reason whatsoever (We have two of these machines. The other remained blessedly silent the whole time) every ten seconds as I struggled with both it and my sleep-fogged brain in an attempt to figure out how to silence it for good (Cement shoes and Lake Superior being a leading option). I immediately recognized the chirping as coming from the smoke alarm because it had done that in the middle of the night once before, when it decided to let me know that the power was out and it did not have a battery installed in it, so it could not properly protect me. At this point, you may wish to re-read that sentence. That actually happened until I found a battery and jammed it into the alarm, at which point it shut up, leaving unanswered the obvious question: If it had no battery and the power was out, how was it yelling at me at a volume loud enough to wake the (probable) crack dealers in the vacant house next door?!? I still do not know this, but I am so happy with the security this device provides me that I am giving serious consideration to re-enacting the last fifteen minutes of The Shining with it. And then, and only then, will I finally be able to rest easily. At which point I will presumably die in a fire.

Sad Days In Rock History

May 18, 1975 - Jack Johnson is born.

Most of you probably know Jack Johnson as "That guy who sang that song. You know. With the acoustic guitar." And that would be correct. You see, Jack Johnson was born without an angry bone in his body. He came out of the womb, not crying like a normal human baby, but blinking in wide-eyed wonder, his tiny infant face scrunched up as if to convey the sentiment 'Man. This place is, like, totally cool'. This trend continued throughout most of his formative years. When his friends tried to perform science experiments on small animals using sticks, young Jack would phone PETA. When they sat down to play Risk®, he would refuse to roll the dice, believing that "We should all just get along". And this worked fine, as Jack, son of a surfer, went into the ranks of professional surferdom or whatever. But then things took a tragic turn. Jack, believing professional surfing was "Too competitive (I did not make this one up)", decided he was going to devote his life to playing music. And his unfortunate run of unearned chart success seems likely to limit the chances of him retiring from his new profession anytime soon.

Here's the thing. I'm not trying to claim that all bands need to be the Sex Pistols or scream at the audience in Spanish or whatever. But when you're mellow to the point that it could easily be assumed you're on an IV of pure Zoloft™, there's an issue. You see, rock and roll was originally a sort of protest music. Not protesting like being angry that Abercrombie raised the price on their khakis, like Jack's music is made for.

Perhaps you think I'm being unfair here. Fine. Let's do a lyrical comparison. Here are the first two lines of a song by the Silver Jews, a band whose singer and songwriter (David Berman) publishes books of poetry in his spare time: 'Where's the paper bag that holds the liquor? Just in case I feel the need to puke.' Let's compare this to one of Jack's lyrics, this one from the song "Better Together," the first track off his album In Between Dreams (Keep in mind while reading this that in rock and roll, an album is traditionally sequenced to lead off with a fast track to grab the listener's attention): "Love is the answer, at least for most of the questions in my heart." Jack, the poet just destroyed you in a competition of manliness. So please, listen up. I'm only going to offer this advice once: GROW A PAIR. Look here fruitcake, if I wanted to hear music extolling the same virtues of peace and love that Jesus put forth, I'd hang out in West Side Market and listen to Creed and Jars of Clay on an eternal, unholy loop. I don't do that. So what I would like is for you to never be on any stereo in my vicinity from now until the end of time. If you cannot do this, please mail me your guitar so that I may smash it into a million little pieces (Because we all know you won't do this). Insurance on the package will not be necesary. The choice is yours.