At times, I find myself oddly interested in cooking shows. What's odd about this is that I do very little cooking…and what I do do is way simpler than anything that is likely to ever be taught on a cooking show. Matter o' fact, not only could I never prepare 90% of what they make on cooking shows but with my weird array of food allergies and my increasing dislike of certain edibles, I probably couldn't or wouldn't eat 90% of what's prepared on those programs.
I don't know why I watch them; maybe to make myself feel better about not cooking. One half-hour of Alton Brown explaining how the molecular structure of acorn squash is altered when you sprinkle it with Kosher Salt and I'm convinced I know too little to even be allowed into a kitchen, let alone cook in it.
But an odd thing is happening to cooking programs. They all seem to be turning into life-and-death competitions where the idea is no longer to make a great soufflé but to make it in nine minutes in a strange kitchen with insufficient ingredients and moments of panic. And then you have to stand before a team of judges who will taste it…and some of them may say hurtful things about your skills and vote you off the show.
Every time I turn on what looks like a cooking show these days, what I find is a contest that seems to have been made up just for the purposes of televising a contest. In fact, most of them seem to have been configured to give the audience moments of despair when someone is eliminated and must fight back tears of disappointment as they make the Exit of Shame. And I usually do not understand why most of the judges are qualified to judge others.
You want to know how unqualified some of those judges are? I was recently asked to be judge on a popular cooking competition series. I turned it down for a number of reasons. In no particular order…
- I don't like being on camera. I can tolerate it if I feel I'm really, really qualified to be there…like if they want someone to talk about Jack Kirby. But I sure don't feel qualified to judge cooking even if my fellow judges will be equally unqualified.
- Whoever the contestants are, they certainly cook better than I do. I don't want to judge anyone and declare them a loser but I especially don't want to crush the spirit of someone who's better than I am at the activity under discussion.
- The show in question is non-union and doesn't pay. I would be expected to get myself there, dressed appropriately, and they expect me to do it, sans compensation, for the exposure or the importance or just thrill of being on television. (That last one is apparently enough for a lot of people.)
- What if the food we're supposed to sample and judge is something my allergies will not permit me to eat?
- And finally, they would want me to be at the studio — which is about 90 minutes from where I live — at 8 AM and it is not impossible that I would need to be there for fourteen hours.
Any one of these was reason enough to say no and I did. A few days later, I was talking to a friend of mine who had been asked a few years ago to be on one of these and he said yes. "It was awful," he said…and when I asked why, he related the following…
Well, for one thing, we were there forever. They had different teams and we had to sit there and wait while the camera crews went back and forth between the different teams that were each cooking the same thing. Each team had like thirty minutes to do the assignment but what they didn't tell you on the show was it wasn't the same thirty minutes. They couldn't film four teams at the same time so they did two and two…and then after they filmed each team making their entry, they had the chefs on that team go back and re-create some stages of the process for the cameras. They needed different angles and shots of the chefs getting panicked.
They also had to build in drama. You know…one team spills something and another team brought the wrong spices. There had to be a disaster in each case to crank up the suspense. A lot of that was planned. We were supposed to ignore the problems and just judge the finished food items…but then when it came time to explain why we eliminated the one we eliminated, then we were expected to mention the disasters as among the reasons.
We were told we had a free choice to pick whoever we wanted as the winners and losers but the producers made it pretty clear to us how they were hoping we'd rule. And then when it came time to explain why we gave someone a low grade, the producers would say, "Now, when we start filming say something like, 'I thought it was too salty and your sauce was too runny.'" So they'd start filming and we'd say, "I thought it was too salty and your sauce was too runny." I mean, if you want to do this kind of thing, what's the point in having them not want to ask you back?
We shot the ending — where we announce which of the last two teams won — three times. The first two times, the winning team didn't seem jubilant enough so the director said some lie like "We had technical problems, we have to do it again." And then the producers would say, "Uh, since we have to do it again, maybe you winners could be more excited and hug each other." Eventually, they got what they wanted. If they hadn't, we'd still be there.
Hearing all that made me really glad I'd turned down my big chance. And it confirmed my belief that there's nothing on television with less reality than a Reality Show. Unless it's a Ted Cruz commercial.