Gluttony as entertainment

I see where one Molly Schuyler has set a world record of sorts with her unprecedented feat of gobbling down 363 chicken wings in half an hour. No word on what must have been an equally impressive bout of vomiting shortly thereafter, and the inevitable bowl-busting bowel movement she has surely had since.

What intrigues me is that this "news" arrived on my screen under the heading "entertainment." This is obviously the low-rent district of the Food Porn genre. It provides a competitive outlet for a few folks incapable of competing at anything else but who still have some sort of inner drive to compete, to win.

However pathetic and repulsive these "contests" are, this being America there is someone at the ready to profit from it. In this case it's the NASCAR of competitive eating, All Pro Eating Promotions, a self-styled sanctioning body that organizes these events. That means sponsorships and publicity and money.

We are told that Molly Schuyler won $22,000 for her efforts. Only Molly can answer whether that makes it worth sacrificing her dignity and risking her health. It does however make it possible that more than her competitive streak was at work here.

Maybe she just desperately needed the money.

Food porn goes bad

I was watching one of those food porn channels the other night. That's what you're left with these days, considering the terrible state of pro sports and reality TV.

Not to mention news.

TV news is kind of over, wouldn't you think? If you're any kind of a news junkie you can find the opportunity a few times during your day to click on a news site or two or three and catch up on the big stories. There's generally nothing new at six or eleven.

So instead of watching news I'm watching that Anthony Bourdain fellow, and he's got a whole godamn special on about cooking with rotten food!

Who can even imagine such a thing?

It sort of sets you back initially, but then you get to thinking about it.

I'd kinda given up all hope for ever making my money back on those twelve jars of currant jam we still have left over from that batch we cooked up three years ago.  But if I could just land a product placement on the next episode of Food Porn Follies, that stuff will be like gold once the cooking-with-rotten-stuff craze takes off.

But the more you think about it, the more you realize that cooking is all about death and decay already. With the exception of clams and lobsters, we don't generally cook live animals, do we?

So the stuff we bake, broil, roast and toast is dead and has been in decay.

Cheese is just rotten milk, isn't it?

Fermentation is just another word for decay, isn't it?

Beer is just rotting barley with water added, isn't it?

See where I'm going here?

We already have a culture that feeds on rotting biomass and dead animals.

Nothing to see here, folks... move along!

William Deresiewics and Food Porn

Bill Deresiewics was interviewed on the CBC this morning, and while he may offer a more genteel critique of the "high food" movement, I think he's fundamentally on the same page as the think tank here at Falling Downs.

I wonder what Bill would think of the picture I'm looking at right now, on page L3 of yesterday's Globe and Mail. Near one side of an otherwise pristine white dinner plate we see a brown and white conglomeration of something, which appears to have been festooned with a couple of parsley sprigs.

Said conglomeration occupies a very small fraction of the surface area of that plate. The caption informs us that "Momofuku adopts aspects of Chinatown service."

I'm not sure what "Chinatown service" implies, but I do know that Momofuku is one of the current high temples of the food-is-art movement that Deresiewics has been railing against.

When my children were quite young I often took them to a park in Saint John, right downtown, Loyalist Square I think it was called, to feed the pigeons. The pigeons were quite accustomed to being fed and could be quite bold. Along with feeding the pigeons, we had ample opportunity to observe them defecating.

Which brings me back to Momofuku. That wondrous artsy delicacy pictured in the pages of The Globe?

Looks to me like somebody let the pigeons a little too close to the picnic table, and one of them took a crap on the edge of the dinner plate.

How food porn entrenches slavery in the restaurant business

Food Porn.

It's all over the TV and internet. There are literally dozens of shows that feature chef competitions, restaurant make-overs, or in-depth explorations of how a successful restaurant became successful.

The average wage of a "chef" in the US is around 20 thousand dollars a year. We're marginally above minimum wage territory here. It's not really a place that any sane person would aim for.

The cooking shows make it look like everybody in the business is having a great time. They're busy busy busy and they're making money hand over fist.

When you get to the so-called celebrity chefs some of them are indeed making money hand over fist. They've got the restaurant, they've got the TV show, and they've got people lining up to invest in the next franchise.

They've also got half their staff working for free as "interns".

An intern is somebody who works for free because they figure six months of working for a celebrity chef is going to look good on their resume.

Working for free used to be called slavery.

But at least the slave-owners provided room and board.

Say no to job porn

There's a fairly recent innovation in entertainment for the brain dead that I'll call job porn. Its genesis was the insatiable need that the ever-expanding cable universe has for content. It took its cues from the food porn genre, which originally involved showing photogenic chefs making pretty food for dumbfucks sitting in the Lay-Z-Boy with a bag of Doritos and a 2 litre bottle of Coke.

Understandably there's a market for this kind of entertainment. When you're working two or three minimum wage jobs trying to keep a roof over the spawn you ain't gonna do any fancy-pants cooking yourself. But it's easy on the eye and allows the mind to unwind. These shows lacked one thing though; drama.

Didn't take long to fix that. You take the buff chef and the pretty food, and you add a couple or three wanna-be assistant chefs, young and pretty, who are competing for a chance to work in the Kitchen of the Great Man. Instant competition, instant drama, and you can bet all these wanna-bees will work for nothing just to get on TV. Brilliant programming! When they win, they get a chance to work in the kitchen of the Puck or the Ramsey for six months or a year, again for nothing. It's called "internship".

Didn't take long for the concept to spread to other occupations. You got duelling carpenters now, racing to see who can finish the deck first. The car shop guys racing the clock to see if they can get the flat screen television and the hot-tub fitted into the Cadillac Escalade by tommow at three, because that's when Lebron Bigballs from the Clippers is gonna pick it up, even if the ten dollar an hour Latinos with dubious immigration status doing the work have to pull an allnighter and gouge each others' eyes out to get it done.

Over at the bike shop you've got Bubba's team and Sparky's team, duking it out to see who can build the finest chopper for the semi-retired biker who made millions dealing dope. The human drama is mostly added in the editing room, of course. Walk into a chopper shop and see how they really react when you tell them the jobs gotta be done by tomorrow, or else. They'll think that's really funny. You won't.

Working in the kitchen or the car shop will never be glamorous. But by the time the editors work their magic it will certainly seem that way. To me, it's another way to profit from the little folks working really hard to make a wage that even in a good year will still see them well south of the poverty line.

The big dogs do OK though. Can't hurt Gordon Ramsey to have interns fighting for a chance to work for free. And Buddy with the car shop bills the customers $90 an hour while he pays the workers ten or twenty. All in all, it's a brilliant formula for making more money off the peons who will never have any.

But as an entertaiment genre that's cheap to make and consistantly profitable, it's hard to beat.

That's why I say no to job porn.