6th
On Mediocrity and Food
“Complain all you want. It’s like railing against the pounding surf. [Rachael Ray] only grows stronger and more powerful. Her ear-shattering tones louder and louder. We KNOW she can’t cook. She shrewdly tells us so. So…what is she selling us? Really? She’s selling us satisfaction, the smug reassurance that mediocrity is quite enough. She’s a friendly, familiar face who appears regularly on our screens to tell us that ‘Even your dumb, lazy ass can cook this!’ Wallowing in your own crapulence on your Cheeto-littered couch you watch her and think, ‘Hell…I could do that. I ain’t gonna…but I could—if I wanted! Now where’s my damn jug a Diet Pepsi?’ Where the saintly Julia Child sought to raise expectations, to enlighten us, make us better—teach us—and in fact, did, Rachael uses her strange and terrible powers to narcotize her public with her hypnotic mantra of Yummo and Evoo and Sammys. ‘You’re doing just fine. You don’t even have to chop an onion—you can buy it already chopped. Aspire to nothing…Just sit there. Have another Triscuit…Sleep….sleep….’” — Anthony Bourdain
{Via soupsoup}
Yes, yes, there is all of that, but let’s hope that Bourdain recognizes that if Rach did not exist, he would have to invent her, or, with nothing to rail against, he would be dangerously underexposed between forays into remote places to drink the local moonshine/eat the local reptile testes. Bourdain and Ray, at this point in their careers, are both television personalities, or personalities largely defined by television. Neither of them will have a significant impact on the art of gastronomy in the 21st century. If you imagine the world of food TV as the world of professional wrestling, the relation between Ray and Bourdain is clearer.
