Another White Food Network Star

A few weeks ago M asked me why I don't watch the Food Network more. Its a channel I used to watch with some regularity about 10 years ago. But that was when Ming Tsai was on. Padma Lakshmi had a bad cooking show. Iron Chef was the actual Japanese version of the show. In short, it was a place where I could go to see a little bit of culinary diversity from around America and from around the world. In recent years I've stopped watching it as much mostly because I'm not interested in seeing cooking shows that are about making food through short cuts all the time. I also do not need to feel like the only people who can teach people how to cook are white ladies. There are a few people of color, here and there, but by and large, the hosts on the Food Network are white ladies and few of them are as quirky and interesting as Nigella Lawson.

I started watching The Next Food Network Star a few weeks ago, and it seemed to have a little promise to me--there was Jamika, the African American, Debbie the Korean American and Jeffrey, who had a really interesting idea for a show. All in all, I was kind of hopeful that there might be some potential to see a bit more diversity. Surely among these potentials, the Food Network would jump at the chance to do its bit for multiculturalism and have a Korean American, or a Lebanese American or an African American woman host a show? Its not exactly like that market is saturated.

But once I started watching Melissa D'Arabian talk, I knew she was going to win. The whitest contestant, the most cliche and obvious and boring contestant--not because she has no culinary training but because she is a stay-at-home mom with 4 children (4? Who has 4 children anymore?) who then purports to claim that this demographic is some kind of blighted minority. She actually presented herself as someone who could speak to and for a supposedly ignored group, and meanwhile, I'm thinking, really? moms are ignored on the Food Network? Really? There are no products that are designed for moms? Really? No one addresses YOUR needs? But her rhetoric is so powerful because it seems in a knee-jerk fashion that someone like Melissa D'Arabian is in the minority, when in reality she emblematizes everything about mainstream America. She is the person to whom everything in the food world, or at least on super-market shelves, is marketed.

I'm reminded here of what Anthony Bourdain says about Rachael Ray:

Complain all you want. It's like railing against the pounding surf. She 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..

Melissa D'Arabian certainly seems to be able to cook, but like RR, she also seems to want to smugly reassure us that we need to bring middle America back to the center of the world, except that it is already there. Honestly, I can't fault Melissa--she's a shrewd business-woman who knows what will sell. She knows that America can only tolerate diversity in bits and pieces and that they'd rather have a recipe for chicken cooked in lemon, ver 34.0 than try cooking with something else, say harissa.

I wasn't that big of a fan of Jeffrey, but I loved the concept of using a different ingredient and cooking with that. There's really nothing like that on Food Network, and it would perhaps open our minds up to more ingredients and possibilities (sure, there are definitely other issues that might surface with that approach) but apparently we needed another show hosted by Sara Moulton look-alike who will tell us how to prepare dinner using recipes that we could find on the back of a can of green beans.

I know there are a few people of color who host cooking shows on The Food Network but they are not the stars. Sure, Aaron McCargo was a past winner, but most people don't know who he is or that his show was cancelled. But bean counting should not be the way to go--the logic of "but so and so has a show and is a person of color" is lame. The basic paradigm of white hosts rules and the only way we ever see any diversity is of the culinary adventuring genre in which white men are able to host shows which take them around the world. People of color remain firmly rooted in contexts that are always an elsewhere, never in the studios of the Food Network for any length of time. Ming Tsai may come and go, but Rachael Ray, Giada de Laurentiis, Paula Deen, Sandra Lee remain. And now Melissa D'Arabian can join the ranks of the white ladies of the Food Network.

I'm disappointed again. But disappointment is a familiar feeling when you want to see a little diversity and variety. But on the Food Network, white is right. And once again, the suburban mom can claim to be marginalized and prove just how much cultural power she has in the United States.