Pornucopia
Transcript
BROOKE GLADSTONE: It's been almost 12 years since an upstart cable channel called The Food Network first went on the air, and in that time a host of celebrity chefs from Emeril Lagasse to Rachael Ray have roasted, broiled and baked their way onto the American media menu and into 86 million homes. What accounts for The Food Network's success is not necessarily the quality of the food or the service. What keeps us tuning in to yet another choreographed confection by yet another culinary star is the vision of great-looking meals. After all, we're not actually tasting anything. We're watching other people, more nimble than we, make it seem easy, which can be exciting, as writer Frederick Kaufman argues in the current issue of Harper's Magazine, "Like Porn." Frederick Kaufman joins me now on the show. Fred, welcome to On the Media.
FREDERICK KAUFMAN: Great to be here.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well, let's talk a little bit about the history of food on TV. I mean, most of us can remember Julia Child on PBS. I can't think of a less pornographic host. But you say that's not the point - at least it wasn't in that show.
FREDERICK KAUFMAN: You know, in the old days of food television, if you talked to the producers, if you talked to the people who were involved, they were already making jokes about "it's food porn." The difference today is that the porniness has become more pervasive. Nobody would confuse Julia herself with a porn star. However, that leg of lamb, that big chunk of steak, that was the star, and the fetishized focus on it was clearly a pornographic focus.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now, for your Harper's piece you met with a woman named Barbara Nitke, who is a photographer who worked for many years in the porn industry. In fact, you went to her home one afternoon, ordered in some Mexican food and watched The Food Network for six hours. So what did you learn about camera angles and lighting and the nuts and bolts of gastroporn?
FREDERICK KAUFMAN: Well, Barbara has been a professional in the porn industry, taking still photographs, for many years, worked on over 300 porn films. And she really gave me an education in terms of not only of the shots but in terms of the wacky, strange soundtracks - [SOUNDTRACK UP AND UNDER] - this kind of caressing camera going over the food, back and forth and up and down. One of the things that makes it extremely porny is the repetition. You'll see the peach, and the camera going over those peaches again, then Giada, then the peach, then Giada, then the peach. And so this is very similar to how porn works.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So let's talk about that Giada DeLaurentis episode where she is cooking these baked peaches. You see her using a melon baller to sort of get the pit out.
FREDERICK KAUFMAN: Yeah. One of the things Barbara Nitke points out also on show like Giada is that the sound, the incredibly overmiked sound, you can hear this kind of - the clicks and the snaps and the little crunchy edges of things. [CRUNCHES, CLICKS AND SNAPS]
GIADA DeLAURENTIS: Let me just give my eggs a quick whisk. [CLICKING, BEATING SOUNDS] And then we're going to add some cheese. [CLICKING SOUNDS]
FREDERICK KAUFMAN: It's also shot very differently. It's actually shot single-camera as opposed to a four-camera television format. And so it's almost shot like a 35-millimeter film. You get an amazing angle on Giada, who is beautiful, and who always is wearing a very close-cut sleeveless top. And then you get the food, and then you get Giada, and then you get her fingers on the food. And oh, it's so moist. [MUSIC UP AND UNDER]
GIADA DeLAURENTIS: Mmmm! Peaches are juicy, crunchy from the amaretti cookies. The sugar's caramelized, and it's creamy with the whipped cream.
FREDERICK KAUFMAN: Part of the big lie of porn and part of the big lie of The Food Network is things are made to look extremely simple when in fact they're extraordinarily complex. So, for instance, if you're seeing something like oral sex in pornography, it looks like the easiest thing in the world, when in fact there are all sort of issues with the way the camera is low and the light is to the side. And it's extremely difficult to actually pull this off. This is a wildly choreographed event, just as the food is wildly choreographed. And the big lie is "taste life," have a real experience when, in fact, this is the most unreal experience.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: "Taste life" is the motto for The Food Network.
FREDERICK KAUFMAN: Precisely. "Taste life," as though by watching it you're going to actually have some sort of authentic, lifelike - not even lifelike - life itself is here, as opposed to this outrageous simulacrum that's being presented as such.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You know, a key demographic - I found this surprising - for The Food Network is the 18-to-35-year-old male.
FREDERICK KAUFMAN: The men who like to watch.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS] Or you call them the "can't cook, won't cook crowd." Now, you've talked to Food Network execs. Are they consciously targeting a population that, as you say, likes to watch?
FREDERICK KAUFMAN: A predominantly male demographic is much more popular with advertisers. And many people who I've spoken to call it "The Emeril Network" because Emeril was the man responsible for bringing a male demographic to The Food Network. He brought in the hockey fans.
EMERIL LAGASSE: You see that? The sugar? The butter? In goes the bananas. Oh yeah, babe. Get 'em happy right now.
FREDERICK KAUFMAN: Now, in fact, you're seeing men in bars watching Giada; they're watching Rachael next to the football game. And it's almost this kind of strange surreal experience of having somebody cook for you while you're sitting there drinking beer alone in a bar, crunching a potato chip. It's this kind of outrageous sense of happiness and perfection given to you in this completely virtual manner.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You didn't just watch, though. When you hung out backstage at The Food Network, did you get the sense that they were deliberately setting things up to be enticing in that particular way?
FREDERICK KAUFMAN: Of course. Well, you know, one of the things that's so interesting is the, the whole notion of "the food swap" in terms of the enticing, which is that, you know, they'll make an apple pie on stage but, in fact, in The Food Network kitchens they're making five or six or seven apple pies, and the one that looks the best is the one that they're going to use. And they're going to bring it out, and it's going to be sizzling and trickling cheese and juices. And absolutely, and it's the swap. And, of course, this comes, this comes right out of porn. I mean, the whole notion of the swap is necessary in classic porn filmmaking. You need to have a certain kind of shot which can only happen a few hours after [LAUGHS] another kind of shot, and so you wait. Then you make your "sex swap" as opposed to your "food swap."
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Let's talk about those main characters, then, that populate The Food Channel. You said that Emeril Lagasse essentially made it safe for men to watch food, and then once there, they got characters like Giada DeLaurentis and Rachael Ray and -
FREDERICK KAUFMAN: Tyler Florence, of course, the -
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well -
FREDERICK KAUFMAN: - the man who rescues the desperate housewives across the nation.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Yeah. Now, in that program, this guy named Tyler goes into the houses of damsels in distress, you say - [OVERTALK]
FREDERICK KAUFMAN: That's right.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: - and helps them cook?
FREDERICK KAUFMAN: She needs her cookies. She must have her cookies. And Tyler will come in and rescue her and, and make the cookies for her. [MUSIC UP AND UNDER]
TYLER FLORENCE: Hey, everybody. I'm Tyler Florence. Welcome back to Food 911. I'm hanging out with Julia. And the next thing we're going to make, I'm calling it My Big Fat Chocolate Chip Cookie. Okay, I said it. We're going to make the biggest chocolate chip cookie you've ever seen. It's going to be about like - like - like that.
FREDERICK KAUFMAN: And there's always this bizarre vibe. It's - it's the pizza man in the porn film, and there's always the sense that when it's over, if the husband doesn't get home in time, there's going to be a quickie.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS] Let's talk about Iron Chef. Iron Chef, you suggest, is the kind of S&M of The Food Channel.
FREDERICK KAUFMAN: Iron Chef is the classic fetish porn film. Welcome to the Dungeon, with this billowing smoke.
MAN: [JAPANESE INTRO] Iron Chef! [IRON CHEF THEME MUSIC UP AND UNDER]
ALTON BROWN: Making their ascent in the kitchen stadium and beginning a new chapter in the Gourmet Academy's history, the invincible men of culinary skills.
FREDERICK KAUFMAN: And then you have this great dominator character who's in this kind of wild brocaded outfit with the black leather glove. And then comes the strange ingredient from the ceiling. It's squid. It's living squid. And you have the dominators taking this submissive food and transforming it into something beautiful. In other words, the classic plot in a dom-sub fetish porn film is you have a transformation of a character from a meek little thing or an ugly little thing into a gorgeous, beautiful, wrapped-up, zipped-up thing. And here what you have in food is you have this disgusting thing, like living, writhing squid, that's turned into this highly refined and highly mediated squid risotto.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS] Okay. So where does Giada DeLaurentis and, say, Rachael Ray fit into this constellation of culinary stars?
FREDERICK KAUFMAN: Well, Rachael Ray, you know, everybody says is "the girl next door." Rachael Ray is perky, smiley, next-door-neighbor sex.
RACHAEL RAY: Lentils poof up big when you cook 'em. They just suck up all the liquid as they get nice and tender. I gotta take a quick break. [START MUSIC] I'm just gonna keep cookin' up something super good for dinner, and I'll meet you right back here.
FREDERICK KAUFMAN: She's the girl who won't say no. Giada DeLaurentis is more of the exotic Glamazon, the Ginger to Rachael Ray's Mary Ann, so to speak.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now along with your observations about The Food Network, you presented a thesis about the way that we receive information, a brain in the gut versus a brain in the head. Can you parse this out for me?
FREDERICK KAUFMAN: Well, Michael Gershon is - up at Columbia University, wrote a book about the brain in the gut. There are a hundred million neurons in our gut, which is more than the spinal cord and the brain combined. He says that, in fact, when we have a gut reaction it's giving us actual information that we should act on. It's the brain in the gut, in fact, which governs the actions of the sphincters throughout the body. The body is controlled by these O-ring muscles all the way up and down the digestive tract. They're in the pupils of your eyes. They're in your heart. Of course, they're also in your sexual organs. And so the structure of porn is very similar to the structure of food television, in that they both are made to stimulate some sort of automatic or autonomic nervous response.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Okay Frederick, people listening to this may say, "Oh, come on, aren't you just laying it on a little thick here? Obviously if you're handling foodstuffs you're going to handle things that are squishy and juicy." Are you not - are you sure about this?
FREDERICK KAUFMAN: You know, these are just ways of talking about a certain kind of reaction that we have when we're watching something, a certain kind of involuntary excitement that we get. And sex is a very easy metaphor to use because everybody understands it and everybody thinks about it. I'm not so interested necessarily that, oh, it's like sex, oh, it is sex, oh, they're exploiting sex. I'm interested in a deeper structure of nervous response. And I'm concerned that media in general is starting to use this kind of automatic nervous response, as opposed to a more thoughtful process. And The Food Network is really paving the way. We're seeing a lot of news structured in an equivalent fashion. In other words, you know, as Van Gordon Sauter used to say to the CNN troops, "Get the emo." Where does the "emo" come from? The "emo" comes from the gut. What does the gut give you? The gut gives you the "wow!" And, of course, the "wow!" makes the money.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Frederick Kaufman, thank you very much.
FREDERICK KAUFMAN: Thank you.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Frederick Kaufman is a journalist, an author based in New York. His book: A Short History of the American Stomach will be published by Harcourt. [MUSIC UP AND UNDER]
BOB GARFIELD: That's it for this week's show. On the Media was produced by Megan Ryan, Tony Field, Jami York and Mike Vuolo, and edited - by Brooke. Dylan Keefe is our technical director and Jennifer Munson our engineer. We had help from Katie Holt and Kevin Schlottmann. Our webmaster is Amy Pearl.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Katya Rogers is our senior producer and John Keefe our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. You can listen to the program and find free transcripts, MP3 downloads and our podcast at onthemedia.org, also in the iTunes podcast directory. And e-mail us at onthemedia@wnyc.org. This is On the Media, from WNYC. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. (MUSIC TAG) (FUNDING CREDITS) *****
copyright 2005 WNYC Radio
FREDERICK KAUFMAN: Great to be here.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well, let's talk a little bit about the history of food on TV. I mean, most of us can remember Julia Child on PBS. I can't think of a less pornographic host. But you say that's not the point - at least it wasn't in that show.
FREDERICK KAUFMAN: You know, in the old days of food television, if you talked to the producers, if you talked to the people who were involved, they were already making jokes about "it's food porn." The difference today is that the porniness has become more pervasive. Nobody would confuse Julia herself with a porn star. However, that leg of lamb, that big chunk of steak, that was the star, and the fetishized focus on it was clearly a pornographic focus.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now, for your Harper's piece you met with a woman named Barbara Nitke, who is a photographer who worked for many years in the porn industry. In fact, you went to her home one afternoon, ordered in some Mexican food and watched The Food Network for six hours. So what did you learn about camera angles and lighting and the nuts and bolts of gastroporn?
FREDERICK KAUFMAN: Well, Barbara has been a professional in the porn industry, taking still photographs, for many years, worked on over 300 porn films. And she really gave me an education in terms of not only of the shots but in terms of the wacky, strange soundtracks - [SOUNDTRACK UP AND UNDER] - this kind of caressing camera going over the food, back and forth and up and down. One of the things that makes it extremely porny is the repetition. You'll see the peach, and the camera going over those peaches again, then Giada, then the peach, then Giada, then the peach. And so this is very similar to how porn works.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So let's talk about that Giada DeLaurentis episode where she is cooking these baked peaches. You see her using a melon baller to sort of get the pit out.
FREDERICK KAUFMAN: Yeah. One of the things Barbara Nitke points out also on show like Giada is that the sound, the incredibly overmiked sound, you can hear this kind of - the clicks and the snaps and the little crunchy edges of things. [CRUNCHES, CLICKS AND SNAPS]
GIADA DeLAURENTIS: Let me just give my eggs a quick whisk. [CLICKING, BEATING SOUNDS] And then we're going to add some cheese. [CLICKING SOUNDS]
FREDERICK KAUFMAN: It's also shot very differently. It's actually shot single-camera as opposed to a four-camera television format. And so it's almost shot like a 35-millimeter film. You get an amazing angle on Giada, who is beautiful, and who always is wearing a very close-cut sleeveless top. And then you get the food, and then you get Giada, and then you get her fingers on the food. And oh, it's so moist. [MUSIC UP AND UNDER]
GIADA DeLAURENTIS: Mmmm! Peaches are juicy, crunchy from the amaretti cookies. The sugar's caramelized, and it's creamy with the whipped cream.
FREDERICK KAUFMAN: Part of the big lie of porn and part of the big lie of The Food Network is things are made to look extremely simple when in fact they're extraordinarily complex. So, for instance, if you're seeing something like oral sex in pornography, it looks like the easiest thing in the world, when in fact there are all sort of issues with the way the camera is low and the light is to the side. And it's extremely difficult to actually pull this off. This is a wildly choreographed event, just as the food is wildly choreographed. And the big lie is "taste life," have a real experience when, in fact, this is the most unreal experience.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: "Taste life" is the motto for The Food Network.
FREDERICK KAUFMAN: Precisely. "Taste life," as though by watching it you're going to actually have some sort of authentic, lifelike - not even lifelike - life itself is here, as opposed to this outrageous simulacrum that's being presented as such.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You know, a key demographic - I found this surprising - for The Food Network is the 18-to-35-year-old male.
FREDERICK KAUFMAN: The men who like to watch.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS] Or you call them the "can't cook, won't cook crowd." Now, you've talked to Food Network execs. Are they consciously targeting a population that, as you say, likes to watch?
FREDERICK KAUFMAN: A predominantly male demographic is much more popular with advertisers. And many people who I've spoken to call it "The Emeril Network" because Emeril was the man responsible for bringing a male demographic to The Food Network. He brought in the hockey fans.
EMERIL LAGASSE: You see that? The sugar? The butter? In goes the bananas. Oh yeah, babe. Get 'em happy right now.
FREDERICK KAUFMAN: Now, in fact, you're seeing men in bars watching Giada; they're watching Rachael next to the football game. And it's almost this kind of strange surreal experience of having somebody cook for you while you're sitting there drinking beer alone in a bar, crunching a potato chip. It's this kind of outrageous sense of happiness and perfection given to you in this completely virtual manner.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You didn't just watch, though. When you hung out backstage at The Food Network, did you get the sense that they were deliberately setting things up to be enticing in that particular way?
FREDERICK KAUFMAN: Of course. Well, you know, one of the things that's so interesting is the, the whole notion of "the food swap" in terms of the enticing, which is that, you know, they'll make an apple pie on stage but, in fact, in The Food Network kitchens they're making five or six or seven apple pies, and the one that looks the best is the one that they're going to use. And they're going to bring it out, and it's going to be sizzling and trickling cheese and juices. And absolutely, and it's the swap. And, of course, this comes, this comes right out of porn. I mean, the whole notion of the swap is necessary in classic porn filmmaking. You need to have a certain kind of shot which can only happen a few hours after [LAUGHS] another kind of shot, and so you wait. Then you make your "sex swap" as opposed to your "food swap."
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Let's talk about those main characters, then, that populate The Food Channel. You said that Emeril Lagasse essentially made it safe for men to watch food, and then once there, they got characters like Giada DeLaurentis and Rachael Ray and -
FREDERICK KAUFMAN: Tyler Florence, of course, the -
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well -
FREDERICK KAUFMAN: - the man who rescues the desperate housewives across the nation.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Yeah. Now, in that program, this guy named Tyler goes into the houses of damsels in distress, you say - [OVERTALK]
FREDERICK KAUFMAN: That's right.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: - and helps them cook?
FREDERICK KAUFMAN: She needs her cookies. She must have her cookies. And Tyler will come in and rescue her and, and make the cookies for her. [MUSIC UP AND UNDER]
TYLER FLORENCE: Hey, everybody. I'm Tyler Florence. Welcome back to Food 911. I'm hanging out with Julia. And the next thing we're going to make, I'm calling it My Big Fat Chocolate Chip Cookie. Okay, I said it. We're going to make the biggest chocolate chip cookie you've ever seen. It's going to be about like - like - like that.
FREDERICK KAUFMAN: And there's always this bizarre vibe. It's - it's the pizza man in the porn film, and there's always the sense that when it's over, if the husband doesn't get home in time, there's going to be a quickie.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS] Let's talk about Iron Chef. Iron Chef, you suggest, is the kind of S&M of The Food Channel.
FREDERICK KAUFMAN: Iron Chef is the classic fetish porn film. Welcome to the Dungeon, with this billowing smoke.
MAN: [JAPANESE INTRO] Iron Chef! [IRON CHEF THEME MUSIC UP AND UNDER]
ALTON BROWN: Making their ascent in the kitchen stadium and beginning a new chapter in the Gourmet Academy's history, the invincible men of culinary skills.
FREDERICK KAUFMAN: And then you have this great dominator character who's in this kind of wild brocaded outfit with the black leather glove. And then comes the strange ingredient from the ceiling. It's squid. It's living squid. And you have the dominators taking this submissive food and transforming it into something beautiful. In other words, the classic plot in a dom-sub fetish porn film is you have a transformation of a character from a meek little thing or an ugly little thing into a gorgeous, beautiful, wrapped-up, zipped-up thing. And here what you have in food is you have this disgusting thing, like living, writhing squid, that's turned into this highly refined and highly mediated squid risotto.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: [LAUGHS] Okay. So where does Giada DeLaurentis and, say, Rachael Ray fit into this constellation of culinary stars?
FREDERICK KAUFMAN: Well, Rachael Ray, you know, everybody says is "the girl next door." Rachael Ray is perky, smiley, next-door-neighbor sex.
RACHAEL RAY: Lentils poof up big when you cook 'em. They just suck up all the liquid as they get nice and tender. I gotta take a quick break. [START MUSIC] I'm just gonna keep cookin' up something super good for dinner, and I'll meet you right back here.
FREDERICK KAUFMAN: She's the girl who won't say no. Giada DeLaurentis is more of the exotic Glamazon, the Ginger to Rachael Ray's Mary Ann, so to speak.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now along with your observations about The Food Network, you presented a thesis about the way that we receive information, a brain in the gut versus a brain in the head. Can you parse this out for me?
FREDERICK KAUFMAN: Well, Michael Gershon is - up at Columbia University, wrote a book about the brain in the gut. There are a hundred million neurons in our gut, which is more than the spinal cord and the brain combined. He says that, in fact, when we have a gut reaction it's giving us actual information that we should act on. It's the brain in the gut, in fact, which governs the actions of the sphincters throughout the body. The body is controlled by these O-ring muscles all the way up and down the digestive tract. They're in the pupils of your eyes. They're in your heart. Of course, they're also in your sexual organs. And so the structure of porn is very similar to the structure of food television, in that they both are made to stimulate some sort of automatic or autonomic nervous response.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Okay Frederick, people listening to this may say, "Oh, come on, aren't you just laying it on a little thick here? Obviously if you're handling foodstuffs you're going to handle things that are squishy and juicy." Are you not - are you sure about this?
FREDERICK KAUFMAN: You know, these are just ways of talking about a certain kind of reaction that we have when we're watching something, a certain kind of involuntary excitement that we get. And sex is a very easy metaphor to use because everybody understands it and everybody thinks about it. I'm not so interested necessarily that, oh, it's like sex, oh, it is sex, oh, they're exploiting sex. I'm interested in a deeper structure of nervous response. And I'm concerned that media in general is starting to use this kind of automatic nervous response, as opposed to a more thoughtful process. And The Food Network is really paving the way. We're seeing a lot of news structured in an equivalent fashion. In other words, you know, as Van Gordon Sauter used to say to the CNN troops, "Get the emo." Where does the "emo" come from? The "emo" comes from the gut. What does the gut give you? The gut gives you the "wow!" And, of course, the "wow!" makes the money.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Frederick Kaufman, thank you very much.
FREDERICK KAUFMAN: Thank you.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Frederick Kaufman is a journalist, an author based in New York. His book: A Short History of the American Stomach will be published by Harcourt. [MUSIC UP AND UNDER]
BOB GARFIELD: That's it for this week's show. On the Media was produced by Megan Ryan, Tony Field, Jami York and Mike Vuolo, and edited - by Brooke. Dylan Keefe is our technical director and Jennifer Munson our engineer. We had help from Katie Holt and Kevin Schlottmann. Our webmaster is Amy Pearl.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Katya Rogers is our senior producer and John Keefe our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. You can listen to the program and find free transcripts, MP3 downloads and our podcast at onthemedia.org, also in the iTunes podcast directory. And e-mail us at onthemedia@wnyc.org. This is On the Media, from WNYC. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. (MUSIC TAG) (FUNDING CREDITS) *****
copyright 2005 WNYC Radio
Produced by WNYC Studios