Jeffrey Steingarten, an Appreciation

I read The Man Who Ate Everything years ago and didn't think very highly of it, and then I promptly forgot that Jeffrey Steingarten existed, until the Food Network's deliriously bad remake of Iron Chef began to bring him on as a judge, where he played a pleasingly carbuncular foil to the other, generally politer judges.

Although we have passed, thankfully, the period during which it became universally popular to bemoan the advent of reality television as if it alone were the doom of the Republic, lamenting it remains prevalent, if not exactly fashionable. I find this attitude absolutely incomprehensible; yes, reality TV is bad, but one more turd hardly ruins the toilet. The complaint wasn't simply that scripted-unscripted shows were lousy--they were and are--but that they were effectively ruining a medium. Partly I suspect this complaint percolated into the newsmedia from the Writer's Guild and SAG, who, having spent the nineties inflicting Kelsey Grammar's Rushmorian head upon us all, saw a bunch of hack scenario sketchers and fametards willing to eat worms nibbling at the collective payscale. Anyway, TV was terrible before MTV realized that it could save production costs by editing a plot into the raw footage of a bunch of semiliterate, venereal postadolescents rubbing up on each other, and terrible TV remains. Thank god that the internet and her punky brother, video games are killing TV and movies--let the last sitcom be strangled with the guts of the last rom-com; let George Clooney be bludgeoned to death by the monstrous body of Bill O'Reilly, and he in turn put out of his misery by a Heidi-Klum-shaped ice pick to the back of the titanic noggin.

Heidi Klum, though, I can appreciate. I recall falling asleep on many a night to my boyfriend's uncontrollable giggling as he watched Project Runway on his laptop in bed. That show, if you are not familiar, is a reality-TV competition in which several women and a narrow jaggle of homosexuals compete to become fashion designers. Klum is the show's spiritual figurehead; she presides in judgment at the end of every episode along with Michael Kors, who looks more and more like a prosciutto every day, and Nina Garcia, one of the many interchangeable women in fashion. Garcia has a slight and lovely Colombian accent, whereas Klum sounds like two hamsters crawled up her nostrils in the middle of the night. Directing the cast of would-be Cocos is one Tim Gunn, who speaks as if two Heidi Klums crawled up his nostrils in the middle of the night. He is the show's one rational actor, however, and he does look good in a suit. Anyway, the whole thing is just hysterical. The histrionic competitors wheedle and slink their way around each other; so steeped are they in the reality of reality TV that they fall immediately into their predestined roles. More on that below. They are given a series of improbable tasks--take these three tear-stained pillowcases and make me an après-ski outfit that is appropriate for a black-tie wedding--and then dismissed, one by one, for failure, until only one remains. As far as I can tell, the only winner who went on to do anything was the elfin Christian Siriano--the rest of them vanished into the subfamous ether, from which discorporate realm their voices can still occasionally be heard, whispering "look at me, look at me."

However, I don't much care for fashion, and so when I found out that there was a show called The Next Iron Chef, modelled on similar lines, I popped immediately over to Hulu, at whose website I have been enjoying Season 2, mostly--maybe only--because of Steingarten. As a point of clarification, the real forebear of this type of entertainment isn't The Real World, and it's not really proper to call them reality shows. They are in fact expansions of the game show format; hussied up with a bit of interpersonal intrigue and some vague semblance of extra-competitive plot, but still fundamentally a skill-specific version of Family Fued or Jeopardy. Competition progresses in stages; the winners stay on; the losers go home. The Next Iron Chef eschews much of the antic dorm-room action that you find in other competitions of the type and sticks mercifully to cooking. The host is they hyperkinetic Alton Brown, who may be the least funny man on television, although he has not been told. The competitors appear to be real chefs, and they appear to cook real food. But even these actual, real-reality professionals can't escape the maw of the culture-consuming television virus. They speak in a bizarre, made-for-confessional, competitive patois: they might've pushed it a little too hard; they're not going to be the one to go home; they're in it to win it; etc. In the first episode, one of the chefs observes pointedly that it's nerve-shattering every time you go before the judges. But . . . this is the first episode! And then he's the first to be cut. Every time? Born to play the role, each and every one of us, it seems.

Steingarten sits in foofy, dyspeptic glory between two women--a restaurateur and some sort of slow-food guru--who plainly despise him. He keeps telling Donatella Arpaia that she's wrong, and she keeps looking as if she wants to eat him. He takes perverse pleasure in undermining their critical judgments. As the ladies oooh over a salad, he declaims, "Sometimes light and refreshing isn't good. Sometimes it's lousy!" He gestures with a fork. He grins. His schtick occasionally seems to verge on misogyny, and yet he is clearly a fan of the female cooks; or at least, he hates them equally with the men. It's just obvious that he considers his copanelists morons, and of course, they are. He is gleefully dismissive of bad food, lacerating in his comments, and his highest compliment is, "I would pay for this." He does not engage in any of the egregious moralizing that has infected culinary culture, the earth-goddess greenwashing of the act of eating, wherein each organic apple is so-much ammunition for the war on global warming. It seems odd that a grouchy, silvered man so fond of pocket silks and catty asides should remind us that eating is base, carnal, and animal--awesome, in other words--and yet, there it is. He does.