Should everyone involved in producing "Worst Cooks in America" be shot? Just 'cause I can't think why not doesn't mean there isn't a reason

"Fun With Flambé" this clip is called. Let's see a show of hands: Who believes that flambé-ing is among the top 200 skills a novice cook needs to learn? 300? 400? The sad thing is that Chef Robert's demonstration of how to make a bread pudding is actually quite good. You have the feeling that he could actually teach aspiring cooks if Food Network's Worst Cooks in America, which has its second-season finale tonight, had any aspiration to doing so.

by Ken

So, tonight is the Season 2 finale of Food Network's Worst Cooks in America. I have the comfort of knowing that it will join the earlier episodes on my DVR, where I suppose someday I'll force myself to watch them. I know I should probably watch them before going off on the show again (see "Travesty Tonight: Worst Cooks in America gets even worse!"), but I've watched enough bits of this season's episodes, including whole minutes of the season premiere, in which Robert Irvine, whose culinary skills I've come to respect a lot via Dinner Impossible, where in the course of tackling his mission he's had to do quite a lot of on-the-spot culinary instruction to skill-free designated helpers, replaced last season's Beau MacMillan alongside Anne Burrell.

Now these people all know how to cook, which means they all learned how to do it, somehow, which means they all know that this wasn't it. They also know the show doesn't allow, let alone encourage, them to do much actual teaching. Instead they're simply ringmasters presiding over this circus of kitchen washouts who for the most part actually, even desperately, want to acquire some basic kitchen skills, but instead are made the butt of the show's ridicule. Oh sure, some of them do produce occasional acceptable results, but since they have almost nothing to go by except the week's initial demonstration, anything they produce (or, God forbid, learn) is apt to be by accident or luck.

Imagine if a bunch of people who really, really wanted to learn to play the piano had a skilled player demonstrate for them how to play, say, a Chopin waltz, and then got to fiddle at the keyboard for a while before being judged on their ability to reproduce it. Pretty ridiculous, eh? (Well, not so ridiculous that if somebody decides to put this show on the air I would reject payment for the idea.)

This isn't how any skill I'm aware of is acquired, least of all by taking place in the gladiatorial setting of a TV competition reality show. It's as if these godforsaken TV competitions have taken the place of reality. Well, I suppose something has to take the place of reality in an age when the overriding public mood is to devote every ounce of energy, every fiber of the corporeal being, to the absolute and utter denial of reality.

I had to stop watching early on in the first episode when the culinary plebes were given a piece of "instruction" by Chef Robert: how to cut up a chicken. Now butchering a chicken is a genuinely useful kitchen skill, but (a) it is absolutely, unequivocally non-essential to knowing how to cook (in every supermarket in the country you can buy all the chicken parts you need or desire), and (b) it is not a skill that anyone in the history of cooking has learned from watching it done once and then being tested on it, not ever, never, and anyone who pretends otherwise is a liar or ignoramus or both. Said pretender is also someone without the tiniest regard for either kitchen skills or the people who want to learn them.

Ladies and gents, I give you your Food Network team.

I caught a bit of a more recent episode where the poor plebes were subjected to a kitchen "decathlon," where they had to execute a whole bunch of skills -- an utterly indiscriminate mishmosh of the fundamental and the arcane -- all under pressure of time, so that the contestants' primary focus was on how they stood timewise against their competitors, meaning that essentially no focus was on the actual skills.

By coincidence, one of the skills in the "decathlon" was an actual basic kitchen skill: chopping an onion. Now I'm not going to say that speed is totally irrelevant to the task. I think it's safe to say that anyone who needs five minutes to dismantle an onion is overmatched by his/her lack of skills, and not being able to produce a decently chopped onion is almost the least of his/her problems. I think there's a 98 percent probability that such a person, if only out a sense of sheer helplessness, is going to spend as little time in a kitchen as he/she can manage.

The "coincidence" I meant is that onion-chopping happens to be one of the skill demonstrations I remember most vividly from the series of basic-technique shows Jacques Pépin did decades ago on public television, which for me were not only an inspiration but a source of invaluable instruction. Jacques explained that he slices an onion at his whirlwind pace simply because he's done it so much, and stressed that such speed is unnecessary to the home cook. As long as you understand and get the hang of the basic technique, it becomes part of your skill set, and an incredibly important one -- and the likelihood is that the more you do it, the more comfortably if not actually faster you'll be able to do it.

There is no element of actual cooking skills that can in any way be interpreted as a race, and any effort to pretend otherwise is, again, an absolute blatant fraud. It's a fraud that Worst Cooks in America has now gleefully perpetrated on two seasons' worth of contestants -- and of course viewers.

When you consider in addition that these kitchen professionals are allowing themselves to be used, to fatten their wallets or egos or both, for the purpose of taunting poor souls who just want to acquire some basic kitchen skills, the only imaginable conclusion is that they are the sworn enemies of everything that matters about culinary skills and, for that matter, about humanity. As I believe I wrote about the first season of Worst Cooks in America, there's probably a reason why everyone involved in this sordid spectacle shouldn't be lined up against a wall and shot dead; I just can't think of it.

Beyond all of this, there is an underlying, or perhaps overlying, lie at the heart of this disgraceful spectacle: that what these would-be cooks need to learn is how to produce "restaurant-quality" meals. The stark reality is that restaurant cooking as practiced today has far more to do with theater than cooking, and the embarrassing secret -- secret, at least apparently, from the people who pay those ridiculous prices for all that crap food -- is that vast gutfuls of the swill that's served in today's restaurants is as dreadful as the swill that's displayed on movie screens and in art museums and on theatrical and operatic stages: junk dished out to gullible patrons who want desperately to believe that they're "with it."

Of course there's such a thing as good restaurant cooking. But it's not what most home cooks truly want to learn. We want to be able to put interesting and well-prepared food on our tables for the enjoyment of ourselves, family, and friends. Restaurant cooking tends to place a premium on things you find in restaurant kitchens: an abundance of daily-prepared stocks and sauces, staffs of prep cooks to provide materials for labor-intensive preparations, ingredients beyond the inclination or scope of most home shoppers (although of course more and more of those ingredients have become available to home cooks, for a price). We want to learn the kind of cooking that helps us know what kinds of ingredients to buy, how to handle them, and how to turn them into the aforementioned self-, family-, and friend-satisfying meals.

Having your dish judged by a panel of self-imagined culinary experts (some of whom are culinary experts, I hasten to say) as the grand climax of the series as if it were a restaurant offering is, well, just plain silly. I will say that from the bits of judging I've seen Chef Anne and Chef Robert provide on this season's episodes, there actually are bits of useful critiquing delivered to the contestants, but it comes in the worst way at the worst time. The contestants needed that critiquing when they were stabbing blindly at reproducing the week's challenge dish.

I recall seeing in Anne Burrell's bio that she does in fact teach classes at one of the fancy-shmancy cooking schools. I like to think that if she provided "instruction" of the caliber she does on Worst Cooks in America, her students would have the sense to demand their money back.

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