"Worst Cooks in America" is back, once again putting the "o-o-o" in "bo-o-ogus"

Ah, noodle-pulling! A wonderful skill, and a pleasure to watch as done by someone who knows what he's doing, like Chef Lee here. However, it's not only an extremely difficult skill but a totally unnecessary one for even the most skilled home cook. Yet here it was in this batch of worst cooks' second session! (A Food Network caption for a different photo from the field trip says, "Anne and Bobby bring their recruits to Chinatown to make their own noodles, which brings fear -- and tears -- to both teams.")

by Ken

As I write, I'm struggling to get through an episode of Season 3 of Food Network's abominable Worst Cooks in America, a repeat of last week's Episode 2, "Going Global." (As one of the "recruits" noted on camera, she hasn't even gotten basic American cooking down, and now she was supposed to produce Asian cuisine?) As I've written in the past (most recently last February, in "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"), this show enrages me to a degree that I makes it all but unwatchable for me. Yet here I am, doing my quasi-journalistic duty. I can't write about the third iteration of this TV abomination without watching it.

Or can I? It turns out to be essentially the same fraud as it was in the first two seasons: a show that pretends to be providing instruction to cooking plebes but does no such thing, instead using them as props for the entertainment of viewers who presumably have as little regard as the producers do for both the skills involved in cooking and the process by which we humans learn. The notion that any professional chef would lend his or her presence and credibility to such an enterprise is shocking and shameful. After all, who should more respect for both the knowledge base and the process of acquiring it than someone who had to go through his/her own learning process and develop a proper respect for ingredients and skills?

And yet here is Worst Cook in America "returning champion" Anne Burrell, back for the third season, now squaring off against Bobby Flay. I had just a smidgeon of curiosity about this, since both Anne and Bobby make no secret of having undergone extensive formal training. Since they have shown no hesitation in identifying themselves with the institutions with which they have been and still are associated, you'd think that some of the people there would be taking the lead in a campaign of professional shunning.

Oh, but of course, it's only entertainment!

So what, for example, what could that recruit have been thinking when she expressed the thought that perhaps she ought to be learning some kitchen basics before venturing into Asian cuisine? Surely she didn't think that anyone connected with the show cared whether she acquired any skills? If she's lucky really, simply being exposed to all those people cooking all that food, and witnessing weekly one-off demonstrations and getting the occasional hint (maybe helpful, more likely not), may enable her to absorb some odd shards of cooking knowledge, or at least just a tiny bit more confidence in attempting to cook. If so, it will be purely accidental. Of course, it seems to me equally likely that all the wild misinformation the recruits are being exposed to will increase their confusion about what they need to learn and how they could learn it.

Noodle-pulling? Come on, gang! Hey, if I thought I had to become a noodle-pulling master to be a competent cook, I would probably throw in the kitchen towel without a second thought. Or later in the show, when the recruits were all required to make a meatball dish (more about this in a moment), they were required to grind their own meat! This is certainly a potentially useful skill for the home cook. For ages I've thought about getting into grinding my own meat (often in comjunction with a fantasy of getting into sausage-making, and maybe terrine- and pâté-making). I've never done it, though. And I know, just as every person on the planet knows -- with the possible exception of the oafs at Food Network, it's a totally non-essential skill. And again, to throw it at totally unskilled cooks in their second session?

By contrast, meatball-making could be an actually useful kitchen skill, and the recruits might just possibly have gleaned a few tips in the one and only demonstration they get of any technique. The only thing is, they weren't just making meatballs. Each of them was making a foreign meatball-type dish, chosen by a random drawing. (Who doesn't like random drawings? This is great TV!) So nearly everyone was attempting to produce a dish with which he/she was totally unfamiliar, in both conception and taste.

The assumption, I guess, is that actually teaching technique wouldn't be of interest to bored-out-of-their-mind viewers. Such viewers are presumed, quite possibly correctly, to have no attention available for watching people actually being taught the various skills involved in meatball making, with demonstration, explanation, practice, and correction. How tiresome! Who would want to watch that?

So we have a show pretending to teach people how to cook, conceived for people who are presumed to have no interest in how one actually learns how to cook. The goal, of course, is to have the final contestants, the last ones standing after the others have been thrown off the island by Chefs Anne and Bobby, produce "a restaurant-quality meal." Again as I've pointed out, this is both a preposterous and an irrelevant goal for home cooks. Lots of home cooks regularly produce dishes superior to most of what's turned out at restaurants, who are basically in the hospitality, not the culinary, business.

I admit there was a moment early in the "Going Global" episode where I felt a flicker of interest. In one of our rare glimpses into what the promotional campaigns always refer to as "boot camp," yet a boot camp where there doesn't seem to be any serious repetition and corrective instruction, we saw a bit of the recruits attempting to apply Chef Anne's now-you-see-it, now-you-don't "lessons" in knife technique. Julienning and chiffonading, as I recall -- when you can't recall what was demonstrated, let alone what the demonstration(s) consisted off, you may guess that not much knowledge was imparted.

No, I don't mean when Chef Anne delivered her witty mot about one recruit's chiffonaded cabbage looking like it came from a lawn-mower bag. Ha ha, Chef Anne! No, I'm thinking of the moment -- and it was just a moment -- when suddenly there was Chef Bobby providing actual hands-on correction of one of the recruits' knife technique! Except that what he was telling the poor fellow was to be looking at the knife, not his fingers.

Doesn't Food Network have lawyers? Was there really no one to wonder how many lawsuits they may be subject to by viewers who wind up in hospital ERs with sliced-up hands trying to apply what they "learned" here from Bobby Flay?

In the end, though, you can't be ashamed for other people. Still, the fact that nobody connected with this assault on the craft and art of cooking, and the ability of humans to learn, is experiencing profound shame may be what's most upsetting.

#