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Popular Culture Review
take on the role of model consumer. Usually, they are engaged directly in an act
of consumption. We find them either shopping—buying or penising ingredients
in marketplaces or tasting food in restaurants—or in the closely related act of
traveling—touring the sources of foodstuffs or cuisines, and sampling the
discoveries. Over the years that these scenarios have been typical, several
distinct personae of the chef-consumer have emerged.
One is the chef as connoisseur. Chefs reveal their depth of expertise
and a discerning sensibility when they guide us through varieties of food
available in, say, a marketplace. That’s what Susan Feniger and Mary Sue
Milliken did inside the comucopic Grand Central Market in downtown Los
Angeles. They introduced viewers to the market’s authentic carnitas and an
encyclopedic collection of chiles in one episode of their former Food Network
program The Two Hot Tamales. Mario Batali’s serial sojourns to Italy on his
former TVFN show, Mario Eats Italy, bordered on scholarly. He held forth as
the more erudite half of a travel duo including a guy cast as his naive cohort, on
the distinct specialties of each region and their origins. When Bobby Flay travels
across the U.S. in Food Nation, digging up every imaginable type of authentic
hole-in-the-wall and oldie-but-goodie Joint, he is demonstrating his command of
American regionalism and his ability to recognize a diamond in the rough.
We also often see the chef in the guise of adventurer. This type is
especially well developed in shows involving travel. Bourdain is infamous for
his willingness to go anywhere to try anything, including such “extreme cuisine”
specialties as the Japanese delicacy of fngii (blowfish)—which rarely does, if
handled properly, but technically can kill you—snacks of bugs and grubs, and a
still-beating cobra heart after an amuse-hoitche of its blood. Bourdain is also
known for repeatedly suffering the consequences of his being a good guest by
obliging one host after another who shows his hospitality by insisting that
everyone get hammered. Chefs on television, more than most of us, seem game
for all sorts of exotica. In some cases, they’re up to trying edgy methods of
cooking, too. Keith Famie, the chef who made his first appearance on TV as a
contestant on the reality show Siin’ivor, became identified with adventurous
cooking right in the title of his subsequent show for the NBC-affiliate WDIVTV: Famie’s Adventures in Cooking. In one 2000 episode, he wrapped a trout in
tin foil and cooked it on the muffler of a Harley Davidson while riding in a biker
rally.
Chefs are implied advocates of cultural diversity as well: they tour,
travel, and taste their way across the country and globe. Part of their openness to
adventure and their role as perpetual students of the world involves reveling in
the wealth of ethnic and regional differences. In some cases, the chefs own
culinary reputation as an eclectic reinforces their ima