Core Post #3

This week I watched the penultimate episode of this year’s season of Top Chef, a cooking competition that airs weekly on Bravo. Top Chef is really the only reality show I can handle and watch on a regular basis. After trying out several different cooking competitions (most of them on the Food Network) with my wife, we found that Top Chef is one of the only shows that focuses on actual cooking, and not some sort of fabricated drama. As far as I can tell, the producers do not vet contestants that have tragic backstories, like they do in McCarthy’s example with Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. The contestants on Top Chef are all accomplished chefs and the show is ostensibly only concerned with their professional cooking.

Thus, I’m a little upset at Ouelette for ruining my last watchable reality show. By thinking about Top Chef as a form of education or “citizenship training,” it becomes clear that the show preserves a political imbalance in the culinary world and beyond. As each week the contestants must perform up to a fine dining standard, there arise clear divisions between the social statuses of the chefs and judges. Under the guise of a “culinary art contest,” the entire competition is structured around serving food for members of the upper class. In other words, the chefs, hailed as creative geniuses, compete by fulfilling typical working-class roles. While this is apparent in many cooking shows, it is particularly relevant to the way this show is structured around space and different settings. For example, whereas a show like Chopped always takes place in the same kitchen where judges sit for the entirety of the show only a few feet away from the contestants, Top Chef makes a point to separate the cooking space from the judges’ table. In each episode, the judges receive the complete dining experience. We watch as they talk and socialize in expensive restaurants, while the contestants hand deliver their plates. The editing can even be unintentionally comical, by frequently cutting between the judges’ casual conversations and the chefs running around the kitchen, fighting the clock.

While the main judges of the show are at least subtle when it comes to their wealth, the guest judges are often less so. The familiar faces range from celebrity chefs, to internet stars, to politicians. One of the most dramatic examples this season is an episode shot entirely in the Colorado governor’s mansion. As the governor and the first lady participate in the judging of the food, the episode proudly aligns food criticism with power and wealth.

According to Ouelette’s chapter, these structures in the show instruct us to emulate a certain type of citizen, or specifically in this case, a member of the culinary world/working class. I find it particularly alarming considering the fact that the show is probably a major source of inspiration for aspiring chefs. By situating the mark of success in relation to the service of not only upper-class food critics, but celebrities and politicians, the show undoubtedly propagates a damaging ideology.