Food TV and Church: Don’t Try to Improve It

So my question is, have those little food videos that play automatically in my Facebook Feed taken the place of what use to be Food TV? Not that I would have any way of answering this question because I don’t ever turn on the tv. The Food Network hasn’t been seen by me for many a year. I was one day surfing through the channels in that long lost past, looking for a cooking show, and came to the devastating conclusion that they had all gone, replaced by Food Travel, where you watch some guy (didn’t seem very often to be a woman, this must mean something) go from place to place eating signature burgers and slurping oysters. Oh, and Food Competition. Because, I guess, watching people cook in ridiculous circumstances with money on the line is more exciting than Bobby Flay alone at his grill squeezing a lemon over a single perfectly charred viand.

I have no idea what the Food Network is doing now. But I do have a Facebook feed full of Tasty, of disembodied hands moving over a single burner, of snapping fingers producing minced shallots. There is something truly and profoundly mesmerizing about these little clips. I watch them Every Time, even though there is no chance of me ever making any of the things ever.

But I don’t need Facebook or television to know about the spectacled nature of cooking. Just like when you get on your phone to speak to someone far away and suddenly a crowd assembles demanding and crying out for your attention so that you can hear and can’t think, so also as soon as you think you’ll have a quiet thoughtful moment to work out a complicated sauce the whole world show up and wants to “help” or at least know what you’re doing.

Why are you cutting that? Why are you pouring that in there? What is that? What are you doing? Is that a tomato? Is that an onion? Is that why you’re crying? What are you doing?

And so the long day wears on. Me in the kitchen cooking before the gathered throng but mostly wishing I was alone with my thoughts and my cheese.

When someone is cooking, I think the basic human impulse is to stop and watch. Not because watching will produce actual knowledge that produces actual food. But because, well, it’s like a magic show. And also gluttony. Potato covered in cheese and garlic. Chocolate perfectly shaped into a ball that sits over and hides a brownie and ice cream. I could go on but I won’t.

It’s ridiculous, I think, for tv executives to think that they need to go past the winning model of a person standing in front of the camera and cooking. Food doesn’t need to be more exciting than it already is. Competition and Travel don’t make food more interesting. It’s akin, I think, to the foolish belief that church will be boring if you don’t pep it up with a light show and a stage jumbled with storm troopers. Rows of people praying, singing, listening, and then tasting a bite of bread and a sip of wine really cannot be improved upon. Kneeling in your pew watching some guy pray over a plate of bread and a cup, though you would not expect this, doesn’t ever get old. Even though it’s the same thing every time.

The onwards and upwards, next best greatest thing maybe works for technology (although I feel like the iPhone 7 is showing us that that’s not going to be true), and maybe could even work for home improvement (but really not because it’s still just a house and a couch and a bed), and maybe for bringing up baby (seriously, some of the gadgets by the time I got to my sixth baby were cool…although, for real, babies just eat and sleep, so I guess not this one either)–you know, I think probably it just works for war, and color printing, where was I? Oh yes, the essential components of life that really make a person comfortable and mentally healthy are things that should never change–cooking and church. These shouldn’t change. The change of the seasons, as CS Lewis said somewhere or other, is enough.

And now I do need some kind of magic to overtake me because I was going to make soup but I bought the wrong kind of beans.