Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

I just came across this video and think it was beautifully shot and edited. I often spend my Saturday mornings at the Union Square market and love seeing the trip my produce made to Manhattan. Very well done!

I swore off that show last year, when a looser won. ( the show is ALL about ratings) Who's going to win is who they want to win--- screw um!!!!! Dave

OK, I'm late to the party, but having watched the series (and hated myself for it) I wanted to chime in. From a marketing standpoint, I completely agree with Melissa's win. She engaged the viewer/the camera in a way that Jeffery simply did not. Despite having the more interesting concept (I know what harissa is, yet I'd never seen it used the way he did!) he just cannot relate to the camera. I found him stiff and uncomfortable, and it may well be, as someone above suggested, that what sutis him is a NO RESERVATIONS-type show on the travel channel, rather than a dumbed-down dump-and-stir show on FN.

Having said that, I'm a working housewife and I cook - a lot. I'm not Melissa's target audience - I prefer Ina Garten, Lidia Bastianich and reruns of Molto Mario - but her value to the network is huge. She's must more likeable than either Rachael Ray or Sandra Lee (less frenetic and phony) and really gives good camera. Her "four-step chicken" is indeed a great idea (albeit a very simplified version of any standard chicken saute) but she puts it into terms that the so-called harried homemaker can remember as they run through the grocery store to pick up dinner. Plus, unlike Sandra Lee - and sadly now Rachael Ray - she seems to use all real ingredients rather than lots of premade stuff loaded with preservatives, which should be a nice change for this network.

Overall, I think FN shoudl get rid of everyone but Bobby Flay (who is annoying, but can really cook), Alton Brown and Ina Garten and start over. But again, as someone above pointed out, I don't think FN is really interested in targeting the Serious Eats audience!

I don't think a fat tax is very practical - there are several things wrong with Pigouvian taxes in general. They are hard to calculate because it is impossible to determine the exact amount of externality caused, in this case by obesity, and they affect different people in different ways! Here is an article about why a fat tax wouldn't work: http://www.mindreign.com/en/mindshare/Global-Economics/Fat-Tax/sl35291137bp387cpp10pn1.html

I agree with Remander. We're not the Food Network's market, though I'm not sure that I completely agree with Erica Gruen in the statement that "people don't watch television to learn things."

We're people who like food and like to cook (not to mention eat!). But there are a lot of people out there who don't cook. They either don't like to cook, didn't learn to cook or think that it will take hours of slaving over a hot stove to get dinner on the table every night. If these shows start getting people in the kitchen that's a step in the right direction.

The last two paragraphs of the Pollan article says, "Crusty as a fresh baguette, Harry Balzer insists on dealing with the world, and human nature, as it really is, or at least as he finds it in the survey data he has spent the past three decades poring over. But for a brief moment, I was able to engage him in the project of imagining a slightly different reality. This took a little doing. Many of his clients — which include many of the big chain restaurants and food manufacturers — profit handsomely from the decline and fall of cooking in America; indeed, their marketing has contributed to it. Yet Balzer himself made it clear that he recognizes all that the decline of everyday cooking has cost us. So I asked him how, in an ideal world, Americans might begin to undo the damage that the modern diet of industrially prepared food has done to our health.

'“Easy. You want Americans to eat less? I have the diet for you. It’s short, and it’s simple. Here’s my diet plan: Cook it yourself. That’s it. Eat anything you want — just as long as you’re willing to cook it yourself.”'

I listened to the podcast and Melissa has some good ideas -- and they're ideas that the novice cook will benefit from. I liked her concept recipe for chicken and I can see that this could be done with other quick-cooking cuts of meat or fish. A new cook might not know this.

I read a lot of cooking blogs and I'm constantly amazed how little people know about cooking. They don't know that you can use more or less (or none!) of something, especially seasonings, and still have a recipe that tastes great. Maybe not exactly like the original, but still very good.

I don't like Sandra Lee, but a friend of mine pointed out that the way she "cooks" is not only the way a lot of people cook, but what they think cooking is. If the Food Network can pull people in with Sandra Lee, then maybe they'll move on to Rachael, Giada, Paula, the Neelys, Aaron McCargo, Ina, Alton and others. Maybe after that they'll get interested in Julia, Lidia, Marcella,

And maybe they won't. But if they're inspired to actually cook more, that's a good thing.

Wanna know why they pick people we (people who want to learn to cook) think suck?

Read the NY Times piece from Sunday: Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/magazine/02cooking-t.html?_r=1&ref=dining

Here's the excerpt that tells it all: "Erica Gruen, the cable executive often credited with putting the Food Network on the map in the late ’90s, recognized early on that, as she told a journalist, “people don’t watch television to learn things.” So she shifted the network’s target audience from people who love to cook to people who love to eat, a considerably larger universe and one that — important for a cable network — happens to contain a great many more men."

We are not their market. Food Network is no more likely to be concerned about teaching us to cook than would be Soap Opera Network. Not their thing.

I also want to point out that the person that made the comment at the Economist, as well as 95% of people out there, don't use BMI correctly. BMI should not be used as an individual level tool to see if you are overweight or underweight, as all the examples given (Lance Armstrong, Football teams, etc...) have shown. BMI is a good population level tool where you can have large populations. So, comparing Portland to Seattle on BMI is a fine use, or two high schools, but not two people.

The media likes to use BMI because it's simple and anyone can calculate it, and there isn't a good alternative out there. When used by researchers to show that the average BMI is increasing, it has value, but basing a tax off of it would be a horrible idea.

What brought her to the show?
Her culinary point of view was "stay at home mother (that can cook)".
FN is marketing her as "mom".
Hubby has a new job, and the family relocates to Washington state.

So this stay at home mom, will be leaving the kids to fly across the country to New York City for TV. And it has nothing to do with "supporting the family", it's all about her.
Leaving the nanny to raise the kids...
It won't take long for mom's (stay at home or work out of home) to see through this farce, and those that can afford a nanny don't care about her $10 meals anyway.
I really don't see who her audience is.

I'm not woman bashing, I am a woman - that happened to raise her own kids while working full time.

I liked both of them as cooks, but I vastly preferred Jeffrey's show concept. I don't need another feed-your-family-for-cheap-and-in-thirty-minutes show. Show me something new that I can use-- I already know how to dredge chicken breasts in flour-- I don't need another Rachel Ray/Sandra Lee Cooking For Dummies show.

I am now off to buy some harissa.

@esarn - "45% of Americans pay $0 in income taxes." That's incredibly vague, care to share the source? I admit this is entirely anecdotal, but all of the uninsured people I know work and pay taxes, so that just doesn't sound accurate to me and I'd love to know what organization is putting out that number.

Melissa tasting her peppers was a really smart thing to do. First of all, heat levels can vary widely, even among the same pepper variety. I recently failed to taste some serranos I was cooking with and the dish turned out way too hot because I had a hotter than usual batch of peppers but I hadn't tasted them so I didn't know. So, rather than a sign of inexperience, tasting the peppers was a sign of cooking savvy. And didn't that dish get great reviews? So it also proved that she can take an ingredient she doesn't have a whole lot of experience with and still produce delicious food.

As for abandoning her family, shows on the FN are filmed in clusters so it probably only takes a couple of weeks to do 6 shows. Lots of FN cooking show hosts live in places that aren't New York. And yes, it's incredibly sexist and irritating that Melissa's parenting decisions are questioned but Jeffrey's aren't.

I agreed with Alton's assessment of Melissa as having "it" and that "it" is not teachable. To me, Jeffrey came across as insincere, especially when along the way he would throw in what came across as made-up stuff about his family, just because the judges wanted a glimpse into his personal life. Maybe what he said was true; his delivery, however, just didn't make me believe it.

I probably won't watch Melissa's show more than once just to see what it's like, and would gladly watch 10 more Alton Brown shows, but I do think the right person won.

And to the person who complained about Melissa "selfishly" leaving her family to do this show: it seems a little sexist since Jeffrey would've been in the exact same position if he had won. I mean, really. Why is it not selfish for a man, but IS selfish for a woman? Geez!