Medium Raw

Leaving him with this awful image, I ended in FULL CAPS that given the inconvenient and annoyingly complicated relationship between the conditions in which people live and his adorable animal friends, maybe he should start thinking about people first.

Granted, my reaction was on a par with suddenly taking a baseball bat to the barista who mistakenly used skim instead of soy milk on your latte, but I was really and truly angry. Not at my poor, unsuspecting friend, undeserving of such treatment (from whom I’ve never heard since). He just wanted to save a few animals, after all. It was just his bad luck that he’d asked me for help—and at a very bad time. I was angry at all the shit he made me think about.

And I’m still angry.

But I digress.

From the softer-edged distance of a changed and far more comfortable life, I’ve searched for a root cause, a common denominator that might explain my seemingly rote, instinctive, reflexive scorn for anyone cooking on TV (or in films, for that matter) whom I see, somehow, as unworthy.

What has Guy Fieri ever done to me? Why should I care if something Sandra Lee made on her show came from a can—or arrived held aloft by celestial virgins on a cubic zirconium–encrusted sleigh straight from Tuscany or Provence or fucking Valhalla? What does it matter if Rachael can cook or not? People like her! What’s my problem? So what if the contestants on Hell’s Kitchen are transparently delusional and hopeless? I shouldn’t get mad about it, right?

But I do.

Here’s what I’d like to think.

Back when I started cooking—back in the heady, crazy, admittedly lower-standard days of the early 1970s, when it was all about speed, endurance, attitude, physical toughness, and the ability to work through every variety of self-inflicted punishment—people handled food differently. The distinction between the way a “professional” and a home cook handled food was easy to spot: the professional cook was rougher with his food. (Obviously, I’m not talking about Lutèce or the Four Seasons or the better restaurants of the day here.) The fact was, cooks tended to slap their meat around a little bit more than was absolutely necessary, to drop portions of fish onto the cutting board with an audible panache that fell something short of delicacy. Looking like you didn’t give a shit—while cranking out food with the speed and efficiency and consistency of someone who did—was something of the fashion. You saw it in the rough, easy familiarity with which professional butchers took apart a primal section, the too-cool-to-be-bothered expression that said, “I could do this in my sleep.”

Simply put, neither I nor the people I worked with—or admired—particularly “respected the ingredient,” as chefs are likely to call it these days. We were frankly brutal with our food. I don’t know exactly when that attitude changed in me—somewhere, I’m sure, around the time I started putting on airs and spouting shit from the Larousse. But over time, without my realizing it was happening, my attitude did change, hardening, eventually, into a deeply held belief that doing bad things to food, especially when one does them knowingly—or wasting perfectly good food, or, in general, disrespecting it—is fundamentally wrong, a sin (if such a thing exists), a violation of a basic contract with decency, with the world and its citizens. In a word: evil.

Traveling has only reinforced that feeling.

I’m sure that I’m not alone in feeling an almost physical pain when I see somebody cut heedlessly into an unrested steak. Most people I know who have cooked for a living will react with a groan or a wince if they see someone committing an easily preventable crime against food. But most of my friends don’t actually get angry when somebody who knows (or should know) better massacres a perfectly good dish on TV.

I do.

I don’t dislike Guy Fieri, I realized, after many viewings of his cooking shows, much soul-searching at my personal ashram, and many doses of prescription hypnotics. I just dislike—really dislike—the idea that somebody would put Texas-style barbeque inside a fucking nori roll. I was, and remain, angry that there are genuine pit-masters who’ve made a calling of getting pork shoulder just right—and sushi chefs who worked three years on rice alone before being deemed worthy to lay hands on fish—and here’s some guy on TV blithely smashing those two disciplines together like junkers in a demolition derby. A pre-chopped onion is not okay, the way I look at it—no matter what Rachael or Sandra tell you. The shit in a can is not anywhere nearly as good—and almost always more expensive—than stuff you can often make yourself just as quickly. It’s…it’s just…wrong to tell people otherwise.