A Gusher for TV Chef Fans

OK, it’s official: food is show business. The final proof? “TV Chefs” (Renaissance Books, $16.95), a blown-out fanzine profiling a couple of dozen television cooking teachers, from Julia to whoever those guys are on “Dinner and a Movie.” As you might expect, the profiles are short on content and long on the kind of obsessive details the truly devoted love to collect: Sara Moulton loves the smell of bacon cooking; Mollie Katzen has a guilty thing for breakfast cereal; Emeril Lagasse’s favorite sound is “Bam” (that’s a shock). Despite its shortcomings (or perhaps because of them), you can’t escape the feeling this could be one of those zeitgeist-capturing relics that perfectly sums up a particular time and place, kind of like a Monkees lunchbox.

Don’t Look Down

You’ve heard of billboards. The next big thing in the grocery business may be “billfloors.” Supermarket News magazine reports that “chains across the country are beginning to use floor graphics to get the consumer’s attention.”

These advertisements--6-foot-square in full color, in fact--are placed on the floor near the appropriate products.

“The vast floor space is one of the few areas not cluttered with printed messages where merchandisers can make an impression,” a representative of Floorgraphics, the Princeton, N.J., company that manages the ads, told the magazine.