Amusing the Fooderati

It’s early morning at the Fancy Food Show, and you can already smell the salsas, saltimbocca and ceviche, the Camembert, calimari and quesadillas that will be spoon-fed to 25,000 visitors from around the world. Most have come to check out the latest fads in America’s booming food specialty market. But some just want to be stars.

Television chefs, gourmet raconteurs, mediagenic restaurateurs--you name it, they’ve got the bug. And as the wannabes gather at Javits Convention Center, Lou Ekus has some bracing advice. “American cooking shows are designed to entertain people, not instruct them,” says the president of AirTyme Corp., a consulting firm that trains would-be TV chefs. “Just because you cook well in your home, or interact nicely with people in a restaurant doesn’t guarantee success.”

Ekus starts pacing the room, like a sous-chef ready to box the ears of a dimwitted apprentice. He’s trained some of the best, including the Food Network’s Emeril Lagasse, but this morning he shows tapes of a lesser-known author, Jim Fobel--before and after media training.

In the first tape, Fobel is promoting his “Whole Chicken Cookbook” for a TV interview. When he’s asked why people should care about chicken, he answers softly, almost defensively. “Because it’s a mild meat.” “Oh, yeah!” booms Ekus, laughing derisively. “There’s a good reason for buying his book. I’m rushing right out!”

Then he shows Fobel several weeks later, fielding similar questions but looking remarkably more alert. “Great to be here!” the author smiles, before beginning his spiel. He nods at easy questions, deflects critical ones and makes it clear that Americans need chicken more than ever.

Asked who will be the next superchef, Ekus confides that he is training a man who assembles granola in his basement. “He really believes he’s going to be the first Granola Crossover Celebrity. And don’t laugh. In this culture of ours, anything is possible.”

Once a puritanical society that ate poorly and mocked gluttons, America has gone food crazy. Just check out the food media: Television and radio shows, cookbooks, magazines, newspaper columns, newsletters and Internet sites devoted to cooking, eating at home and dining out are growing by leaps and bounds. And much of the media chatter is aimed at an increasingly sophisticated audience that can’t get enough, especially when it’s delivered hot off the grill by TV-friendly gastronomes.

“Chefs used to be seen as blue-collar types who didn’t earn too much money and didn’t have much respect,” says Ruth Reichl, editor of Gourmet magazine and former restaurant critic for the Los Angeles Times and New York Times. “But now the media has elevated them, and they’ve become bona fide stars.”

The focus of the food media has changed dramatically since the days when Julia Child first stared into a PBS camera and taught Americans how to boil a live lobster. Back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, chefs wrote cookbooks to establish themselves professionally, says Geoff Drummond, co-founder of A La Carte Communications in New York. Yet today they compete fiercely for television exposure, and publishers who once sought written proposals for earnest little books ask would-be chefs for flashy TV tapes.

“It’s all about entertainment,” says Rick Bayless, a passionate Chicagoan and producer of a multi-part PBS series on Mexican cuisine. “The country is more interested in the personalities on these shows and the excitement they create than in the details of cooking. It might disappoint purists, but food has become theater, pure and simple.”

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Perhaps the nation’s obsession with fine dining illustrates historian Jacques Barzun’s belief that our society has entered a state of near-permanent decadence.

We’re not talking chocolate. It’s a moment in time when key institutions--political, religious and corporate--no longer knit people together, and many are “peculiarly restless,” searching for new indulgences, Barzun writes. It’s an era when “boredom and fatigue are great historical forces.” This is not a negative view, simply the description of a culture questing for the Next Big Thing.

And it helps explain the rise of the fooderati. Their passions have been stoked by a robust economy, the maturation of American tastes and a sense that culinary knowledge bestows status. We’re not just what we eat. We’re also what we read about cooking, and which gourmet shows we watch.

“This fascination with food used to be confined to the upper classes, but now it’s spreading into the American middle class and beyond,” says Alan Davidson, author of the encyclopedic “Oxford Companion to Food.” “Nowadays when people entertain, they have to be able to talk about food and unusual dishes. They want to be able to say, ‘Yes, this is a rare form of pepper grown only on the western slope of a mountain in Peru, and it’s available only in New York.”

Elsewhere, millions of Americans, motivated in part by health concerns, have sparked a revolution in the quality of food ingredients by patronizing a national network of farmers’ markets. Inspired by Alice Waters of Berkeley’s legendary Chez Panisse, many consumers insist on buying only fresh products from local merchants, instead of frozen or dull substitutes trucked in from across the continent.

Food culture is also driven by the hectic pace of modern life. Americans have less time to cook, so they eat more in restaurants. (Sales between 1994 and 1998 jumped from $217 billion to $247 billion.) As links to the stockpot erode, many are fascinated by the romance of star chefs and the full-color graphics in glamorous magazines that some have dubbed “gastroporn.” Ultimately, food has become a middle-age substitute for the sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll that are wistful memories for many baby boomers.

“When you reach a certain age, you don’t go to Smashing Pumpkins concerts anymore,” says Erica Gruen, a media consultant and former president of the Food Network. “You don’t do much of anything, actually. But you love to go out and eat.”

For Reichl and others, the explosion of interest in food is a healthy sign that America is finally catching up with other great cultures, like France, which have long venerated cooking and dining. Others take dim views of a phenomenon that has become more celebrity-oriented and less focused on food.

“We have this fascination with superstar chefs, and it’s good that they’re out of the kitchen,” says Colman Andrews, editor of Saveur, one of the latest and most elegant of the epicurean magazines. “But when I see festivals like ‘The Great Chefs of Encino,’ or ‘Great Chefs of the Ohio River Valley,’ I’m concerned because there are only half a dozen great chefs in America, and I wouldn’t presume to name them.

“There’s a lot of silly, badly cooked food out there, and the media makes stars out of chefs long before they’re ready,” he adds gloomily.

While the mania is nationwide, it’s particularly intense here in Manhattan, where newspapers and TV are filled with the comings and goings of celebrity chefs, and restaurant openings are pure glitz. When meticulous French chef Alain Ducasse opened his hushed namesake emporium this summer, the New York Daily News bannered the $500 cost of a dinner for two--including tax, tip and wine--on Page 1.

The number of people cutting, chopping, fileting and otherwise flogging food on American television has grown from a handful in the 1970s to a garlic-mincing army. They hold court on the 24-hour Food Network, plus PBS, prime-time network shows, late-night and early-morning TV, local cable and public access. The airwaves are filled with cookbook authors, culinary merchants, food historians and journalists.

“The Food Network has become a pop culture brand, because we changed it from a product for people who loved to cook into a network for people who love to eat,” says Gruen, who guided the expanding company in the ‘90s. and ESPN, according to industry surveys. (The Food Network is owned by Scripps Howard; the Tribune Co., which owns the Los Angeles Times, is also a partner.)

“We made the decision to put Emeril in front of a live audience because we thought of him as a talk show host with food,” Gruen adds. “When you see a chicken recipe now on TV, it’s not just chicken--it’s Sara Moulton’s chicken. It’s Bobby Flay’s chicken. You’re not just getting a practical recipe, you’re absorbing stardust in your home.”

Lagasse may be the most visible example of this celebrity: in addition to his Food Network show and a regular slot on ABC-TV’s “Good Morning America,” he’s appeared on game shows and “The Sopranos.” A classically trained chef with a street-smart persona, he has written best-selling cookbooks and conducts “food concerts” in which he shares the stage with blues and rock musicians, cooking up pork chops as they perform.

Purists may scoff at Lagasse’s antics, preferring Child’s quirky, though quiet, professionalism. Some revel in the mock drama of “Iron Chef” shows from Japan, featuring manic one-hour cook-offs between telegenic chefs and upstart challengers. Others enjoy Burt Wolf’s scholarly PBS take on cuisine and culture. Pioneers such as Graham Kerr (“The Galloping Gourmet”) and now Lagasse have made it acceptable for men to take their place in the home kitchen. The next trend to watch for: cooking shows for kids.

On Saturday mornings in Los Angeles, PBS is filled with nonstop food television. And this fall, L.A. restaurateur Wolfgang Puck will debut his first TV show on the Food Network.

“The idea is to have fun with a live audience, and also show people how to cook some very inventive dishes,” says Puck, one of America’s first superstar chefs from the ‘60s generation. Building on the success of Ma Maison and Spago, he’s become Hollywood’s unofficial chef to the stars and a highly successful merchant, with Wolfgang Puck Cafes in cities across the nation and a line of frozen designer pizzas in supermarkets.

“I will be appearing with some of my Hollywood friends from time to time, and the idea is for this to be very entertaining,” says Puck. “There’s no point teaching people how to cook pasta with truffles, since truffles are expensive and most people don’t use them. There’s nothing wrong with teaching them a new way to cook spaghetti and meatballs so they can enjoy pasta at home.”

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Most pasta lovers will never get inside Rao’s, an East Harlem hole-in-the-wall with 10 tables. For decades, celebrities, wise guys and status-hungry New Yorkers have tried with difficulty to book seats at the colorful, family-owned Italian restaurant that’s been on the same corner for 105 years.

But now the virtual fantasy of a night at Rao’s can be yours--courtesy of the Rao’s cookbook. Along with a CD playing tunes from the jukebox, you get the experience of a night out. “This is what a lot of cookbooks do nowadays,” says owner Frank Pellegrino. “They can take you some place special, a place you might not otherwise go.”

Cookbook sales generated $2.2 billion in 1996, up from $1.8 billion the previous year, according to Forbes magazine. Advertising revenues from food and wine-related magazines have grown 28% this year over a similar period last year, well ahead of the overall industry growth rate, according to the Magazine Publishers of America. There were 263 such publications last year, compared with 100 in 1989.

In this environment, star chef-cookbook authors command hefty advances while entertainment and fantasy drive the market for food magazines as well. At Gourmet, one of the nation’s oldest epicurean magazines, Reichl says she seeks a balance between the trusty recipes that longtime readers expect and vivid storytelling. Yet she concedes that many buy the magazine for purely escapist reasons. “I imagine that there are lots of people lying in bed reading our food spreads and fantasizing that they have cooked them,” she says.

As for the Internet, industry observers estimate there are 600-plus sites devoted to cuisine and cooking, with the number expanding. Web sites run the gamut from online food delivery, specialty ingredients, kitchen gadgetry and Web sites of the celebrity chefs.

There’s something for every palette: Impromptugourmet.com, based in New York, offers home delivery of ready-to-assemble meals from celebrity chefs; Food.com, based in the Bay Area, is one of several sites enabling users to order restaurant meals over the Internet. Booksforcooks.com specializes in cookbooks and food-related titles. Web sites offer more than 500,000 free recipes, and Judy Girard, senior vice president of the Food Network, says the ability of television viewers to instantly download a recipe is a key to audience growth.

Others deplore such marketing tie-ins. At New York’s Chowhound.com, founder Jim Leff differentiates true food lovers--the chowhounds--from foodies, the shallow followers of trends and fashion. In a chowhound universe, he declares, “people can speak with equal passion about Ducasse and cowcheek tacos. Food should be about fun and community, not putting on your turtleneck and swirling your glass.”

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Like a pigeon in aspic, Karen Serafinko is quivering in the green room of the Food Network. Within minutes, she and 200 others will be whisked into a TV studio for the taping of Emeril Lagasse’s top-rated show. Some are excited, even euphoric, but the tension is getting to Serafinko. She’s bracing for a milestone event in her life.

Inside the studio, a producer lays down the rules. Please don’t rush the stage with gifts for Emeril. If he offers you food, chew with your mouth closed, because America is watching.

And now, the ever-more-burly chef bursts from the wings, showering fans with high-fives as a jazz band cranks up the volume. Today’s show is about camping cuisine, and when Lagasse plops garlic in a pan, they cheer. When he slits open a lovely trout and describes the moist, savory stuffing, a woman moans.

Afterward, the crowd rushes the set, hungrily spearing forkfuls of pancakes and eggplant, until guards usher them out. “I can’t believe we got this great stuff to eat and we were on television too,” says one well-fed man, clutching a sign that reads “Feed Me!” as he leaves the make-believe kitchen.

“I was thinking back over the years, and I’d guess this is a real high point,” says Serafinko, a New York schoolteacher. “I haven’t been this excited since I saw the Beatles at Shea Stadium in 1964.”