Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook (3 page)

With every critical outrage—the humiliating, painful-to-watch Food Network Awards, the clumsily rigged-looking
Next Food Network Star
, the cheesily cheap-jack production values of
Next Iron Chef America
—every obvious, half-assed knock-off they slapped on the air would go on to ring up sky-high ratings and an ever-larger audience of cherished males twenty-two to thirty-six (or whatever that prime car-buying demographic is). In service to this new, groin-level dynamic, even poor, loyal Bobby Flay was banished from cooking anywhere near as well as he actually could—to face off with web-fingered yokels in head-to-head crab-cake contests—to almost inevitably (and dubiously) lose.

If any further evidence is needed of the inevitability, the supremacy of the Food Network Model—the runaway locomotive of its success, the brutal genius of the Brooke Johnson Five-Year Plan—well, look at the landscape now:
Gourmet
magazine folded, and while the glossy-magazine industry is in dire straits everywhere and distinguished, 180-year-old newspapers are closing down across the country,
Food Network
magazine,
Everyday with Rachael Ray
, and Paula Deen’s branded magazines are booming, the Empire of Mediocrity successfully spreading its tentacles everywhere.

This, I have come to understand, is the way of the world. To resist is to stand against the hurricane. Bend (preferably at the hip, ass-cheeks proffered). Or break.

But perhaps you need more visceral evidence of the Apocalypse: Rachael Ray sent me a fruit basket. So I stopped saying mean things about her. It’s that easy with me now. Really. An unsolicited gesture of kindness and I have a very hard time being mean. It would seem…ungrateful. Churlish. To be nasty to someone after they sent you a gift of fruit doesn’t fit my somewhat distorted view of myself as secretly a gentleman. Rachael was shrewd about that.

Others have taken a more…confrontational approach.

So, it’s the party following the
Julie & Julia
premiere, and I’m standing there by the end of the buffet, sipping a martini with Ottavia, the woman I’d married in 2007, and two friends, when I feel somebody touching me. There’s a hand under my jacket and running up my back and I instantly assume this must be somebody I know really well to touch me in this way—particularly in front of my wife. Ottavia has had a couple of years of mixed martial arts training by now, and the last time a female fan was demonstrative in this way, she leaned over, grabbed her wrist, and said something along the lines of “If you don’t take your hands off my husband, I’m going to smash your fucking face in.” (In fact, I remember that those were her words exactly. Also, that this was not an idle threat.)

In that peculiar slow motion one experiences in car wrecks, in the brief second or so it took for me to turn, I recall that particularly frightening detail: my wife’s expression, significant in that it was frozen into a rictus of a grin, paralyzed with a look I’d never seen before. What could be standing behind me that would put this unusual expression on my wife’s face—make her freeze like that—a deer in the headlights?

I turned to find myself staring into the face of Sandra Lee. Ordinarily by now, a woman’s hand up my back, Ottavia would have been across the table with a flying tomahawk chop to the top of the skull—or a vicious elbow to the thorax—followed immediately by a left-right combination and a side kick to the jaw as her victim was on the way to the floor. But no. Such are the strange and terrible powers of television’s Queen of Semi-Homemade that we, both of us, stood there like hypnotized chickens. The fact that Sandra was standing next to New York’s attorney general—and likely next governor—Andrew Cuomo (her boyfriend), added, I thought, an implied menace.

“You’ve been a bad boy,” Sandra was saying, perhaps referring to casual comments I may or may not have made, in which I may have suggested she was the “hellspawn of Betty Crocker and Charles Manson.” The words “pure evil” might have come up as well. It is alleged that the words “war crimes” might also have been used by me—in reference to some of Sandra’s more notorious offerings, like her “Kwanzaa Cake.” Right now, I have no contemporaneous recollection of those comments.

Nor do I have any recollection of how I responded to the feel of Sandra’s icy, predatory claws working their way up my spine and around my hips—like some terrifying alien mandibles, probing for a soft spot before plunging deep into the soft goo of my kidneys or liver. Looking back, I imagine myself doing that Ralph Kramden thing: “Homina homina homina…”

Actually…no. It was closer to
Cape Fear
. Gregory Peck and family mesmerized by the evil Robert Mitchum—standing there in the doorway—a barely veiled menace just skirting the boundaries of acceptable behavior; with every ticking second, you’re thinking, “Can I call the police…now?…How about…now?” The menacing would-be intruder not yet crossing the line but letting you know, “I can come in any time I want.”

She was probing below my kidney area now, looking my wife directly in the eyes while doing it, too, and saying, “No love handles”—not exactly true, but I don’t think accurate meat grading was the point of the exercise. She was letting my wife—and, by extension, me—know that like Mitchum in
Cape Fear
, she could walk right into our living room at any time and do to us whatever unholy and awful things she wished, and there was nothing we could do about it.

“Are your ears red yet?” were her final words as she gave one of my lobes a tug. Then, having had her way with me, she moved on. She’d made her point.

It’s Sandra Lee’s world. It’s Rachael’s world. Me? You? We’re just living in it.

If this wasn’t clear to me then, after Aunt Sandy had turned me inside out, left me shaken and husked, a shell of a man, like the remains of a lobster dinner, it became absolutely clear just last week, when Scripps Howard, the parent company of Food Network, outbid-ding Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp, bought
my
network, the Travel Channel—for nearly a billion dollars, putting me right back on Maggie’s farm again, so to speak.

I remember now, from a distance, my earlier, dumber self, watching Emeril hawking toothpaste (and, later, Rachael endorsing Dunkin’ Donuts and Ritz Crackers) and gaping, uncomprehending, at the screen, wondering, “Why would anybody making the millions and millions of bucks these guys are making endorse some crap for a few million more? I mean…surely there’s some embarrassment to putting your face next to Dunkin’ Donuts—what with so many kids watching your shows—and Type 2 diabetes exploding like it is…Surely there’s a line not to be crossed at any price for these people, right?”

Later, I asked exactly that question of my fellow chefs—backstage at
Top Chef
one evening, while waiting for the camera crew to set up for the next shot. I was talking with two chefs far more talented, far more creative—and more accomplished than I had ever been—guys with (unlike me) actual reputations to lose. Where does one draw the line, I asked of them? I mean…there they were, avidly comparing notes on which airlines gave you more free miles in return for “menu consultation,” which products were offering what moneys—and at no point was either of them saying about any particular product: “Burger King…not ever…no WAY!” or, after considering the question for a moment, “Okay. Mmmm. Lemme think. Astro-Glide? No. I don’t care how much money they’re offering. I ain’t endorsing that!” Like I said, I asked, “Where. Exactly. Is the line for you guys?”

The two of them looked at me like I had a vestigial twin hanging from my neck. Pityingly. They actually mocked me.

“Are you asking, ‘How much would I have to pay you to taste a booger?’” said one, as if talking to a child. The two of them resumed their conversation, comparing soft-drink money to frozen pasta dinners, as if I were no longer there. This, clearly, was a conversation for grown-ups, and they considered me too clueless, too dumb, too unsophisticated about the world to be included in the discussion.

They were right. What was I talking about anyway?

The notion of “selling out” is such a quaint one, after all. At what point exactly does one really sell out? To the would-be anarchist—invariably a white guy in dreadlocks, talking about forming a band and “keepin’ it real” while waiting for Mom and Dad to send a check—selling out is getting a job.

Certainly, anytime anyone gets up in the morning earlier than one would like, drags oneself across town to do things one wouldn’t ordinarily do in one’s leisure time for people one doesn’t particularly like—that would be selling out, whether that activity involves working in a coal mine, heating up macaroni and cheese at Popeye’s, or giving tug jobs to strangers in the back of a strip club. To my mind, they are all morally equivalent. (You do what you’ve got to do to get by.) While there is a certain stigma attached to sucking the cocks of strangers—because, perhaps, of particularly Western concepts of intimacy and religion—how different, how much worse, or more “wrong,” is it than plunging toilets, hosing down a slaughterhouse floor, burning off polyps, or endorsing Diet Coke? Who—given more options, better choices—would do any of those things?

Who in this world gets to do only what they want—and what they feel consistent with their principles—and get paid for it?

Well…I guess,
me
—until recently.

But wait. The second I sat down for an interview, or went out on the book tour to promote
Kitchen Confidential
…surely that was kind of selling out, right? I didn’t know Matt Lauer or Bryant Gumbel or any of these people. Why was I suddenly being nice to them? In what way was I different than a common whore, spending minutes, hours, eventually weeks of my rapidly waning life making nice to people I didn’t even know? You fuck somebody for money, it’s cash on the barrel. You pick up the money, you go home, you take a shower, and it’s gone—presumably having used as much emotional investment as a morning dump. But what about week after week of smiling, nodding your head, pretending to laugh, telling the same stories, giving the same answers as if they’d just—only now—occurred to you for the first time?

Who’s the ho now? Me. That’s who.

Jesus—I would have given Oprah a back rub and a bikini wax, had she asked me when her people called. Fifty-five thousand copies a minute—every minute Oprah’s talking about your book (according to industry legend)? I know few authors who wouldn’t. So I guess I knew—even back then—what my price was.

There’s that old joke, I’ve referred to it before, where the guy at the bar asks the girl if she’d fuck him for a million dollars—and she thinks about it and finally replies, “Well, I guess for a million dollars, yeah…” At which point he quickly offers her a dollar for the same service. “Fuck you!” she says, declining angrily. “You think I’d fuck you for a
dollar
? What do you think I am?” To which the guy says, “Well…we’ve already established you’re a whore. Now we’re just haggling over the price.”

It’s a crude, hateful, sexist wheezer of a joke—but it’s as applicable to men as to women. To chefs as to any other craftsmen, artists, or laborers.

What was my problem with my peers—no, my
betters
—grabbing the endorsement dollars left and right: the branded pots and pans, kitchen utensils, ghostwritten cookbooks, commercials for boil-in-a-bag dinners, toaster ovens, California raisins? I’d turned them all down.

I’d deluded myself for the longest time that there was…“integrity” involved…or something like that. But as soon as I became a daddy, I knew better.

I’d just been haggling over the price.

There’d never been any question of integrity—or ethics—or anything like that…For fuck’s sake, I’d stolen money from old ladies, sold my possessions on a blanket on the street for crack, hustled bad coke and bad pills, and done far worse in my life.

I started asking people about this. I needed guidance from people who’d been navigating these murky waters for years.

Among the more illuminating and poignant explanations, one came from—of all people—Emeril. We were guest hosts/roasters at a charity roast of a mutual friend, Mario Batali. In a quiet moment between dick jokes, we talked, as we sometimes do, me asking with genuine curiosity why he continued to do it. He was, at the time, being treated very shabbily by the Food Network—I could see that he’d been hurt by it—and I asked him why he gave a fuck. “You’ve got a large, well-respected restaurant empire…the cookbooks…the cookware line”—which is actually pretty high-quality stuff—“presumably you’ve got plenty of loot. Why go on? Why even care about television anymore—that silly show, the hooting audience of no-necked strangers? If I was you,” I went on, “it would take people two weeks to reach me on the phone…I’d be so far off the fucking grid, you’d never see me in shoes again…I’d live in a sarong somewhere where nobody would ever find me—all this? It would be a distant memory.”

He didn’t elaborate. He smiled tolerantly, then began listing the number of children, ex-wives, employees (in the hundreds) working for Emeril Inc., establishing for me in quick, broad—and slightly sad—strokes the sheer size of the Beast that had to be fed every day in order for him to be Responsible Emeril—and do right by all the people who’d helped him along the way and who now relied on him, in one form or another, for their living. His success had become an organic, ever-expanding thing, growing naturally larger, as it had to, for to shrink—or even stay the same—would be to die.

Mario has twelve restaurants and counting, watch and clog endorsements, the cookware, the books, the bobblehead doll, NASCAR affiliation, and God knows what else—nothing ever seems to be enough for the man. Above and beyond the fact that he raises millions of dollars for various charities—including his own—he’s clearly not in it for the money. Always expanding, always starting new partnerships, trying new concepts. In Mario’s case, I think, it’s about ego—and the fact that he’s got a restless mind. It’s not, and never was, enough—or even interesting—to Batali to make money. If that had been the case, he’d have never opened Babbo (or Casa Mono, or Del Posto, or Otto, or Esca); he’d have opened his version of Mario’s Old Spaghetti Factories, coast to coast—and been swimming in a sea of cash by now. No.