How Do You Cook without Taste Buds?

Among the several vices to which I am sadly subject is, of all things, cooking shows.  I say "of all things" because I am one of those incompetents in the kitchen of whom it is often said "He could burn water."  Accurately.

The assumption would be that I watch those shows because I am trying to learn to be better in the kitchen than I am, and you might say there is a grain of truth therein.  But it is definitely not the reason.  That would be supported by the fact that essentially all the cooking shows that we do watch are of the competition variety, and there are at least half a dozen of which we are fans.  Competition is, of course, fun.

One such show stars the very widely-known and successful UK chef named Gordon Ramsay.  Ramsay, as you probably know, has several shows running during the year, sometimes simultaneously.  He has a foul mouth; not in the sense that he is a creative user of profanity, but in that he uses it all the time -- except when the competing chefs are children (as on his "Master Chef Junior" show).  I mean "all the time", certainly by television standards.  There's a whole lot of bleeping going on when Ramsay is going strong.

One of his shows is called "H--l's Kitchen" (forgive me), and has been on the air for many seasons now.  The show takes place in an actual operating restaurant with the same name as the show.  It features, initially, some 16 contestants, all of whom are cooks or chefs of some kind, working professionally in the USA preparing food.  Most are either chefs, sous chefs, line cooks, cooking instructors or something of that nature, so they live in kitchens for the most part.

The premise of the show is simple.  Initially the contestants are put in two teams, men and women.  Each week there is a team cooking challenge of some kind, usually preparing some dish or other, or doing a blind ingredient taste test, something like that.  The winning team gets a reward like a dinner at some four-star restaurant, or helicopter ride to a winery, or something else really nice.  The losing team spends the day in the kitchen of the operating restaurant, peeling eight billion potatoes or carrying sacks of rice all day -- something awful.

Then at night the two teams each man their own kitchen while the restaurant opens and Ramsay screams and yells at them as they invariably screw up.  Whichever team has the worse dinner service nominates two of its team members for elimination, and one is picked by Ramsay to get sent home.  That's pretty much it.  Presumably between dinner services there is also a lot of training going on; at least I hope there is.

All of that, of course, is predicate.  The point of this piece is about none of the activities above, and all about the scenes where the contestants are resting in their dorms upstairs between dinner services, or are up there picking whom to nominate for elimination.  That's because in those scenes, each and every season, at least half of the contestants are smoking.

Now, I have no idea what California law covers as far as smoking in a residential dorm is concerned, and to be honest, I don't really care very much.  What does bother me, more than you can imagine, is that each and every season, most of the people selected to be on this show -- about food, mind you -- are smokers.

I do not for a minute believe that their tobacco addiction in any way influences their selection.  Rather, I take it as logical that among the pool of candidate cooks, the people selected for the show are a representative sample of the food-preparation profession in the USA.  I say that for two reasons.  First, the outcome, in terms of percentage of smokers in every season's contestants, is the same, over and over.  Second, if someone is trying to promote smoking as a good thing to do, well, showing the assemblage of morons that 80% of the contestants are would turn anyone away from tobacco.  Good Lord, are they idiots.

So here's the real point.  When I go to a restaurant, I should expect food served from a clean kitchen, with recipes designed by actual executive chefs with actual, you know, taste buds.  If I am to extrapolate, from the herd of losers competing on this show, who is designing dishes at the average American restaurant, I don't know what to think.  Do you know what smoking does to the senses?  Who the heck wants to eat food conceived and then rendered by people whose sense of taste is warped by tobacco consumption?

What is also interesting is that I cannot recall in the many seasons of this show, Ramsay, who never smoked, ever castigating any of the contestants for their habit.  And yet back in 2011, when asked why so many contestants failed to master the small number of dishes consistently served in the show's kitchen, he answered, "I think a majority of them smoke, which I think is disgusting.  It's like, would you go to a doctor who smoked six cigarettes a day?"

I don't get smoking, and never have.  I don't want to be around people who do smoke, and I immediately lower my opinion some when I hear that someone does smoke.  I also have contempt for fellow conservatives when they try to defend tobacco companies and smoking, as I have written here.  So it's pretty sad to come to the realization that when you go out to eat, you can expect it more than likely that the food will be prepared by a tobacco addict.  Yuk.

Fortunately, my Best Girl is a remarkable, creative person when cooking, and bans me from helping in the kitchen (for good reason).  And she, needless to say, does not smoke.  Bless her.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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