In Bed With The Right - April 21, 2026


Episode 131 [PATREON PREVIEW] -- Dining, Flavortowns and Gender

Topics
Guy Fieri masculinity
Episode 130 -- Elizabeth Cady Stanton Episode 132 -- ＂Repeal the 19th＂

Episode Stats


Length

23 minutes

Words per minute

190.11

Word count

4,525

Sentence count

301

Harmful content

Misogyny

11

sentences flagged

Toxicity

46

sentences flagged

Hate speech

22

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
00:00:00.000 Hello, I'm Adrienne Dopp.
00:00:07.400 And I'm Moira Donegan.
00:00:08.760 And whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.
00:00:13.920 So, Adrienne, this week, I reached out to you and I was like, hey, are we down to record?
00:00:20.200 You're doing your episode on Thomas Aquinas, right?
00:00:24.220 And you said, well, I might go in a different direction.
00:00:30.000 Yeah. So we replaced the sainted Thomas Aquinas with the mayor of Flavortown, Guy Fieri. It turned out not to be entirely a Guy Fieri episode, but it's about the question of gender, the figure of the chef and of cooking and of food. And I thought those are all things we like.
00:00:47.280 Now, we should say this is going to be a Patreon exclusive,
00:00:49.920 but we're giving our listeners more than a morsel,
00:00:53.520 more than an amuse-bouche, if you will,
00:00:54.980 more than really an appetizer,
00:00:56.860 but you're not getting the entree.
00:00:58.380 So you are welcome to check that out on the Patreon
00:01:01.520 and join us on patreon.com slash inbidwiththeright.
00:01:05.560 Or you can just wait for St. Thomas Aquinas,
00:01:07.240 the spinach that is coming next week.
00:01:10.640 Join us in Flavortown.
00:01:11.980 Yeah, you can join us in Flavortown
00:01:13.460 or get monastic with us next week.
00:01:16.880 It's your choice.
00:01:19.620 All right.
00:01:20.540 Yeah, so today is about food and masculinity.
00:01:23.480 And part of the reason I got interested in this was that people asked me about him because he's in the news currently.
00:01:30.080 And he's an interesting figure because, like, I always assumed that he was kind of a Trumpy guy.
00:01:35.020 But it's actually a little hard to tell how Trumpy this guy is.
00:01:38.380 What he got in trouble for is not really proximity to the Trump extended cinematic universe.
00:01:43.780 It is, I don't know if you followed this,
00:01:45.640 that he was in the news after a video
00:01:48.300 showing him with the Tate brothers.
00:01:50.560 Oh, God.
00:01:51.560 Manosphere superstars and noted human traffickers
00:01:54.400 at a UFC fight.
00:01:56.440 And a lot of fans of his were quite upset by this.
00:01:59.780 But it's important, right?
00:02:00.500 It's not sort of MAGA adjacency.
00:02:02.240 It's really Manosphere adjacency,
00:02:04.160 which is like a form of MAGA, obviously,
00:02:06.240 but it has to do with gender right there.
00:02:08.640 And Fieri responded.
00:02:10.360 I have here a tweet from Mayor Guy Fieri.
00:02:13.080 I don't know. This strains credulity to me.
00:02:39.200 I think Andrew Tate at this point is a pretty recognizable figure.
00:02:43.080 Sadly, he's not a fringe figure.
00:02:45.520 This guy is at the center of an ascendant political movement that has gained a lot of popularity.
00:02:51.200 He's got bazillions of followers, and a lot of them are guys a lot like Guy Fieri, guys in his age cohort, guys in his racial cohort. 0.98
00:03:00.480 This sounds like a cover your ass statement a bit to me. 0.54
00:03:04.360 Yeah, I think for the purposes of this podcast, I'm going to take him at his word and sort of think about that adjacency. 0.95
00:03:11.040 Think about the fact that he could cross paths with them and that maybe the alarm bells didn't go off in the moment and then went off afterwards.
00:03:17.560 I mean, because there's two things that are remarkable, right?
00:03:19.600 Like the obvious thing would be to be get off my back, I'm being canceled.
00:03:23.920 And that's not what he's doing here, right?
00:03:25.380 He is doing something that straight up MAGA figures tend not to do.
00:03:29.560 He's like, you know, I hate these people, right?
00:03:32.140 And that's kind of interesting.
00:03:33.040 He's trying to put daylight between himself and the manosphere.
00:03:37.160 And as you say, it feels a little disingenuous to whether he really doesn't know who they are.
00:03:41.440 Still, the rhetorical effort, I think, was to me kind of interesting.
00:03:45.520 And it gets at the, yeah, the hybridity of this man.
00:03:50.760 He's right-wing coded and he's populist coded in ways that are deeply gendered,
00:03:56.720 but he doesn't always end up in the predictable place.
00:03:58.840 And a lot of that has to do with the field that he works in and the kinds of people that he works with.
00:04:03.600 So today, it's going to be partly about Guy Fieri.
00:04:05.740 It's going to be also just about the figure of the chef and the gendered nature of that figure.
00:04:11.280 It's going to be about an industry that is sustained by immigrants and POC, whom this administration hates, 0.57
00:04:17.920 while at the same time having this kind of macho bad boy thing that like does lend itself to kind of manosphere politics.
00:04:23.660 But above all, I do want to talk about gender because Fieri wasn't at a Trump rally and photograph greeting Don Jr.
00:04:30.720 right he was at a UFC fight ding ding ding greeting two Manosphere influencers ding ding ding ding 0.74
00:04:36.120 yeah there's something about Guy Fieri where he is a parody of masculinity the way that like drag 0.90
00:04:45.880 queens are parodies of femininity you know he's like it's over the top it's self-consciously 1.00
00:04:51.380 excessive and for our listeners who can't imagine the figure of Guy Fieri maybe they're not like 0.98
00:04:57.020 immersed in the american pop culture of like the 90s and aughts that we grew up in adrian
00:05:02.220 but this is a guy who looks real over the top he really looks like somebody you would find on like
00:05:10.360 the side of a nascar automobile or like something sold in a plastic package in a gas station he's uh
00:05:18.160 he has frosted tips his hair is styled with a lot of gel into these like vertical spikes that he has
00:05:24.580 dyed really platinum blonde like marilyn monroe blonde but just at the ends he's kind of like
00:05:30.260 rotund he's not an especially tall guy but he's a round guy he's really red-faced and sunburned all
00:05:35.980 the time like he spends a lot of time outside in a southern state perhaps and he wears wraparound
00:05:41.780 sunglasses and big spacious polyester button-down shirts that always have flames on them always got
00:05:49.940 flames. And it's very much like an eight year old boy's idea of a cool guy, you know, and he's
00:05:54.520 always riding motorcycles or shouting with enthusiasm. He's famous for a Food Network
00:06:01.080 show called Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, where he really like revels in highway culture. There's a
00:06:07.980 lot about like old cars, but there's really a lot about these restaurants that are cheap, greasy
00:06:13.680 spoons that are sort of elevating or he is seeking to with his, you know, show's attention to these
00:06:18.960 spots. Like elevate the sort of creative grossness of American fast food and American like
00:06:23.940 vernacular food. Yeah. So maybe let's first talk about the food culture that his media persona
00:06:31.380 comes out of. Because I think there's three things going on here. You have the chef as a social
00:06:36.520 institution, right? Fieri did come up as a chef, right? Or as a restaurateur. And of course, the
00:06:42.180 chef is a person who performs publicly something that usually happens behind closed doors and in
00:06:47.420 the home. So there's already an interesting kind of gendered component there. You're watching 1.00
00:06:51.780 someone perform something that normally you don't tend to, unless it's one of those architectural
00:06:57.120 things where like you can look into the kitchen or whatever, like a door swings open and you hear
00:07:02.060 shouts and like it's happening behind that door. So the chef is also kind of an interestingly
00:07:06.300 gendered performance, right? The chef sort of takes something that traditionally has been
00:07:12.200 feminized labor, right? Preparing food for other people with a sweaty brow and masculizes it, 0.74
00:07:18.340 makes it swole, makes it macho, et cetera, et cetera, right? Like a lot of the new food culture
00:07:23.560 right down to the like, yes, chef. It has a kind of feeling of the military unit. Like it's meaning
00:07:29.480 to swole-ify something that they all know is not in the end that swole. You're making a rue. It's
00:07:34.460 not, it's not fucking, you're not deadlifting, you know? Yeah. There's a, the Lady Dolph protests 0.95
00:07:39.900 too much quality a little bit 0.77
00:07:42.180 to some of the attempts
00:07:43.160 to masculinize the chef as a figure
00:07:46.640 and to like really lean into
00:07:48.360 the physical and psychological extremity
00:07:51.860 of working in fine dining, especially.
00:07:53.840 Yeah, there's a very funny parody of this
00:07:55.860 in The Soul Extended in Philadelphia
00:07:57.280 where they do a parody of the bear.
00:07:59.580 All right, chili flakes, please.
00:08:01.700 Wait, what?
00:08:02.520 I need the chili flakes, please see them.
00:08:04.220 Yeah, I see them.
00:08:05.040 Yes, chef.
00:08:05.800 What?
00:08:06.340 Say yes, chef.
00:08:07.680 Why?
00:08:08.200 Because the steaks are very high.
00:08:10.820 You know, this is high-stakes stuff.
00:08:12.180 Steaks are what?
00:08:13.100 Cooking!
00:08:14.020 It's life and death stuff, man.
00:08:15.540 I need you to say yes, chef.
00:08:17.500 Sorry, but steaks aren't that high.
00:08:19.580 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:08:20.000 Like, we have shows about the space program, you know, like...
00:08:22.520 Yeah, it's like, you should not be this stressed out over a lemon curd.
00:08:25.980 Yeah.
00:08:26.420 You're not saving lives.
00:08:29.340 But my perception is that the celebrity chef has existed for a long time,
00:08:32.820 but this machismo is kind of a new thing.
00:08:36.020 It's a historic thing.
00:08:36.880 It's happened during our lifetime.
00:08:38.540 And I think we can really trace it back to sort of the late 90s with figures like Anthony Bourdain, who's often positioned as sort of the anti-Guy Fieri, I would say.
00:08:46.480 Yeah, there was something of a transition, I think, in the like early media chef figures, which were, you know, people like Julia Child down to like Martha Stewart, who were pitching themselves to women as sort of like aspirational models that are going to teach you how to be a better homemaker and hostess.
00:09:02.540 And the male celebrity chef is doing something different.
00:09:04.980 It's much more about like the outside world beyond the home.
00:09:08.140 It's about adventure.
00:09:09.600 And it's about unmasking, like what's really going on, like before you get that delicious
00:09:13.860 bowl of food, right?
00:09:15.180 So Anthony Bourdain published Don't Eat Before Reading This in The New Yorker in 1999.
00:09:20.100 And he followed it up with Kitchen Confidential, which is like a huge book in 2000.
00:09:25.720 And that sort of brings in the age of the bad boy chef.
00:09:30.780 So this is Bobby Flay of Mesa Grill. 0.98
00:09:33.620 This is Gordon Ramsay, him of dressing everyone down and telling people that their food sucks.
00:09:39.860 And eventually Guy Fieri sort of joins that crop.
00:09:42.620 They all had like little catchphrases, right?
00:09:44.880 This was actually a pretty crowded market in the late 90s and early aughts.
00:09:48.360 So there was like, Emerald, kick it up a notch.
00:09:51.240 You know, they would do like weird, like weird ethnic pantomimes sometimes. 0.99
00:09:56.380 Or like they all had their little sliver of the market, right? 0.99
00:09:58.880 So like Mario Batali was really pitching a European style sensualism, right?
00:10:04.980 And Anthony Bourdain was really going for this kind of internationalist cosmopolitanism.
00:10:10.040 And Guy Fieri was really the like American kitsch version.
00:10:13.580 That was his niche.
00:10:14.960 So I would actually argue that from people like Mario Batali or Emeril Lagasse or Julia Child or Martin Yan, et cetera, et cetera, to these guys, there's actually a real shift.
00:10:24.840 and it has to do with ethnicity
00:10:25.960 because there's a turn of the cooking show
00:10:29.220 towards the documentary.
00:10:30.560 I'm not showing you how to do it.
00:10:31.660 I'm letting you watch it being done.
00:10:33.420 The chef becomes an explorer of other people's cuisines
00:10:37.180 as opposed to the kind of Julia Child, Martin Yan, etc. model
00:10:40.340 where someone is an ambassador for that cuisine, right?
00:10:44.720 PBS used to have this.
00:10:45.840 Like they had a guy doing the Chinese food,
00:10:47.740 the guy doing the Italian food.
00:10:49.340 And that stops.
00:10:50.560 They stop being ambassadors.
00:10:52.080 They start becoming explorers.
00:10:53.480 The chef is a discoverer or a bit of a Columbus who is going into other people's kitchen and sort of like exploring what's going on there. 0.72
00:11:02.380 Most of these guys are white men and whiteness in a kind of emphatically generic way. 0.51
00:11:07.120 They're no longer ambassadors of a specific ethnic tradition in terms of cooking. 0.75
00:11:12.120 They are the white guy who's getting things explained to them, right?
00:11:16.760 Andrew Zimmern in Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern does not show up as a guy who's steeped in the Jewish cooking tradition, which he was.
00:11:23.080 he shows up as like a white guy 0.99
00:11:24.820 who eats a fucking scorpion. 1.00
00:11:26.880 Bourdain also is unmarked, right? 1.00
00:11:28.680 His background is in French cooking,
00:11:30.580 but he's always sort of like the outsider
00:11:32.460 that you're explaining things to.
00:11:34.380 And I think the same is actually true for Guy Fieri.
00:11:36.680 They all come with an unmarked whiteness
00:11:39.040 that then makes them the perfect sponge
00:11:41.660 for other cuisines, right? 0.91
00:11:44.240 And that is different from the Julia Child model
00:11:46.200 who's like, I went to France, 1.00
00:11:47.760 I learned how to fucking cook this shit. 1.00
00:11:49.480 Now listen to me explain to you 1.00
00:11:50.860 how to flip a fucking omelet, right? 0.99
00:11:52.140 That's not what they do. 1.00
00:11:53.680 Right.
00:11:53.820 The shift from the ethnic ambassador to the explorer is, I think, a gender shift, right? 0.60
00:12:00.320 Because the ethnic ambassador is somebody who's telling you what their grandma showed them, right?
00:12:04.760 In the home during their childhood.
00:12:07.380 That is always their sort of origin story.
00:12:10.180 Yeah.
00:12:10.420 For a long time, like every restaurant was named like Nona's or like Patilda's.
00:12:14.780 And it's like, oh, he named it after his grandmother who immigrated. 0.51
00:12:17.660 You know, that was like the story at every fucking fancy restaurant in – I'm dating myself as somebody who like lived in Brooklyn in 2010. 0.93
00:12:27.600 But you know what I'm saying, right? 0.90
00:12:28.680 And the shift to the Explorer model is obviously like kind of a neo-colonial gesture, right?
00:12:34.820 But the whiteness of the Explorer celebrity chef presumes the whiteness of his audience, the American-ness of his audience.
00:12:42.960 And something that always struck me about Guy Fieri was that he is both sort of pantomiming authenticity, but also ushering in a clearly like foreign audience when he's going to these American like roadside kitsch places, right?
00:12:57.620 He both wants to be the guy who wrestles the crocs in Florida, you know, so to speak, or like eats armadillo in West Texas.
00:13:05.360 But he's kind of showing that to you, the nerd from New York, right?
00:13:09.500 There's a little bit of a coastal voyeur onto the, like, American heartland that's happening in his show, I think.
00:13:17.220 Yeah, and I think we should say that this is important, that this is only happening on TV.
00:13:21.360 I mean, I agree with you with the Nana's wave and the, like, this reminds me of my childhood garden. 1.00
00:13:25.900 It's like, fuck your childhood garden. 1.00
00:13:27.160 Just give me a bowl of soup. 1.00
00:13:28.840 But every chef I've ever talked to, like, will obviously talk about their family background and the way cooking was integrated into its life.
00:13:36.380 It makes a lot of sense.
00:13:38.180 it's the shift happens in the media ecosystem
00:13:40.300 around these people,
00:13:41.480 like how they are presented,
00:13:42.960 how something like the Food Network decides to,
00:13:45.180 which was a series of cooking shows,
00:13:47.560 how they sort of enter into the reality TV age.
00:13:50.800 Guy Fieri's shows like Bourdain's,
00:13:52.860 like Andrew Zimmern's,
00:13:54.200 are reality shows with cooking in them.
00:13:56.560 They are no longer cooking shows.
00:13:58.000 So this is really about our media environment,
00:14:00.400 I think more so than how actual restaurants work.
00:14:03.280 I would bet that someone who opens a restaurant in 2026
00:14:05.740 also flashes back to how their parents cooked her,
00:14:09.280 their grandparents cooked her, how they like to eat.
00:14:11.380 But in some way, the Bourdain moment was sort of like,
00:14:14.060 we don't care about that anymore.
00:14:15.980 We want to have someone else's Nona describe to us 1.00
00:14:18.160 how she makes the perfect cannoli, right? 0.92
00:14:20.440 Right.
00:14:20.900 But this is also this unmarked position
00:14:22.600 of the kind of Columbus-ing outsider
00:14:24.960 who's white, male, and kind of bro-y, right?
00:14:29.700 It's like enjoying a good beer.
00:14:31.600 Like, Bourdain would often have to do shots
00:14:33.620 on his show or whatever, right?
00:14:35.140 Like he always would flash back to like how he did heroin there at some point.
00:14:38.220 And you're like, okay, cool.
00:14:39.320 He's like, I'm in Istanbul where I did heroin last time I was here. 0.99
00:14:41.560 And like, okay, can we get to the fucking food, man? 0.98
00:14:44.020 I mean, I should say I love Anthony Bourdain. 0.97
00:14:45.960 And so like, please don't send me any emails.
00:14:47.620 I love that man.
00:14:48.540 But it was very noticeable.
00:14:49.640 Like there's a kind of tortured masculinity at the center of it.
00:14:53.060 Right.
00:14:53.220 That's being very deliberately performed and emphasized, right?
00:14:56.220 Yeah.
00:14:56.500 Bourdain was marketing a little bit.
00:14:57.900 It was at the forefront of his persona.
00:15:00.160 Yeah.
00:15:00.620 Right.
00:15:00.880 I mean, like his books were all memoirs, right?
00:15:02.540 They're all about this.
00:15:03.380 I do think it's also worth mentioning that Bourdain's show, which was first Chef's Journey, then No Reservations, then Parts Unknown.
00:15:12.160 Yes.
00:15:12.640 He would start these off with these almost like prose poems about the place that he was going.
00:15:18.660 Time. Venice's seeming timelessness.
00:15:21.640 The assumption that, well, she's been here, she surely always will be, is a central irony.
00:15:27.420 Like it really had a, I want to say beat, or like it had like new journalism feel to it.
00:15:31.600 Yeah.
00:15:31.800 And some of it was quite impressive.
00:15:33.060 There's a really impressive episode, I think, where he's in Beirut and there's an Israeli attack.
00:15:37.260 And CNN is like, you got to get home.
00:15:38.720 He's like, no, we're going to see how people cook while they're under rocket mortar fire, basically.
00:15:44.220 On the one hand, like, I think that's very commendable.
00:15:46.700 If more of our media did that, I think we'd have less mortar fire in the world. 0.59
00:15:50.300 On the other hand, it's also like definitely a gender performance.
00:15:53.420 This is a kind of war correspondent machismo that, you know, the recent movie Civil War, I think, very clearly explored.
00:16:00.160 But I think this kind of position
00:16:01.740 has actually come under pressure in recent years
00:16:04.000 in really interesting ways.
00:16:05.360 And that's what makes Fieri kind of a relic
00:16:07.360 because I think this moment came and went.
00:16:09.760 I think one place I would point you to,
00:16:11.280 I don't know, do you watch Top Chef at all?
00:16:13.160 I have never seen Top Chef, actually. 1.00
00:16:15.160 Oh, shit. Okay. 0.99
00:16:16.260 Top Chef has been on since 2006,
00:16:18.340 has run for 23 seasons at this point.
00:16:20.400 I think there might even be some extra seasons
00:16:22.960 of like, you know, All Stars, blah, blah, blah.
00:16:24.780 But I think there's been 23 sort of mainline seasons.
00:16:27.880 And I've watched all of them.
00:16:28.960 it's a big part of my years when a new Top Chef season comes out.
00:16:32.580 They're not all great, but I don't know.
00:16:34.860 Watching someone fuck up a risotto, it really just, it palms me. 0.80
00:16:38.240 It centers me. 0.98
00:16:40.080 Like, ah, my life may be a shambles, 0.99
00:16:42.460 but this man just fucked up a risotto royally. 0.99
00:16:46.520 But yeah, it's very funny. 0.91
00:16:47.880 That show started around the same time as Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern,
00:16:53.700 which ran forever, and it just, like, put its protagonists through a gauntlet of, like, 0.99
00:16:57.440 Andrew Zimmern eats testicles. 0.99
00:16:58.780 Like every other episode I've ever seen of it was like, and we're in Spain, we're eating testicles. 0.99
00:17:02.660 It's like, okay, at some point it wears out, it's welcome.
00:17:05.540 Like Joe Rogan wants its bit back, please.
00:17:08.000 But here's the thing, the early seasons of Top Chef clearly came out of this sort of early reality.
00:17:14.160 It's a reality show competition, like Project Runway, et cetera, et cetera, right?
00:17:17.540 And it's cast as very high drama, right?
00:17:19.660 It's a potboiler.
00:17:20.620 It's not just like, oh, I'm cooking, I'm making a meal, I'm going to enjoy this process. 1.00
00:17:25.320 And then this result, it's like, fuck you. 1.00
00:17:28.780 I'm cooking. I'm cooking fast. I'm cooking with a really big flame. I'm cooking something that's 1.00
00:17:33.700 like super duper spicy. You know, there's a lot of extremity and like artificial urgency around it.
00:17:38.520 So there is some of that. But interestingly, the bad boy behavior has really been dialed down.
00:17:43.500 So when Top Chef first premiered, this was also the time of like Iron Chef, right, where people
00:17:47.940 would enter into the ring, right? Like where cooking competitions sort of merged with, in fact,
00:17:52.160 UFC fights. It became a combative performance. And early seasons of Top Chef are all like that.
00:17:57.780 it's all these awful macho bros bro-ing out and yelling at each other and like trying to clearly
00:18:04.340 create drama with a kind of heavy-handedness that frankly the real housewives of salt lake city 0.98
00:18:09.660 would find embarrassing don't take it on me and think i'm gonna shake your hand like everything's
00:18:14.380 everything that's not how i am you want to know what i would have been a man about it and you 0.95
00:18:19.880 would have bitched like a little girl okay like you've been doing all day i'm gonna go home now 0.99
00:18:24.400 I don't give a **** what you do. 0.98
00:18:28.180 I'm here to do my best. 0.83
00:18:29.580 You do your best.
00:18:30.880 We'll see what happens, all right?
00:18:34.560 And that's gone away.
00:18:36.320 Okay.
00:18:36.700 Like, there's still, as you say,
00:18:37.960 manufactured pressure.
00:18:38.900 It is a reality show,
00:18:39.680 but it's very noticeable
00:18:40.620 that the contestants largely
00:18:42.000 are there for each other.
00:18:43.760 We'll sort of be like,
00:18:44.200 you need help, et cetera, et cetera.
00:18:45.620 So there's been a real shift.
00:18:47.380 And I do think it's not because
00:18:48.700 these people are somehow nicer.
00:18:50.180 It's because the producers realized
00:18:51.680 that people were tiring of the shenanigans
00:18:53.940 and they wanted something a little bit more uplifting.
00:18:56.920 And so there are, especially the COVID seasons of Top Chef
00:18:59.660 are just like almost a little treacly.
00:19:02.160 People who are just like, I'm just so happy.
00:19:03.740 I don't care if I'm getting voted off this week.
00:19:05.580 I'm just happy.
00:19:06.440 I'm once again cooking around other chefs.
00:19:07.980 It was really, it's been really hard at home, right?
00:19:09.920 Just like cooking for myself.
00:19:10.980 And you're like, whoa, okay.
00:19:12.180 That's a very different kind of vibe from like,
00:19:14.220 yo bro, I'm boiling here.
00:19:16.120 Yeah, I think about this a lot with television.
00:19:17.780 It's like, if television functions largely as escapism,
00:19:21.460 the products that are going to be successful
00:19:23.280 are the ones that are best attuned to what people are trying to escape from. So in historical
00:19:27.460 moments, when there's a lot of, I don't know, like stagnance or enemy or stability, people might be
00:19:33.880 looking for more excitement, right? And pressure and the fantasy of having a sense of higher stakes
00:19:39.480 in their lives. And that's not really the moment we're at now, right? Like my escapism is like,
00:19:44.560 oh, I want to see competent people with good intentions trying to be nice to each other.
00:19:48.780 Like, what would that be like? Yeah. I have enough of the shouting in the real world. You
00:19:52.320 know what i mean i mean there might be kind of a zeitgeist shift like that i think that's true
00:19:55.500 i mean there's also the much more pedestrian possibility that someone at bravo watched great
00:20:00.720 british bake-off which is like sweet to a fault right where everyone's like so we're such good
00:20:05.020 friends like you guys know each other for a date i can't be true but that's the pandemic effect
00:20:09.340 the great british bake-off and and ted lasso that kind of like aggressive gentleness you know like
00:20:16.420 everybody is a kindergarten teacher on these shows well uh but great british bake-off started
00:20:21.260 it in 2010 or food heads among us know this so i think it's i think it's also that that was a
00:20:28.100 public broadcaster initially right i think it moved over to channel four at a later date like
00:20:33.100 they didn't feel as comfortable like having people just cussing each other out on the bbc
00:20:36.240 they've got gordon ramsay for that and also i think it's that the gordon ramsay lane was taken
00:20:40.580 of just like yeah so for listeners who are not familiar with the his stick it's just
00:20:44.380 dripping vicious put downs he just saunters into people's and what is it called kitchen nightmares
00:20:50.700 he like saunters into like these bed and breakfasts 1.00
00:20:53.220 and basically he's like this place fucking sucks 0.99
00:20:55.140 there's a roach in my pavlova 1.00
00:20:57.240 or whatever and it's just like 1.00
00:20:58.760 god damn it this guy sucks 0.99
00:21:00.680 and so maybe it was just in England that the lane of the 1.00
00:21:03.100 celebrity chef asshole was taken 1.00
00:21:04.820 so they're like well okay we'll make 0.99
00:21:06.700 Paul Hollywood nice and we'll just
00:21:08.780 have people being really sweet to each
00:21:10.920 other but it's this interesting shift
00:21:12.760 right like on the one hand the
00:21:14.660 macho bad boy stuff is
00:21:16.820 about teaching people oh it can
00:21:18.980 be like swole or it can be like masculine to cook right it can be an expression of like pure
00:21:25.380 testosterone right you have to cook out in the heat at 110 degrees in this lower desert and you're
00:21:31.000 like why why would you do that get them a tent whereas like in the great british bake-off they
00:21:34.700 also have inevitably one bake where it's too hot and all the cakes sort of fall down and it was
00:21:38.860 like oh dear oh no right like they're not like oh no they're just like they're dripping they're
00:21:43.940 like bleeding you know so there is exactly this kind of self-mortification like you yeah you
00:21:48.900 mortify that boar but you also mortify your own flesh in a certain way but there is this also
00:21:54.640 this other way of like gender and labor starts of intersecting in weird ways through the figure of
00:22:01.700 people like Bourdain so first of throughout his travel shows Bourdain actually sort of starts
00:22:07.440 really distancing himself from the kind of macho behavior oh interesting and will sort of problematize
00:22:13.440 and thematize that.
00:22:14.180 He'll usually,
00:22:14.840 he often will seek out
00:22:15.880 sort of female chefs
00:22:17.340 to guide him through 1.00
00:22:18.440 like Istanbul or Rome
00:22:20.040 or whatever.
00:22:20.740 He often likes having like
00:22:22.660 these more sort of
00:22:24.000 thoughtful colleagues
00:22:25.140 like Eric Gripere,
00:22:26.480 the man who eventually
00:22:27.200 would trigger warning
00:22:28.200 but find his,
00:22:29.460 when he died.
00:22:30.900 Yeah.
00:22:31.860 Right.
00:22:32.380 Like, so he relies
00:22:33.540 sort of on people
00:22:34.720 who have a kind of
00:22:36.220 pensive attitude
00:22:37.460 towards food,
00:22:38.280 a more emotional side
00:22:39.220 towards food.
00:22:39.880 It's not like,
00:22:40.800 it's like he took me
00:22:41.420 to the craziest dive in town,
00:22:43.280 right?
00:22:43.440 Like he's, it's partly probably because Guy Fieri is around and he's like, I don't want to do that.
00:22:47.420 And so it is this kind of more cerebral and then a less gendered way of engaging with the craft of cooking.
00:22:54.160 But there is also like this other aspect of it, which I'd love to hear how you think about gender, labor and cooking in this particular instance.
00:23:04.820 Are you familiar with the great Kwanzaa cake fiasco of 2010?
00:23:09.460 Uh, Kwanzaa cake?
00:23:13.440 All right, everyone, that's going to be the part that we're releasing on the main feed for this
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00:23:46.660 Thanks so much
00:23:47.180 and see you next time.