The 30 Minute Presidency

The 30 Minute Presidency
By Mariana Aguirre

The first time I watched Rachael Ray’s show 30 Minute Meals, I was immediately annoyed by her. I am not sure what did it— her cute names for food (EVOO or sammies or jambalika, anyone?), her giggles, or her peppy attitude. Actually, it was the fact that her show is a travesty of cooking. In 30 Minute Meals, she attempts to prepare a full dinner that people who do not know how to cook can replicate at home. As a somewhat decent cook myself, “I already know how to do that.” In fact, I do it almost everyday. I can cook pasta and sauce from scratch, or meat and a side, or make a salad in about half an hour without emitting annoying coos. In an ill-equipped kitchen. Apparently, the rest of America (or at least a sizeable portion of Food Network viewers) cannot, since Ray is one of the most famous Food Network people. The fact that she is so prominent within a network dedicated to food filled with actual chefs such as Emeril Lagasse or Mario Battali is baffling. It seems that America likes its women cooks to be stupid.

In many ways, Rachael Ray’s success is a reaction against Martha Stewart’s overachieving and intimidating personality. Martha overwhelms her viewers with countless cooking tips, such as breaking an egg into a small bowl before adding it to a mixing bowl just in case it is bad or bloody (which makes sense, except that I have only encountered one bloody egg all my life), or running segments in her programs about overpriced kitchen equipment. I cannot say, however, that I have learned any skills from Rachael Ray. The only one of her teachings I remember is that she keeps a bowl to put her trash in, which is meant to save her from constant trips to the trash can. The thing is, I keep my trash can near the cutting area—that allows me to avoid having another bowl to wash—and I actually do not have a 30-minute limit on preparing dinner. Other things that she does that might be useful were things that my Mom told me or that I learned out of sheer laziness and being single. Due to my horror of not having a fully stocked fridge and pantry at all times I usually have enough things at hand to make some sort of salad or pasta dish. Moreover, if you cook in large enough quantities for a half hour one day, dinner the next day takes three minutes to reheat in the microwave. In fact, this is what millions of busy people all over the world do—if they refuse to eat takeout or frozen dinners on a regular basis that is. Maybe my Mom should get a show—she used to cook enough on Saturday so we could have 3 course lunches everyday. She also worked full time. But I guess a 3 hour cooking marathon does not make a good pilot.

Rachael Ray’s other show, 40 Dollars A Day, is also exasperating. It offends me because she gets to travel and eat, but also because her budget seems outrageous. Clearly, anyone with half a brain and 40 dollars can eat very well in most European cities. Before the Euro struck I was able to eat very well in Italy for 20 dollars a day. The show’s inflated budget points to the fact that 30 Minute Meals did not even promote savings—many of her shortcuts depend on using pre-cut, pre-washed vegetables and canned or frozen food, which are more expensively priced than regular produce.

One refreshing thing about Rachael Ray is the fact that she is not hung up on ingredients—thus sparing me Marcella Hazan’s scorn whenever the latter mentions that ingredients I buy routinely, such as capers or tuna in olive oil will never be as good as those in Italy. Conversely, Rachael Ray is not versatile enough to use ingredients in a way that would allow her to compete in Iron Chef, since routinely chopping up vegetables and frying them with ground beef to serve on top of pasta is not very good training for cooking a five-course meal intended to showcase a surprise ingredient.

What is the source of Rachael Ray’s popularity, then? Part of it must be her “sex appeal”—as demonstrated by a very disturbing set of pictures published in FHM. Need link The juxtaposition between seduction and sweetness in the pictures, especially evident in the shot of her licking a chocolate covered spoon (above), partly explains this. Although she is depicted in the kitchen in the act of cooking, Rachael Ray does not appear here as a chef, but rather as someone’s wife, who happened to get naughty while she was baking for the kids. Indeed, Isaac Mizrahi himself, has described her as “America’s sweetheart.” [Ed’s note: that name is taken, isn’t it?] In many ways, Rachael Ray is the Food Network’s sweetheart, if by sweetheart we mean a white and healthy woman who is non-threatening to men (see Meg Ryan, for example). Compared to the other women regularly featured in the network, she is relatively accessible, and most importantly, young. She is not obsessively attentive to detail, like the castrating Martha Stewart. Neither does she possess Ina Garten’s cliquish nature, reinforced by a home in the Hamptons and guests who happen to be stylish gay men. Sarah Moulton is also approachable, but too old to pose for FHM, not that she would do that, since she has a magazine of her own (Gourmet) to edit. Clearly, Rachael Ray’s appeal lies in that she is silly and average and most importantly, will never make you eat anything you do not like or suggest doing anything in the kitchen that seems like a waste of time but actually makes a difference, such as making homemade broth. She is comfortable creating nothing new because her audience does not demand it. When she gets ‘creative’ she waters down ‘ethnic food,’ such as that one time she decided to make Chinese food at home in order to make a healthier version of take out (which of course drove me to order Chinese food, hoping to get as much fat, salt and MSG as I could).

Rachael Ray’s ‘sweetheart factor’ was key to her success, and most importantly, it extended into the Food Network’s airing more shows featuring youngish women, such as Giada De Laurentis from Everyday Italian and Sandra Lee from Semi-Homemade Cooking With Sandra Lee. The latter is a taller, thinner, blond Rachael Ray straight out of a University of Wisconsin at Madison sorority. Because she has children, a husband and her lady friends to entertain, her recipes are even simpler than Ray’s, making her show almost as useless, except for the fact that she regularly features recipes for cocktails, which I appreciate. In a sense, she is the married version to single girl Rachael Ray, and must plan her husband’s tailgates and kids’ parties. This has led her to propose strange recipes—not long ago she crumbled up a whole, perfectly decent store-bought apple pie, stuffed it into baked puff pastry and threatened to top it with a concoction of whipped cream and cinnamon (I believe—I changed the channel once I realized what she was attempting). She is the Food Network’s desperate housewife, who is somehow too busy to actually cook, a latter version of Rachael Ray’s very New Jersey Sex and the City gal. Now that Rachael Ray is married, I wonder why she has not updated her show to a full hour so that she has time to pack a lunch for her husband and kids.

Rachael Ray’s status as a woman within the world male chefs in the Food Network is further underscored by her feminine, old fashioned kitchen. The retro decorations (including a very strange looking microwave) cue the viewer into the kind of her space her kitchen is—a woman’s domain. See Gale Gand’s kitchen on Sweet Dreams for another version of an old-fashioned, female kitchen. Bobby Flay, whose passive-aggressiveness fascinates me to no end, gets to grill (a male task, of course) from the terrace of his expensively furnished Manhattan apartment, while Emeril’s kitchen emulates Oprah’s set, serving as a shrine to himself. Together with her non-threatening persona and the boring approach to cooking she promotes (nothing too fancy, cook it as soon as possible so you can eat it and watch TV), Ray’s kitchen establishes her status within the Food Network as a dilettante, a woman who cooks, presumably for a male partner, not to amaze or because she particularly enjoys it, but rather because whether she stays at home or works, that is her lot in life. Namely, to exist as a practical homemaker and cute cook/girlfriend. It is sad to see that she is the most successful woman within a network of mostly male expert chefs who own restaurants, edit food magazines and compete against each other in Iron Chef America. Martha, of course, is more famous but her career had grown before her show was featured in the Food Network. Although she is a very successful businesswoman, Rachael Ray has made a lot of money by playing a white middle class woman who has been relegated to the kitchen and has to make do.

This article (it costs money) from the New York Times also underscores her persona—her success seems to be accidental, and she is portrayed as a helpless gal who is finally making it, not as someone who has worked hard to reach her goals.

Given that the status of food in America is so contradictory—obesity and malnutrition coexist, chain restaurants bloom as well as organic farms multiply—it is interesting to compare it to politics. Despite her show and persona, Rachael Ray is not stupid. Rather, she has made a success out of herself by playing a stupid girl who happens to cook—much in the same way that George W got to be president by being a ‘regular guy.’ And by regular guy I mean someone who did badly in school, had no interest in foreign travel and was routinely unable to make something of himself without his family’s help. Further, they exemplify America’s attraction and utter indifference to food and politics—which allow ignorant individuals to teach one how to cook and run the country.

In general terms it is extremely disturbing that two of the most successful people in their respective domains, Ray and Bush owe their status not to their skills and experience, but rather, due to their ability to tap into an everyman-woman quality that is so appealing to middle America. It is telling that this is a country in which both food and politics have turned into spectacle, in which pretending to be a fool in order to be win an election does not even matter because one can lose elections and still become president, a country in which ketchup was a vegetable, pasta might come out of a can and a fast food Mexican restaurant advertises a turkey club taco. It is clear then, that our culture is not interested in skills, or results, but rather, wants to be entertained, reassured and coddled. Thankfully, as a woman, as long as I put something edible on the table and act pleasant, I can be someone’s sweetheart . After all, it only takes one more minute to fix a dry martini.

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