You want a piece of Bruschetta? Oh, baby talk dirty, say gouda...

I was out to lunch this afternoon with a dear friend of mine, although she will attest otherwise (as you will see shortly), at a local pizzeria here in Providence. We were sitting down and over the bar was a solitary TV (or eye raper if you prefer). I love food, (see my previous comment about endomorphism) I like how it is prepared and how it is presented there isn't much I don't like about food, except anchiovies on pizza, capers and lima beans (of which I can make an entire post). Back to the point. The point is that the Food Channel was on and I was positively transfixed by the woman making the food, not because she was beautiful, but because she was "whipping something to together" that looked delicious and professional. So I made the off-handed comment to Liz, my friend, that Food Channel is like porn to me. And she said, "I know!" So instantly I am thinking, "Ah. A brother (or sister; screw it comrade) in arms, someone who understands a zest for life through the culinary arts.

Not So.

Here, without further ado is what she meant, in her words (at my request), completely unedited.

To regular readers of this blog: I am not its writer, but I have met him once or twice. Indeed, I ate lunch with him the other day (calamari to start, followed by pizza, washed down with diet coke---but I digress). Like all restaurants today, this one featured the rapist of my eyeballs—yes, television. I suppose I was asking for it, what with wearing a dress and having a vagina, especially on a Sunday. TV aficionados may think I am too outré, but there is a point. My metaphors are meant to suggest the topic of this diatribe—the similarity of the tv programming (cooking shows) to pornography.

Readers of Harper’s may think that this topic is a rerun, and they may be right, except that they aren’t. There was an article a while back comparing the way that cooking show hosts talk about food to the way that porn stars talk about sex (Ooh, that’s good….BAM!). My thesis is different. While I do not dispute the existence of similar acting styles in these media, I noticed another, more subtle similarity. Both cooking shows and porn simplify an intricate process so that it seems to occur over the course of a half hour or so.

In porn, person meets person, they proceed to fucking, and leave satisfied. In real life, it is not always as easy to meet someone to fuck as it is to open the front door. Once one meets a potential partner, it may take time to build up the nerve to broach the subject of sex. Even if one’s nerve is already up and throbbing and ready to go, the partner must be willing to stimulate the nerve in order to release the neurotransmitters. And once the juice is spilled, one may leave feeling full of sweet satisfaction or just wet and sticky and frustrated.

In cooking shows, a chef comes up with an idea for a meal, say summer fiesta, in seconds and prepares the meal in minutes. In real life, I could not make gazpacho in 10 minutes; you couldn’t even pick out the produce in 10 minutes. And if I made a pitcher of mojitos first, then who needs gazpacho anyway.

My boyfriend pointed out that such simplification is the nature of the beast called la tele by the natives of Guadalajara. He may be right, except that he’s not. If tv were really simple, then the people on that island who saw the crazy French bitch come out of that bunker thing would have just said “hey, what’s down there?” instead of taking weeks of my life to gather a posse, explore the hole, flashback to crazy shit with needles….

Wow. I love it. I really love how perfect it is too. You see when I watch Food Channel I am watching it to see something that I really can't do on my own. I have a dish or two that I can "whip together" provided I have a full day to do it. But by-and-large if I have 15 minutes to throw something together, I am heating up a Hillshire Farm Bratwurst (if you are a vegan or vegetarian, maybe you prefer the Better-than-thou Brat that Boca makes). The point is that even being married, which I am, sex is never as easy as it looks in porn. Those people are professionals and there should be a disclaimer Eval Knieval style (although in my own attempts it would be more like Jackass) that states, "Ladies and Gentlemen, these men and women are trained professionals. They are performing these feats under the supervision of many other trained professionals, and under NO circumstances should you quit your job and get a job as a [insert job here, whether it is cable repairman, delivery driver, college professor]." Also as a note, going home to your special lady (or man) friend and "whipping it out" and saying "hey bitch, suck it." Not as successful as illustrated in pornography.

The parallel in food is that, I very rarely have fresh, ripe avocados just laying around my house to toss into a guacamole in short order. Most of the time the supermarket stocks horribly under-ripe avocados and I have to let them sit on a shelf and get ripe. But also, I don't typically have the following, coriander (or cilantro, they are the same), fresh basil or any other herb for that matter, ripe tomatoes, fresh fish... shit I could go on forever, let me tell you what I do have in my house almost without fail. Ginger Ale, Skippy Creamy Peanut Butter, a cracker of some sort, usually at least one can of New England Clam Chowder (Manhattan Clam Chowder is disgusting, you might not think so, but you are wrong) usually a ketchup style of condiment, a half gallon of iffy milk and some left over take out.

Now Rachel Ray. MAKE SOMETHING OUT OF THAT!