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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Tuesday, June 18, 2002

More viewers drooling over TV food shows

By Bridget Byrne
Associated Press

Interest in TV food shows is rising like a souffle in a hot oven.

The Food Network's viewership increased 32 percent last year, and with growth continuing this season, the cable channel has almost 74 million viewers.

Food fans weaned on the talents of Julia Child can still watch the grande dame dish it out on local PBS stations, while that grand dame of domesticity, Martha Stewart, fusses about in the Food Network's "From Martha's Kitchen."

Meanwhile, the youth-oriented E! Entertainment and Style cable channels are serving up their own culinary star in glamorous English homemaker Nigella Lawson, host of "Nigella Bites."

Why this hunger for televised food?

Lawson, whose shows are filmed in her London home, thinks watching someone cook on television is often "the nearest thing we have to sitting around in someone's kitchen, immersed in good smells and familial warmth" — qualities not always present in contemporary households.

But 21st century food programming is more than just slicing and dicing.

Cooking and chefdom also have been touched by the "glitter of celebrityhood," says Geoffrey Drummond, whose A La Carte Productions creates such programs as the syndicated "America's Test Kitchen" and the Emmy-winning "Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home."

Drummond says audiences are falling as hard for today's variety of eccentric cooking characters as they once did for Child, whose seminal influence will be honored with retrospectives on PBS in August, marking her 90th birthday.

Take the fiercely loud and competitive battling cooks on "The Iron Chef," or "The Naked Chef," whose cheeky host Jamie Oliver has a new show called "Oliver's Twist." (All three are on the Food Network.)

Add to that a dash of the "Bam!" man — flamboyant seasoning tosser Emeril Lagasse, comfortably back in charge of the Food Network's "The Essence of Emeril" and "Emeril Live" after his failed attempt to become a sitcom star on NBC.

It might seem that viewers have nearly as many cooking shows to choose from these days as they do sitcoms — a notion that makes Wolfgang Puck laugh.

A celebrity long before he agreed to produce his self-titled show for the Food Network, Puck says: "Do we have too many sitcoms? Well maybe too many bad ones, but we always need another good one!"

Lawson, author of the cookbook "How to be a Domestic Goddess," doesn't have a studio audience, although her two young children, Cosima and Bruno, are often seen licking mixing bowl spoons or digging their little hands into delicious desserts. Their smiling faces send the sensory message.

Lawson also credits her expert crew with communicating those missing cooking sensations: "Incredible pictures and acute recording — the squishes, the squelches, the crunches." She also tries to "talk about the food intensely."

Marc Summers, who was host of Nickelodeon's goo-chucking, slime-tossing game show "Double Dare," takes a journalistic approach to his "Unwrapped" series on the Food Network.

He crisscrosses the country discovering and savoring America's comfort food, including burgers and fries, snow cones and carnival candy.

Summers describes this kind of show as "kind of like a 'Sesame Street' for adults."

Along the way he's even trying his hand at cooking on camera — sort of. To promote the series' recent "Carnival Foods" segment, he dipped caramel apples.

"You can't talk and then do it. You have to talk AND do it," he says. "It's a bit like patting your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time."

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