Y'know, sometimes high def shows you things that you'd almost prefer not to be able to see...
Susan had Iron Chef on when I got back from my evening walk a few minutes ago; the secret ingredient of this episode is coffee, and everyone is trying to come up with various twisted configurations making use of coffee in ways that no sane person would ever want to try. As the camera panned in for a close-up of one of the chefs at work, it was starkly evident that one of the chefs had cut his knuckle, and it was bleeding. So did he stop what he was doing to clean and bandage the wound and dispose of the food he was preparing with a wounded, bleeding hand? Of course not. In fact, as the show continued and they came in for additional close-ups, the wound continued to bleed... and he continued to handle the food with no gloves, no bandage, and no effort to protect the judges from possible disease due to blood contamination. Hey, what's a little hepatitis B among friendly competitors?...
The makers of the show owe the viewers an apology and a "don't ever do this at home" warning; they owe the judges some medical testing and coverage; and they owe the chef a permanent disqualification from any appearance on Food Network. You'd expect better from a network devoted to food preparation, wouldn't you?
One
I haven't seen much of the American version of Iron Chef, but I know in the Japanese version the judges could see all of the action. So if they could see the blood and still ate the food, they deserve whatever they get--in one episode of Iron Chef (Japanese) a judge named Julia Dreyfuss (from Kill Bill, not Julia Louis from Seinfeld) elected not to eat a dish prepared with whale tongue on moral grounds--and whale tongue wasn't even the secret ingredient of the day. Judges should use, well, good judgement.
ReplyDeleteI agree that Food network needs higher standards, but then I think of History Channel, which has nothing to do with History anymore (a special on Nostradamus with no skeptical viewpoint?) and even Sci-Fi channel has no integrity, such as when they aired Apollo 13. That's not sci-fi, that's sci-fa.
Yeah, I've been disappointed that the History Channel has moved so much into Weekly World News territory--but for me, the absolute worst example of misplaced History Channel programming is Ax Men. A show about guys who cut down trees?...
ReplyDelete