RACHEL RAY: ANNOYING? YES. BUT DON'T WRITE HER OFF.
By Emily Battle (Southern Ledger)
If you read much of anything about popular culinary culture, you can’t help but have noticed a barrage of recent criticism of Food Network’s star Rachel Ray.
For those of you out of the loop, Ray is that perky gal who’s always telling you to coat your cookware in “EVOO” before spending thirty minutes cooking a “super-easy,” “dee-lish” meal sure to make you say, “Yum-O.”
(If I lost you at EVOO, don’t worry, because the term is being added to the 2007 Oxford American College Dictionary as an acceptable abbreviation for extra virgin olive oil, thanks to Ray’s popularizing it. How’s that for influence?)
There are Web sites devoted to poking fun at the ever-giggly Ray, who has kicked her already potent personality into overdrive now that she has become a brand, with her own daytime talk show (produced by Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Productions), her own magazine and her picture inviting supermarket shoppers to pick up boxes of Nabisco crackers.
Food bloggers, syndicated columnists and other critics have blasted Ray’s “30-Minute Meals” television show and cookbooks for dumbing down cooking and for taking too many shortcuts.
To sum up the case being made against her, I’ll quote from my favorite writer to take her on, chef/writer/Travel Channel host Anthony Bourdain, who wrote recently on a wildly popular guest post on food writer Michael Ruhlman’s blog:
“Wallowing in your own crapulence on your Cheeto-littered couch you watch her and think, ‘Hell…I could do that. I ain’t gonna…but I could--if I wanted! Now where’s my damn jug a Diet Pepsi?’ Where the saintly Julia Child sought to raise expectations, to enlighten us, make us better--teach us--and in fact, did, Rachael uses her strange and terrible powers to narcotize her public with her hypnotic mantra of Yummo and Evoo and Sammys.”
While I won’t say there’s no truth to that, these criticisms always leave a little part of me longing to defend Ray, because if it weren’t for her, cooking dinner in my house would never have gotten any more adventurous than boiling pasta and opening a jar of sauce.
It was a chance meeting, really.
As a newspaper reporter fresh out of college, I would rush home on the nights I didn’t have to work to catch the 6 o’clock newscast. I wanted to make sure the local news crews hadn’t scooped me on anything.
To ward off boredom during less-than-gripping stories on school field trips and man-in-the-Wal-Mart-parking-lot interviews about tomorrow’s weather, I channel surfed, and stumbled upon Ray’s show, which airs at 6 p.m. and again at 6:30 p.m.
I would watch it each night, just as my rumbling stomach was saying, “Lean Cuisine again? Can’t we have some fun for once?”
Ray was exactly the guide I needed to give me hints on how to stock my pantry, and to make me feel confident that I didn’t have to depend on the supermarket for everything. I could make things like spaghetti sauce, pesto and salad dressing on my own.
Under Ray’s tutelage, I cooked with wine for the first time, I added more fresh vegetables to my shopping list and I even took on risotto, a dish whose exotic name always had me convinced it was out of my league.
Then, I graduated.
I bought a few more complex cookbooks, I started watching more advanced chefs on Food Network and I broadened my repertoire to include baking (something Ray claims she doesn’t do).
Now, watching Ray’s show is for me like being a third grader and watching your second-grade teacher lead a class. She doesn’t hold you r attention the same way, because you think you already know everything she has to say, and the corny jokes she told when you were in her class just aren’t funny anymore.
But that doesn’t mean the foodie community should hold Ray up to ridicule.
In fact, they should thank her for being the accessible, hand-holding guide that helps the average American takeout-eater to bridge the gap between Hamburger Helper and the rewarding world of cooking for yourself.
In a country where fewer and fewer people actually know what goes into the food they eat, that’s practically a public service. Not to mention, it has helped build the audience that is helping to turn many of the food bloggers out there into food bloggers with book deals.
So while part of me will cringe the next time I hear Ray giggle about how much she likes garlic, I’ll try to remember the important role she plays in getting non-cooks to start using their stovetops for something beyond boiling water and heating up canned soup.
---
Copyright 2007. The Southern Ledger. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
