F O O D _F A I R Y L A N D
Gooey chocolate! Creamy butter! Crackling roast pork! BY JOYCE MILLMAN maybe I'm being paranoid, but I think the people who insist that TV is bad for you are the same ones who go around screaming, "Don't eat the movie popcorn! The fettucine Alfredo will kill you! Don't even think about that enchilada!" Those killjoys would have been right at home in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, when the explorers brought back weird foodstuffs from the New World and everybody freaked out. Italians thought if you ate a tomato you'd die. Potatoes were banned in France. A stalk of corn was thought to be a monster too ugly to eat. But the tide is turning against today's food phobics. And TV and food -- once happily joined together in American homes (TV dinners on TV tables!) but more recently scorned together as a public health menace (TV makes you fat!) -- are linking arms to lead the charge. TV newscasters can't get through a Center for Science in the Public Interest restaurant bulletin (the anti-movie-popcorn people) anymore without snickering. A current Boston Market commercial has depressed looking wafer-thin models complaining about a "burning within," at which point ESPN wise-ass Keith Olbermann pops up to yell, "It's called HUNGER. EAT SOMETHING!" "Seinfeld" has always been the one show on TV where eating plays as pivotal a role as it does in real life, but over the past two seasons, the show has become almost militant about its gastronomic obsessions -- virtually every episode now has something to do with food: calzones, fast food roast chicken, Jewish cuisine, Chinese take-out, mutton, crepes, the Soup Nazi, marble rye bread. On "Seinfeld," the characters are unabashed gluttons, and that may be the deep psychological reason why it's been the most popular sitcom of the food-is-bad-for-you era. But the biggest gun in the war against the guilt-trippers is TV's Food Network, the New York-based, 24-hour cable channel devoted entirely to cooking and eating. The Food Network marches a veritable army of personable chefs and foodies into 20 million homes a day to loudly proclaim that IT'S OK TO EAT THE ENCHILADA! And the butter. And the chocolate, and the beef and the pork. Especially the pork.
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