T A B L E_.T A L K

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BY JAMES PONIEWOZIK

Consider the humble box of baking soda. You buy one for 43 cents, stick it in the refrigerator behind the kosher dills and never look at it again for five years, despite the banner screaming, "A houseful of uses! For the love of Jesus, read the back of this box!" It's a nonproduct, a schlemiel of a product, a product so cheap and forgettable and commoditized its manufacturer desperately encourages consumers to pour it down the drain to reduce "sink odors."

After watching Discovery Channel's household-hints show "Home Matters," I will never look at a box of baking soda the same way. During what must have been National Baking Soda Week, I learned that this disrespected compound is in fact a magic powder that, like Al Capp's schmoos from "L'il Abner," is endlessly malleable and exists to serve. You can apply it to household surfaces. You can scour your backyard deck with it. You can add cornstarch and red food coloring and boil it down into a lurid soapy mass that the kids can sculpt into bird's nests -- it's like Play-Doh, but with the added advantage of turning your cookware the color of sweet-and-sour pork.

The shelter-and-crafts movement has long been the baking soda of cultural criticism: pliable fodder for numerous the-way-we-live-now disquisitions and even academic studies on '90s affluence, security and insecurity, class and lack thereof (and just you wait! I've got some doozies!). For which, of course, we can thank the much-loved, -loathed and -parodied Martha Stewart. Now, any editor who forbids letters to the editor in her magazine owns my heart, but clearly to many Martha is the Bad Mother, the satin-wrapped embodiment of 400 years of American puritanism and a lifetime of insecurities. So plenty of entrepreneurs have tried to cut into her Maine blueberry pie by being unlike her -- a crop of African-American Marthas, Gen X Marthas, country Marthas, etc., proclaiming their accessibility.

Martha is to these post-Marthas as the pope is to American cafeteria Catholics. Martha offers a holistic, nonnegotiable program; the post-Marthas offer 15-minute projects. Martha brooks no compromise; the post-Marthas let you pick and choose. Martha issues encyclicals; the post-Marthas give thumbnail guidelines.

Martha, that is, teaches you to make soap; the post-Marthas, baking soda Play-Doh. Thus the four-year-old Home and Garden TV network, which hit 50 million subscribers in January, loads up with Main Street-friendly shows on quilting, collecting and kids; even commercials for Garden.com play off Martha-grade obsessiveness with a gardener cackling giddily over a man-size carrot, billing itself as the Web site "for people with a life outside gardening." And casting its lot decisively with the baking-soda-bird's-nest crowd is Discovery. Originally a science-oriented network known for its nighttime nature-programming bloodbaths, Discovery gives almost its entire 9-to-5 weekday schedule to a troika of populist sheltrists: Susan Powell of "Home Matters," Christopher Lowell of "Interior Motives" and Lynette Jennings of two eponymous design shows.

On the aesthetic spectrum, Discovery is smack between owning a $3.5 million Hamptons getaway done in 65 shades of white and having a statuette of a goose in a sundress on your front porch. Where Martha is authentic to the core, the core of Powell's "Home Matters" is often, well, Styrofoam: Besides cooking and design, it emphasizes borderline-kitschy crafts, a disturbing number of which involve stabbing Styrofoam balls with pine cones. (Bringing crap in from outdoors is ever-popular with the do-it-yourselfer; at the Union Square Greenmarket, every fall farmers mortify the ghosts of our frugal, turnip-digging ancestors by selling bunches of yellow and red leaves to Manhattanites at $5 a pop.) "Home Matters" is about handiwork not as a lifestyle but as a way to brighten a corner and stave off stir-craziness. There's an endearing, slightly neurotic edge to Powell's hosting; hers is the show for the housewife who needs a bathroom diorama or dried-flower topiary project to get through another day in that damn house without murdering the kids.

Longtime designer Lynette Jennings is likewise far removed from Martha's austere shrines, hosting her shows from sets done in Midwestern Grandma -- twig letter baskets and rosebud-bordered hanging shelves. In one segment, Jennings asks what viewers would do if they could redesign their master bedrooms: "Say you just won the lottery," she says, because Jennings knows her viewers are about as likely to add his-and-hers baths and walk-in closets as they are to buy a Ferrari. And she acknowledges her audience's limits: "It's supposed to look handcrafted!" Jennings says, accenting a shelf with permanent marker. "If you're too much of a perfectionist, it won't look realistic!" There's the post-Martha syllabus in essence: teaching amateurs to be authentic amateurs.

Jennings gives her suburban-primitive audience an authenticity with room for, say, gluing twigs, soup cans and kidney beans to a board as an experiment in "texture." What is it with texture in the shelter world nowadays? Faux finish, thread count, distressed cabinetry; ribbing, nubbing, "smashed" potatoes: We're becoming a (literally) touchy-feely society where everything is off-white and nubbly, a great palpable nation of braille, and one Discovery show after another extols the virtue of ragging and sponging and roughing up. During the '90s we convinced ourselves (major amateur pop psychology coming! wait for it!) that we were about more than surfaces, that we had depth, that we weren't impressed by flash and color (unless tastefully applied on an iMac or a VW Bug). We are a people flattered by our ability to appreciate, as the NY Times food section recently enthused, a nice plate of -- yum! -- tapioca.

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