Americans’ cable options are about to get a lot foodier. Last week, Scripps Networks, owners of the Food Network, announced that they’ll be launching a second channel for food lovers called the Cooking Channel, on Memorial Day of this year. It will feature similar content to that of the Food Network, including shows by Rachael Ray and Bobby Flay.

But what does it say about American culture that we can’t stop watching people stir pots, cut vegetables and make exaggerated “oohing” sounds while they eat? To find out, we called Krishnendu Ray, an assistant professor of nutrition and food studies at New York University, who has written about the meaning of food and television.

Does it surprise you that Scripps is launching this second food channel?

Everybody seems to agree that cable broadcasting is dying, but obviously the Food Network has been doing very well. It surprises me. The data shows that people are watching, but most of what we can say about food television and how and why it works is speculative, because there’s very little research. We know very little of what audiences really do with food TV.

For me, food television is a respite from politics. I watch it so I don’t have to watch CNN or MSNBC or Fox News, with their endless talking heads. 

It also strikes me as a sign that people are talking and thinking more about food.

The popularity of food TV is a marker that food is leaving the home. Over the past 250 years, we have stopped making clothes at home. We’ve stopped making soap at home. Through food television, the act of watching people cook and consume food has escaped the confines of the household and become a site of public discussion. We talk about it, we blog about it, and it becomes public culture. 

Is this a good or a bad thing? 

I don’t take the position that all this is bad necessarily. My sense is that we don’t know. People argue about the differences between making food in the house and leaving the home to eat it. The assumption is probably correct that we consume more salt and calories when we’re eating out. 

Michael Pollan has claimed that we’re now just sitting on the couch and watching TV food being cooked instead of making it ourselves. Food TV is one more sign that eating and cooking is becoming a more publicly visible thing, and whether that means we are doing more or less of it at home still needs to be studied. 

Food television often follows a very rigid format — chefs competing on reality shows, people doing cooking demonstrations. Clearly that must be part of its appeal. 

Food television has increasingly come to include three kinds of shows: domestic ones in the morning, sports-style competition in the evening, and travel shows like “No Reservations” and “Cook’s Tour,” in which food is a form of travel. The biggest thing to happen to food TV over the last decade is the growth of the sports-style competition show — from “Iron Chef” to “Chopped.” They squeeze as much competition in as they can.

What’s interesting to me is that these have become very established genres and they’ve become very predictable and tedious. Part of my surprise at the expansion of the Food Network is that nothing particularly interesting has happened to food television since the Japanese version of “Iron Chef.” So much of American food entertainment is derived from that show. To find something different we need to look to other countries — like Indian TV, or South Korean TV. Centers of empires do not produce cutting-edge genres and formats, margins do.

South Korea is a very interesting place. It’s attuned to the grammar of American food and the aesthetics of American television. I recently watched “301/302,” for example, which is a dark and despondent film about two neighbors and their relationship with food, and it’s very stylish and cutting edge. It’s like “Six Feet Under” with food. Our food programs tend to be cheerful and there’s a limit to how much cheer you can take.

My students are also wondering if it’s possible to marry the politics of sustainability with the drama and character development of what’s happening on the Food Network. I think that might be the future, but is it possible to do that without destroying the attractiveness and naiveté and optimism of food television? I don’t know.

Do you think that the rise of “Top Chef”-style competition shows has made the act of cooking more accessible to home cooks?

I think the rise of food television has meant a new prominence for culinary performers. On “Chopped,” for example, chefs have to make an appetizer with four weird things, in 5 minutes. It’s not something we replicate in real life. These skills are only needed and developed by professional chefs. We don’t like watching sports when the people are as unskilled as us, and this is similar. We want to watch people with extraordinary skills.

Competition food shows develop rules to make cooking more watchable — like in sports, you need rules — but it also makes it less and less doable at home. Just like you and I don’t play baseball anywhere near the professional level, and watching it convinces us more and more how bad we are. Increasingly, competition food shows are showing the mark of professional culinary performers, who often come from terrific culinary schools. The rest of us are just going to watch.

Many of the men that appear on food shows — like Anthony Bourdain and Guy Fieri — have a hypermasculine persona. It’s almost as if they’re overcompensating for the traditional feminine aura of home cooking.

There’s this new idiom of old-fashioned masculinity; most of the men on food television are white boys behaving badly, playing with fire and knives, with a token woman, or person of color thrown in. Many competition shows use almost mythic structures, like WWE wrestling. It’s a lot of theater. You have to suspend any claims of outside the TV reality; in some ways it’s as silly to watch as WWE wrestling.

But Rachael Ray is one of the biggest names to come out of the Food Network — and she’s neither a man nor particularly skilled.

Rachael Ray is the necessary counterpart to all of that. She is not this super chef or a professional. She’s the girl next door. She is clever and smart, in the sense that she can do well with limited skills. When she went on “Iron Chef,” she came across as a nervous wreck: “Oh my God! I can’t believe I did it!” That gives her a very attractive American story and she has a youthful kind of femininity that most young urban middle-class women like. It makes her attractive to women and some men.

I think it is amazing how many disdainful comments I’ve heard from chefs about Rachael Ray. They call her a little girl in a tank top with no skills. But they’re missing the point. That’s precisely why she works.

Other Food Network hosts, like Nigella Lawson and Giada De Laurentiis, also represent a kind of idealized middle-class feminity.

Absolutely. They are upwardly mobile. They’ve overcome their tragic back stories. Nigella’s husband died, and she has to raise kids and has this gorgeous English accent and a voluptuous body. Their lesson is: You play with the hand that is dealt to you.

How do you watch food television?

I cook almost every evening with my son and eat with him invariably in front of the TV, which of course is a sign of a number of things: our falling moral standards, bad parenting, good food, and having great fun while channel surfing. We watch the History Channel, the Food Network.

TV screens and computer screens and things like the Food Network are a part of our life now, and the question is: How are we going to deal with it? We’re getting a much more individualized relationship with food and TV. We’re no longer following the socially constituted norms when it comes to consuming food, which is to sit down at the dining room table, shut up and eat. It allows us to reimagine our relationship with each other, and with food. That is what I’m trying to do with my son.

Wouldn’t we all have better taste if there were less crappy products around for us to choose from? Of course we should stimulate the economy and bail out companies teetering on the brink of collapse, but let’s make sure we prop up the right companies while letting the lame ones die quickly. Do we really need to offer assistance to Applebee’s or TGIFriday’s, ensuring the survival of BBQ Pork Ravioli Bites and Fried Mac and Cheese indefinitely? Let’s find a way to bring on the demise of an always-thriving Wal-Mart, while pumping tax dollars into great indie record companies, independent booksellers, excellent mom and pop delis, and, of course, Dunkin’ Donuts, home of the widely celebrated Bavarian Kreme Doughnut!

And while we’re handing out incentives to purchase cars and homes, maybe we should also provide Americans with incentives to get in shape, read better books, talk less, listen more and stop feeding their kids Kool-Aid and reconstituted chicken fingers. Maybe we could allow consumers to file certain culturally worthy purchases as itemized deductions. Nationwide, Americans could save their receipts on classical music and literary fiction purchases, while paying a steep fast food, cigarette and water park tax.

Don’t get me wrong, I like McDonald’s hamburgers and gigantic theme parks and flashy superhero movies and the Fox network just as much as the next slow-moving, self-important American out there. But if some of these things just went away one day, would I cry big, salty tears over it? No. I’d probably lose five pounds, sign up for cello lessons and read “Crime and Punishment” from start to finish.

So, Mr. President, don’t spend all that hard-won Recovery and Reinvestment cash willy-nilly, like some doped-up teenager taking a stolen credit card for a spin at the local mega-mall. Make careful choices, and soon we’ll be a nation of culturally elite, fine-cheese-and-wine-appreciating snobs. You know, like France or Italy, but with more land and better personal hygiene.

Whine and dine

You just know that Tom Colicchio of “Top Chef” (10 p.m. Wednesdays on Bravo) would be 100 percent behind re-creating America in his image, even if it meant making us all bald and superior and slightly irritable whenever we had to deign to explain the difference between medium and medium rare. Look at how the man winces and grits his teeth every time one of the young cheftestants pretends to know how much salt is too much or how long a chunk of halibut should be cooked. Colicchio would probably move to Europe right now, if those haughty, self-righteous snobs didn’t enrage him even more than most Americans do.

In fact, this season of “Top Chef” has been a real merry-go-round of emotions for most self-hating Americans, what with cheftestant Hosea demonstrating the whiny, defensive American archetype with stunning accuracy. Meanwhile, his brand-new cuddle-buddy, cheftestant Leah, embodies the past 10 years of American domestic and foreign policy: She’s sloppy, scattered, disloyal, inconsistent and, above all, a big quitter. It’s no wonder these two find each other well-nigh irresistible.

But the highlight of last week’s episode came in the Quickfire Challenge, when Hosea, who’s a chef at Jax Fish House in Boulder, Colo., bungles his attempt to fillet a few sardines as widely acclaimed chef Eric Ripert looks on. Meanwhile, Finnish cheftestant Stefan and Italian Fabio show off their fish-handling skills with their oddly appealing European arrogance. Why are those two a million times easier to root for than Hosea and Leah? Maybe it’s because they seem to have a sense of humor about themselves, even when they’re feeling feisty – a far cry from Hosea’s repetitive laments. Maybe it’s because they don’t snivel about how much they love their girlfriend/boyfriend while they make out with a fellow cheftestant on the couch. Maybe it’s because they take the piss out of each other without taking either the show or themselves too seriously.

Whatever the reasons, when Stefan gave Hosea an enormous culinary wedgie by skinning and filleting an eel with stunning dexterity, Hosea reacted with typical American style, grace and wit: “He’s, like, been doing eel since he was 3 years old, apparently. Great. You know, just another reason Europe’s so great.”  Have some dignity, man. Have we really fallen so far as a people?

But before we get too superior about the insecure chumps in our midst, let’s not forget another American, Jamie, who can’t open her mouth without delivering a big, superior nanny-nanny-boo-boo to the universe. After weeks of watching Jamie grimace and blink and sigh deeply at the awful mediocrity of everyone and everything she’d been forced to encounter since agreeing to appear on this damnable show, last week she took the cake by muttering that chef Eric Ripert’s dishes at Le Bernadin were underwhelming. “To be honest, I’m bored with this kind of food. It’s not something I’m inspired by.”

Sweet mother of the Lord, what is wrong with this sorry lot? If it weren’t for the fact that perky weirdo Carla is starting to find her stride and hit a few out of the park, I’d be ready to call this one for the Europeans right now.

But even given her terrible attitude, can you believe they sent Jamie home? Jamie, instead of Leah, who’s been stumbling along for weeks now? Or why not Hosea, who never totally fails but never, ever blows the judges’ socks off completely? Sometimes I think Colicchio is so focused on exactly how the meat or fish is prepared, he can’t see past it. Have you noticed how all he talks about is whether something is overdone or underdone, whether a particular cheftestant “respected” his or her protein? I do understand that once you overcook or undercook a piece of meat, the rest of the dish is a non-starter. Still, this is television. Let’s hear a little more about the flavors. Obviously every last one of these chefs is quite capable of screwing up a chunk of meat under these particularly trying circumstances.

While we’re talking judges, I have to ask: Is Toby Young really a positive addition to this team? I was never overly fond of Gail Simmons’ somewhat bland, nasal, finger-licking commentary, but all Young demonstrates, over and over and over again, is that he knows exactly how to lose friends and alienate people. On “Top Chef,” he does this with witty one-liners that feel about as fresh and spontaneous as reheated leftovers. Yes, yes, I know he’s been a restaurant critic for a few years, but does this crabby naysayer really know that much about food, or is he just good at being caustic for the cameras? In this age of blowhards, chatty pundits and celebrity ass hats, it’s chafing when any show or network passes up an actual expert for the sake of yet another Ornery-on-Command TV Personality.

If they wanted an asshole for this spot, I’m sure they could’ve lured Anthony Bourdain with a big wad of cash. He’s far more authentic, clever and nasty. Who wouldn’t want to be berated by Bourdain?

Effing emmer effer!

But while we’re on the subject of TV’s favorite hotheads, let’s not overlook Gordon Ramsay’s latest successful publicity stunt: The world’s most renowned celebrity chef/jackass of all trades/European kitchen tough apparently uttered the word “fuck” 187 times in just under two hours of the show “Gordon’s Great British Nightmare” a week ago.

Sounds like a brilliant way to get a little press — that is, if you’ve never tuned in for “Gordon Ramsey’s The F Word,” (3 p.m. Wednesdays on BBC America), a lively, macho cooking show in which every other word Ramsay mutters is a curse. Can it really be considered swearing when it’s used less as an expression of anger and more as a means of illustrating a particular cooking technique? For example, in Ramsay’s cooking-with-regular-Joes segment, he says to one amateur chef, “Susan, yes? When you lift the fish, make love to it. Don’t fuck it.” See? Purely instructional.

Or later, Ramsay is watching “Top Gear” host James May cover a fish pie with mashed potatoes and says, “It’s like a fucking plasterer. Holy shit. Would you like a trowel?” and “Can we get in the fucking oven now?” and, when their plates of fish pie are next to each other, “I’ve had that there, next to yours, for the last 10 minutes, I hope to fuck it don’t infect it, yes, with shitness.”

Ahh, it’s so nice how these screeners don’t bleep out all of the really informative culinary terms. As you can probably tell, “Gordon Ramsay’s The F Word” is really nothing like either “Hell’s Kitchen” or “Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares” (although it does have a lot of language in common with this “Great British Nightmare” show). “The F Word” is so scattered and free-spirited and strange, in fact, that it calls to mind my favorite cooking show ever, “Two Fat Ladies,” in which two large women traveled around the U.K. in a motorcycle and sidecar combo, cooking and cracking jokes and sampling fatty foods that you’d never, ever want to eat.

Certainly the spirit of “Two Fat Ladies” is hanging in the air as Ramsay goes out to the English countryside to hunt for bunny rabbits with the aid of an enormous golden eagle. Yes, apparently people actually use a trained eagle to hunt for wild hare. As Ramsay looks on, squealing delightedly, the enormous bird snatches up the big rabbit and eats about half of its head off before anyone is able to stop it. Ramsay is thrilled. “We’d never use the head anyway. That’s one perfect hare!”

Then we see Ramsay speeding off in his sports car, while he tells us in a voice-over, “I’m going to take the hare back home and hang it for a couple of days to improve the flavor.” Holy Christ. Hang it where? In some meat shed? In his utility closet? “Then, I’m going to cook it for the kids’ tea.” Wow. Is he going to tell them it’s bunny rabbit?

But apparently this is part of the routine on “The F Word”: enlist the children to help raise animals, then slaughter the animals and feed them to the children. Far kinder than walking into McDonald’s and getting your serving of tortured, terrorized cow, I suppose, but you still have to admire Ramsay’s boldness. It’s obvious he’s taking some pleasure in frying up the rabbit, then calling the kids, and asking them, after they’ve already started eating, if they know what it is. They’re not sure. He tells them it’s hare. “I’d never guess that!” one of his girls chirps, without skipping a beat. I guess the Ramsays chow on bunny rabbit regularly. Don’t you wish Ramsay were your daddy now? Sort of? Just a little?

Plenty of Ramsay’s fans certainly seem to, and it’s not all that difficult to see why: His freakishly aggressive demeanor just draws people in, in spite of themselves. Now, can you imagine an egotistical, obnoxious, foul-mouthed American pulling that off? Not in a million years. Ramsay makes it very clear, on his 50 or 60 TV shows, that Europeans are a lot cooler than Americans these days.

Of course, if the American Recovery, Reinvestment and Extreme Makeover Act passes, that could change. But these pants will still make our ass look fat.

Soaps and daytime talk shows revealed the worst in people, so I resorted to cooking shows: no emotions, no conflict. I sipped murky, gray-green vegetable soup and watched chefs prepare seared sea bass in a sesame crust, ginger crhme brulie with candied tangerine and lamb sausage-stuffed poblano chilies. For a few minutes, I would almost forget how much I missed my 2-and-a-half-year-old son. I would briefly ignore the constant nervous anticipation of the next round of rhythmic contractions. Days and chefs went by. I grew the longest fingernails I’ve ever had and developed a craving for exotic flavors.

Every few days my body overpowered the medication and doctors unleashed a daylong course of powerful muscle relaxants into my bloodstream. From eyes to stomach, my body entered a dreamlike state of extreme slow motion. For the next 24 hours, I couldn’t eat. I could barely even think. I missed the tinkling diversion of the meal cart and came to depend on orange Popsicles — cool and sweet.

Shortly after the last dose snaked down long plastic tubing into my arm, the doctors would give me permission to eat again. Despite nausea and exhaustion, I was starving each time and relished my instant appetizer of salty microwaved chicken noodle soup and crisp toast with peanut butter. My husband, happy to have a task, would arrive with my requested main course: one time, good bread with tangy goat cheese and cracked green olives; another, chewy Pad Thai noodles twisted around fat pink shrimp.

After two weeks of this routine, my husband and I gave up our aching hope that I would go home. We were just relieved to make it through another day avoiding birth. Repeated tests could not explain why I persistently went into labor. The monitors showed a healthy baby, development appropriate for 5-and-a-half months. I felt betrayed by my body.

Late one Sunday evening, my reflexes cut through the drug decoy for the final time. We were very lucky. Although he was 11 weeks early, our 3-pound baby boy arrived safely. He was classified a “feeder and grower” and greenhoused in the neonatal intensive care unit.

As soon as I got my land legs back, I returned to my life and my kitchen. Across town, minute amounts of laboriously pumped breast milk dripped constantly through a feeding tube into Alex’s tender stomach. My skillet weighed more than he did for the five weeks he remained in the hospital.

I juggled the needs of my older son with those of my tiny new baby in his plastic incubator bubble. While kicking the soccer ball with my rambunctious preschooler, I felt I was neglecting the fragile newborn still in the hospital. During the hours I spent cradling Alex’s doll-sized translucent body against my chest, I recalled the wistful look on his older brother’s face. Even the coldest mother-in-law would have forgiven me if our family diet had consisted of Chinese takeout and pizza during the period that I wore a path between home and hospital.

But I needed to cook. I dug out my bursting file of recipes — torn, cut and copied. In the face of my new culinary exuberance, my husband finally stopped teasing me about the boxes of cookbooks and old Gourmet magazines we had shipped across the country three times. I made meals that I had never cooked before. I dared to use new ingredients and flavors I had previously disliked: licorice-scented fennel, yellow and red peppers, alarming amounts of chili powder, woody lemon grass, pungent fish sauce and sweet dusky cardamom. The garbage disposal, I reasoned, could always grind away any failed experiments.

New recipes distracted me; preparing old favorites provided refuge. The morning a nurse reported that Alex had lost weight two days in a row, I made creamy macaroni and cheese. Life might spin out of control but I could still make a white sauce. Ounce by ounce, his weight crept up. When it hit a hefty 4-and-a-half pounds, we brought Alex home and celebrated with a chunky ratatouille of late summer eggplant and tomatoes from the garden.

Finally, I relaxed. I even made an occasional bowl of egg salad for dinner, seasoned with Dijon mustard and finely chopped dill pickle — best when eaten by the spoonful like I did as a child.

In a quilt of soothing food memories, my ultimate comfort food has always been the egg. When I was sick, my mother cracked soft-boiled eggs into a bowl of buttered toast pieces, which became richly saturated with the yolk. Now, on the evenings when my two boys throw ketchup-soaked fish sticks at each other during the evening witching hour, I sometimes slip a couple of eggs in to boil.

The problem is that they come out right only half the time. It’s a delicate balance. I can’t eat a soft-boiled egg that is too soft because a runny white makes me gag. But if it’s overcooked, the yolk remains stubbornly distinct from the toast. Because I only cook soft-boiled eggs when I’m on the edge, my failure to make them right can send me over.

If I examined my successes and failures scientifically, I think I could develop the perfect method. But, as I learned in the hospital, sometimes even science doesn’t have the answer. About half of all premature labor has no obvious medical explanation and responds to no treatment. An egg is not a mass-produced microwave dinner. Each one is unique, born of nature not machinery, and nurturing one successfully requires as much good fortune as science.

Food has its own flashy arena shows. It has its own authenticity-and-equipment-obsessed amateur fantasists (replace “Fender Stratocaster,” “Peavey amp” and “the tablature for ‘Black Dog’” with “All-Clad sauti pan,” “Viking spider-jet range” and “the recipe for paneed Mississippi quail” and you have distilled the soul of the average Molly O’Neill reader). Food even has its own fledgling MTV in cable’s TV Food Network. And though it may never have a Michael Jackson, it may at least have found its Ozzy Osbourne — Emeril Lagasse, aka Emeril, aka “the Bam-Bam Man,” TVFN’s first celebrity, who is biting the head off the food-entertainment genre and serving it in a roasted-poblano coulis on not one but two ear-splitting daily cooking shows.

“The Essence of Emeril” began life in 1994 as a glorified infomercial. But it became a runaway hit, as the personality of Lagasse, successful New Orleans restaurateur, gave way to the persona of the populist wild man “Emeril.” Emeril mixed thorough explanations of moles and bouquets garni with a sort of borderline-Tourette’s vaudeville, declaring — in a memorable segment on frog’s legs — “Naw, it doesn’t taste like chicken! It tastes like FROGS!” and, in what would become his trademark, yelling “Bam!” whenever he threw herbs into a sauti pan.

Emeril was a man who could show you how to prepare a cassoulet for Super Bowl Sunday and leave you with the impression that he may have actually watched a football game once. He was, in other words, Emeril LaGuy. The largest segment of his viewership was men over 30 — including firehouse crews watching his show en masse — and thus he was TVFN’s ticket to not becoming Lifetime Network II.

Time to play You’re-the-Executive: How-would-you-capitalize-on-this-ratings-gift? If you said, “Get him a second show! Twice as long! With a live audience! And music. And get me another fucking latte, I just ended a sentence with a period!” — your corner office is ready. You have just invented the hour-long carny freak show, launched this past January, that is “Emeril Live.”

Dressed in a stylish collarless black jacket, Emeril bounds into a nightclub-like studio, yelling “Bam!” and high-fiving audience members as a guest band plays a G. E. Smith-style musical intro. He strips to a T-shirt and is trussed into chef’s whites on-camera by the production crew. He yells “Bam!” a few more times. The crowd yells “Bam!” back. Someone in the front row hands him a homemade sweat shirt. It too says “Bam!” or one of Emeril’s dozen other catch phrases. He chats up the star-struck foodies, pressing the flesh and asking where they’re from (Flushing, generally). Then he steps up to the butcher block. Hello, Cleveland! It is time! To! Rock!

Except actually it’s not. See, here’s the thing about metaphors: They’re only metaphors. A cooking program with an eccentric host can be like a concert, a late show, a football game. But in reality it’s just a damn cooking program. And while in an eggshell-white, sterile TV kitchen, a popeyed chef shouting, “I’ve been hyp-mo-tized!” like David Letterman is refreshing. On a faux talk-show set the same thing seems like — a lame talk show.

This subtlety, however, is lost on TVFN, which is so determined to play up the host’s popularity that it lets the audience hijack the broadcast, stretching a half-hour’s worth of recipes into 60 minutes with you-had-to-be-there interaction. But then “Emeril Live” isn’t about cooking. It is, first, about how much the slavish posse loves Emeril (and therefore how big a star he must be) and, second, about the audience’s gratification. It wants to taste the andouille; it wants to scream its way onto national TV; it wants Emeril to yell “Bam!” “Pork fat rules!” “Kick it up a notch!” “Makes ya happy happy!” and “Weah LIVE, bay-BEE!” about 50 times apiece. It gets what it wants, and the results can be plain embarrassing.

Still, in a genre once dominated by prissy francophiles preaching to elites between pledge drives, Emeril is probably the most effective evangelist for serious cooking America has ever had. You can still see this on “The Essence” which TVFN thankfully still carries. Catch phrases and all, he’s far preferable to stiffs like Mario Batali of New York’s Po and TVFN’s “Molto Mario,” whose polite, nonna’s-boy deference to tradition and authenticity makes cooking seem like a meek, dutiful obsequy to Bella Italia’s dead.

All the more reason, though, to regret seeing a respected chef turn himself into a Muppet in the name of numbskulled programming. TVFN will ride this horse until its knees give (and this kind of hype can end in nothing but backlash and cancellation, preceded, perhaps, by a desperate interlude involving a crawfish-puppet cohost); right now, counting rebroadcasts, you can watch a full day of Emeril for every week of TVFN programming. He is the sort of franchise character that can establish a small cable network’s identity — a Patsy or Edina, a Saddam Hussein — and by the time his persona’s rotting corpse is pitched atop Jenny McCarthy’s on the overexposure heap, TVFN will have moved on. In a sense it already has: The network is now in 25 million households, is lionized in Time and Entertainment Weekly — and has captured an audience that’s almost half male.

Regardless, however, Lagasse will have wrought a permanent change in the star system for American chefs, and he is hardly a victim of it. He is perhaps the restaurant world’s first Shaquille O’Neal — a superstar whose real legacy is finding new and more remunerative ways to be famous. By reaching beyond the Vongerichten groupies to the Dockers-clad millions, guys who might never drop $200 on dinner but will comb Williams-Sonoma and Barnes and Noble for last-minute gift ideas every Dec. 24 until doomsday (and did I mention that Lagasse’s “Creole Christmas” will be published in October?), he has widened the tarte tatin for chefs still breaking in their first Play-Doh ovens. That’s synergy, bay-BEE, and it’s the essence of supersuperstardom.