Spies, lies and video tape

Good food used to be a reason to celebrate. It was the universal comforter, the ultimate peacemaker.

Now, thanks to reality television, food is war. And war, as we know, is hell.

Reality TV wasn’t bad enough with Big Brother and the godawful Housewives of Wherever? There wasn’t enough backstabbing, scheming and rotten behavior?

I blame the Brits, who produced a show called Come Dine with Me, which spawned similar shows in Canada, including Come Dine with Me Canada, and Dinner Party Wars. Then came Cupcake Wars, and a show called Chopped, guaranteed to embarrass/enrage some hapless cook before the credits roll. Add to this Masterchef and Hell’s Kitchen, both featuring tantrums by Gordon Ramsay. And now, Restaurant Stakeout, with hidden cameras spying on restaurant waitstaff.

For sheer bad manners and nastiness, Come Dine with Me takes the cake. It’s also produced in New Zealand, my home-away-from-home, where it’s marginally worse than the Canadian version.

Here’s the premise: An amateur chef cooks dinner for three or four total strangers, who meanwhile are upstairs, rummaging through the cook’s bedroom, making fun of his/her taste in everything from furniture to underwear. All this for the hidden camera, where they’ll later explain how awful everything tasted.

Money is the root of this particular evil, and the cook who scores the highest total points wins some dough, though not nearly enough to justify this silly show.

Then we have Restaurant Makeover, a scrappy homegrown feature that lasts an interminable hour. It’s painfully predictable. With the kitchen torn apart, Igor, the temperamental construction honcho, announces that the Big Reveal can’t happen because essential widgets haven’t arrived. Anyway, he’s tired of the whole thing and is about to take his table saw and nail gun and go home, which nearly reduces the restaurant designer to tears.

Meanwhile, back in the makeshift kitchen, the chef-in-residence stubbornly refuses to co-operate with the visiting celeb chef who is playing slash-and-burn with the old menu.

Comes the Big Reveal, (it happens, Igor or not), and guests rush through the door shouting highly original comments like “Oh-My-God!” One night I counted five OMG’s, just for openers. Riveting stuff, this.

Back in New Zealand, I watched a terrible food show involving kids in a bake-off. A little girl produced a chocolate cake for the judges, only to have it fall upside down on the floor, leaving her sobbing into the cameras, which continued to roll, recording her humiliation for posterity and the entertainment of the studio audience. Wild applause followed.

Such fun, reality television, where the art of cooking devolves into competitive free-for-alls that make cage-fighting look like Sunday in the park.

Why is it suddenly cool to watch real people suffering in a kitchen?

The current food television debacle makes me long for the single-camera action of PBS and Julia Child, losing her glasses, dropping her omelets.

Old hat? Definitely. Uncool? Probably. But she never made a child cry on television.