• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, July 8, 2022

When it comes to food, peace never reigns thanks to TV’s frantic food fights.

Instead of peace, the preparation of food on TV is the catalyst for battles, beefs, brawls, challenges, championships, clashes, fights, gauntlets, wars, meltdowns, showdowns, throwdowns, cake-offs and bake-offs. All of these words pepper the titles of TV’s relentless food fracases.

Food Network takes the cake, which is understandable because the network features all food shows all the time.

Thus, a great many of them are frenzied food competitions in which madcap meals are prepped and presented by crazed contestants under absurd deadlines.

The meals are then tasted and then presumably wasted because who on Earth would step up to finish them after the judges have taken bites out of them? Hey, man, are you going to eat that? 

The battle-weary titles of these TV food fights say it all. Food Network examples include “BBQ Brawl,” “Iron Chef Gauntlet,” “Chocolate Meltdown: Hershey’s After Dark,” “Halloween Wars,” “Haunted Gingerbread Showdown,” “Vegas Chef Prizefight,” “Family Restaurant Rivals” and even “Thanksgiving Pie Fight” (not hosted by the Three Stooges).

Other networks are also players in the frantic food fight space -- Fox with its various cooking contests co-starring Gordon Ramsay and his expletives, and even E! Entertainment Television, which will debut a new cooking show this summer with B-list personalities called “Celebrity Beef.”

One such food-competition show has the most unsavory title in the entire pantheon of such shows -- “Rat In The Kitchen” on TBS.

In this show, one of the contestants is acting as a secret saboteur -- the “rat” -- who is covertly undermining the other chefs’ dishes.

The title is not suggestive of that scenario at all. Instead, it triggers visions of an actual rat in an actual kitchen, the mere suggestion of which is repellant to just about everybody.

Let it be said that if Food Network’s smorgasbord of food-competition shows were not successful -- as a group or individually -- then they would not present so many of them.

It is likely also true that food shows featuring regular people sitting down to have a peaceful meal together would not make for arresting television.

Indeed, for many people today it is impossible to achieve serene mealtimes. TV’s frantic food fests might reflect the way many Americans relate to their food today.

Eating is often done on the run -- hustling out the door for school and work in the morning, ordering lunch in fast-food drive-throughs and then wolfing the food down in the car, ordering Pizza Hut or Little Caesar’s for dinner and eating it hunched over a coffee table watching TV or standing in a kitchen.

On TV as in real life, food today is prepared and eaten in a hurry, under pressure and on deadline.