'Everyday Italian' on the Food Network Is Borderline Pornography

Everyday Italian on the Food Network is Borderline Pornography

Author's Note: I am well aware of the last shreds of dignity that blogging about this topic strips me of. I appreciate your continued support. AC

Like any flaneur who becomes transfixed with the Food Network, I should have a favorite show. I know many a viewer who enjoy the competitive shows such as Ace of Cakes or Iron Chef . Personally, these shows smack of reality television in a way that unnerves me (not that I've ever watched), so like a post-menopausal Nielsen statistic, I prefer the Food Network shows that actually instruct on how to pass off the recipes of others as my own.

How a viewer is introduced and drawn into the programming is based largely on the personalities behind the shows. Rachael Ray is the motor-mouthed, raucous, and generally ubiquitous host of a number of shows, including ones on daytime television, which I would never watch. Until I found this picture of her...I generally found her to be the most effective instructor because of her matriarchal attributes and her humanity. She's not intimidating, but self-lacerating, she puns (badly), she wears her wedding ring while she hosts and talks about her husband, she's attractive in that soccer mom kind of way, and generally annoying.

As a semi-recent convert to the Food Network, I only know a few of the other hosts.

There is Paula Deen who cooks with more butter in one meal than is recommended for weeks of human life and also makes me hate southern people, and there is Emeril Lagasse...

who frankly, scares me.

I recently stumbled upon the show Everyday Italian not because I happen to cook pasta roughly four days a week due to a startingly dearth of culinary acumen, but because its host, Giada De Laurentiis is really really attractive.

Since finding out that Natalie Portman is a vegetarian, my heart has moved to the decade older, married, goyishe Italian look-a-like.

Like anything more apt to spoil a woman for the rest of us, she knows that she is attractive. Her show caters accordingly. I submit:

*Though married, she never wears her wedding ring or mentions her husband. When cooking for others, the guests always seem to consist of all-woman gatherings or two-couples dinners of which she is the fifth wheel.

*Unlike any other show, Giada always wears a shirt that displays a large amount of cleavage through the episode.

I offered my take on Everyday Italian to a friend and fellow conspiracy theorist this weekend and he was mostly sold (never mind, the fact that we were watching a recorded episode of the show drunk at 4 A.M. on a Sunday morning because only infomercials were on).

I offer you an observational summary of the bizarre unfoldings and suggestive language found in the episode:

In this episode (after a montage of smiling, candlelit dinners, and fork-licking), she starts by talking about the chicken she is going to stuff, commenting on how "garlic citrus chicken comes out of the oven moist and sparkling with fruity highlights.'

Giada is first slicing oranges (you can cut them any which way you want) in a green t-shirt that provides a glimpse of the top of the breasts (not to be upstaged, the chicken's southern end is facing the camera).

The cavity isn't too big in there so I don't want to leave the pieces extra, extra-large. Before stuffing said chicken, she shows a split garlic and comments on its beauty (choosing not to comment on its visual resemblance to a vagina).

The porn music begins as she moves the chicken onto the board to commence stuffing. First she salts the chicken's anus.

And we're seasoning and massaging the inside, the cavity of the chicken...Now we're putting all of the orange in...just tuck it in there...now the lemon...go ahead and push, don't be afraid, it's not going to break...now the garlic halves...just shove it in there, it's all good....

Perhaps a reverential nod to protection and safe sex: It's really important to keep the salt and pepper you use to season the bird in separate containers so you can throw it away later because you don't want to contaminate the salt you usually normally use with your dirty hands.

Don't be afraid to massage the chicken, massage the salt in between the legs and all over the bird.

Perhaps a reverential nod to bondage: Take a piece of string and you just want to tie the legs together...

The music stops.

I am going to transfer HIM to my roasting pan.

She washes her hands, which on other shows is never slowed-down or accompanied by music and does not include close-ups of hands washing together with creamy white soap. She dries her hands off with a hand towel so pink, the fleurs d'innocence come screaming back to you, talking respectability.

Like porn, we're only four minutes into it and you don't want to watch anymore or ever watch again for that matter.

She squeezes juice from lemons and shows more cleavage. She picks out those (ahem) troublesome seeds. She again talks about the moistness of the chicken while the sound of the lemons collapsing in her hand and providing the juice for a glaze builds.

And then you add these flavors to it and then all of a sudden... (CLIMATIC SQUISH)...it's the best tasting chicken you will ever have.

At this point, my friend began to giggle and titter uncontrollably. He has been sold on the show and the theory.

I lack the energy (and the kleenex) to recap anymore of the episode in depth, so I will describe it as a collection of the following: the emphasis of extra virgin olive oil, cleavage, porn music, the discussion of how baby spinach is delicate and not gritty in your mouth like full-grown spinach, the cooking of slighty al dente/slighty toothsome penne, while motioning to her face she proffers an explanation for how garlic heating inside pasta just sort of penetrates, it penetrates my nostrils. We're now 15 minutes in. She goes on to baste the chicken to porn music and makes dessert.