My Addiction to Competitive Food Television

As corny as it sounds, I just can’t get enough of shows like Sweet Genius and Les Chefs! (‘aspirants chefs’ Quebec). Run of the mill save-a-penny, save-some-time meals don’t excite me. Nor does comfort food. After all, as a denizen of the lower order, the shows that feature this latter named fare are like “A day in the Life of Me’.

But to hear the mental ticking of the stopwatch, the see the puzzlement at the mystery ingredient, to feel the trauma of mistakes and experimental corrections of wannabes, nose-tips dripping sweat at their countdown plating, to see the karate chop cuisine, the acrobatics and the war of Iron Chef America, where the take down of the Mighty One-With-Folded-Arms is so tension-filled, these shows pump up my adrenaline.

Never mind the snootiness of the judges, never mind the semblance of wastage, never mind the humiliation for the loser who double-dipped or left behind a strand of hair on his or gourmet oeuvre. These performances, these excruciating displays are not only fodder for my imagination.

The eye candy is also a rush that satiates enough to keep me off from being chosen as The Biggest Loser, a pummeling, grinding uphill battle I fight every day (a show BTW, that deters me, nay scares the hell out of me from me opening my fridge during commercials).  

I am also a fan of messy fun food challenge, which I believe is at the heart of experimenting with taste. Keep with “Can you Blend it?’, O Carla of The Chew! After all it’s this kind of zany art that leads to the salivation experienced at, say,  the thought of that dab of Nutella or I can’t Believe it’s not Butter that we now take for granted.

“ – but she talked and talked, perhaps because of the newness of her own voice” (p. 177), or

Why I chose Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to lead off my blog.

I didn’t plan to use Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah as my first blog post, but there is something prophetic about how this tome kept falling in and out of my hands.

When I came upon the centrality to the novel of the blog of her main character Ifemelu, I knew with a writer’s uncanny discernment for the gift that comes at right moment out of nowhere, that I should sit up and take some lessons. But there are good lessons and bad lessons, for Ifemelu, like the rest of us, is no saint.

From Adichie’s Ifemelu, here’s what I’ll take:

I’ll take the vigor of the speaking voice, the welcome of challenge to tackle hard but interesting subjects. I’ll take the urge to spontaneous response that knows that sometimes the only choice left is tough – you have to get in there and do the job, even though you’re likely to emerge with battered self-esteem and sticky hands. I’ll take the astuteness and good eye for the contemporary, the breadth of reading on and the analysis of human endeavour. The intelligence, the depth of introspection and the electrifying no-holes-barred confrontation with honesty, these, too, I’ll take.

For although Ifemelu’s blog is fictive, it is palpably real; I want that high bar for my blog.

But from Adichie’s Ifemelu, here is what I will not take:

I promise this blog will not be used to dissemble and disguise rant, to rationalise failings, or to bully the reader into accepting self-righteous morality.  

But what I’ll certainly emulate is the spunk and the aura of possibility that make Ifemelu, the blogger, a credible character – a seeker, a watcher, a learner, and a go-getter, a person who would rather go silent than settle for convenient chatter.

Still the blog lessons are not the only reason that I’ve chosen Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to lead off this blog. 

The novel’s debt to the hair braiding salon, the invisible powerhouse behind the blog, is just as large.

Don’t take for granted this house of mirrors.

The blog arises here – in the shedding and the cleansing and the weaving and the letting down of hair. The process is a long patient, talking-through of crafting towards renewal. A fresh, tight, but comfortable face emerges to front decisions made.

This is why I could never forgive Ifemelu’s betrayal of Aisha. And please don’t tell me that after 6 hours of letting down her hair and having it all done up again in a do that gives her a brave face to meet the world, all Ifemelu can leave Aisha are tears of defeatism and a 20$ tip.  I know this is not a fairy tale. More to the point, her nephew Dike is not a plot-plausible excuse. Not good enough!

That hurt.

Go read Americanah and you’ll see what I’m talking about.