February 4, 2026

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I first got into cooking shows by watching Gordon Ramsay deal with filthy restaurants and ridiculous people on Kitchen Nightmares. His combination of acrid candor and surprising compassion won me over. Plus, I had never imagined that the kitchens in restaurants could ever be so appalling.

What really shocked me was realizing that Ramsay only took his Nightmares shows where he was invited. These were restaurants that were in trouble, and the owners -- or at least someone in the restaurant -- knew it. Everyone in the restaurant knew that cameras had been placed everywhere. Why, then, did they behave so badly?

Well, first, they got a complete interior and often exterior remodeling, and I assumed that the show paid for the changes. But in the meantime, I had learned from experience that these reality shows are heavily scripted. You aren't given actual words to say, but the producers make sure you know what your character arc is supposed to be.

In my one reality show experience, I was strongly coached to say certain things about my experiences with the star of the show. The trouble is, not one word of my "script" was real. I just wouldn't go on TV and lie, and so my segment never aired. So I began to suspect that the most obstreperous owners on Nightmares were actually behaving as the producers wanted them to, so the show would have plenty of drama.

Following Ramsay into Master Chef and Hell's Kitchen introduced me to the nastiness of kitchen competitions. Again, I wasn't sure that anything I saw was honest, but I did understand how miraculous some of the cooking was. I watched to learn something about what happened to the ingredients in the making of various difficult dishes.

The Great British Baking Show format showed me an example of how competition didn't have to be mean, and the producers don't have to set the contestants against each other in order to make entertaining television.

But I got tired of Gordon Ramsay being mean to people. He was not as tiresome as Simon Cowell had become on American Idol, but I already know how to swear, and I don't enjoy watching people getting disrespected by a rich guy who could have accomplished as much by being kind.

So Beat Bobby Flay was a breath of fresh air. I had actually eaten several times at Flay's Mesa Grill restaurant in New York City, and the food was quite good; I didn't remember the name of the chef, so I came to Beat Bobby Flay without preconceptions.

What I learned was that a real master chef can prepare a dish he's never even seen, let alone tasted, and still make it work. His competitors are almost always very, very good; but Flay beats them more than half the time.

Yet win or lose, everybody is gracious. Good sportsmanship prevails. Flay's celebrity guests really do seem to be his friends or at least acquaintances, and they are charming and often quite funny. Some of them are also master chefs, so their conversation is full of wisdom and lore about cooking and, sometimes, baking. I enjoy the guest judges, too, and the things they say are smart and teach me what to look for in the dishes I'm served in restaurants.

But much as I enjoy the guest hosts and guest judges, I know that I could never, never, never be a judge on any cooking show.

That's because, to be a judge, you have to actually eat food from every dish.

And by "eat," I mean put it in your mouth, chew it, taste it, and swallow it.

And I can't remember a single cooking show in which I could possibly force myself to do that with every dish.

Hideous Ingredients

My first barrier is alcohol and coffee. I have never acquired a taste for either, having grown up in an alcohol- and coffee-free culture. I have tasted food cooked in wine or other alcoholic beverages. Beer-battered coconut shrimp at Outback has caused me no grief, but when meats are cooked in wine, it wrecks the flavor, as far as I'm concerned.

Coffee, though, is worse. I used to get frozen yogurt at I Can't Believe It's Yogurt (not TCBY) until they suddenly decided to have gourmet coffee as well. From that time on, the smell of coffee was so pervasive that every frozen yogurt was coffee flavored, and that was the end of that.

There are certain dishes that traditionally have to have wine, liquor, or beer as an ingredient; I don't order them in restaurants, and I would be repulsed by them on a cooking show. There's nothing that makes me sadder than to watch Bobby Flay or some other chef upend a bottle of wine over the meat they're about to roast, bake, or pressure cook. As a Texas barbecue connoisseur once told a friend who asked for ketchup, "Son, I'd rather see you piss on that steak than put ketchup on it." (Actually, I'd rather see you put nothing but salt on the meat than to immerse it in either wine or urine.)

Awful Customs

The Great British Baking Show made me realize that I can never have dessert in England. Despite several visits to the Isle of Great Britain, I managed to find little English cuisine that I would ever want to eat again. However, because England makes the best candy bars on Earth, I thought their desserts might be better.

But no. Not only does alcohol go into a lot of desserts that don't need it (rum? For dessert?), but the English also put fruit -- fresh or dried or candied -- in everything. Here the baker has prepared an absolutely delicious looking batter or dough, and then, at the last minute, they fill it with nauseating cooked or dried fruit.

If I bite down on a raisin in a cookie, or a gummy bear in anything, or a dried apricot in a cake, it comes out of my mouth without further chewing and definitely without swallowing. I regard baked fruit as an abomination. In the Old Testament, God destroyed whole cities for lesser offenses.

I don't believe that I saw a single dessert on the Great British Whatever that I would even sample, despite the beauty of everything else about it.

But there are other customs that appall me. All of a sudden, back in the eighties, everybody decided that pasta needed to be "al dente." This translates as "undercooked and rubbery" instead of being soft and comforting. I admit, I learned my taste in pasta from a kitchen in which canned pasta and thoroughly cooked stovetop pasta prevailed, so to some people that brands me as a philistine. But I don't actually care. If the pasta is underdone, it tells me that I must have offended the chef somehow, and he's punishing me.

I have Italian friends who also scoff at "al dente," because their Italian moms or grandmothers cooked their noodles until you could throw one against the wall and it instantly adhered until you had to scrape it off with a rasp.

Rare and Raw Meat

To me, the distinction between "rare" and "raw" is merely academic. If there's red liquid in the steak or roast, none of it goes in my mouth. In fact, I'm likely to find an immediate reason to leave the table and do something else, because my appetite is gone.

I read about a scientific hypothesis that early humans mastered fire in order to cook their meat at a crucial stage in evolution. The ability to cook meat meant that we no longer needed massive molars to chew and chew and chew and chew on leaves and on meat in order to get enough calories to sustain life.

We have small teeth because we cook our food. So why is it that haute cuisine requires that even when I ask, at a restaurant, for my meat to be well done, waiters have more than once returned to tell me, usually in a snooty tone, "I'm sorry, sir, the chef is serving the prime rib rare this evening."

That is usually my signal to leave the restaurant. I'm a human of the species that evolved to eat cooked meat. I've heard connoisseurs tootle about how "well-done meat has had all the flavor cooked out." I correct them. "Well-done meat has had all the flavor of raw, freshly killed muscle tissue cooked out, to be replaced by the satisfying, human-friendly flavor of cooked meat.

When the words "Homo habilis" or "Australopithecus" do not appear in a restaurant's name, I expect to be able to obtain cooked meat for my plate.

"But it's all dried out!" cry the connoisseurs. "Not if the chef is competent," I reply. "Well-done meat has to be ovened, not just pan-fried, so the heat has time to get deeply into the meat. You can't just slap it onto the grill and let the outside get seared while the inside still retains the temperature of the refrigerator."

Then, in the 1980s, somebody decided that fish needed to be served rare or raw even in restaurants that did not mention Japanese cuisine anywhere. Yes, I have enjoyed sashimi as well as sushi, and while I can't gag down seaweed (I ask for soy or rice paper on my sushi rolls instead), I have no problem with raw tuna or raw salmon, when prepared by an excellent sushi chef.

But in an American restaurant, cook the damned fish. Non-Japanese-trained chefs cannot be trusted to choose the right fish and then treat it properly for raw or rare presentation. There are American restaurants that can do it properly, but I haven't yet found one outside of California.

So, once again, in a restaurant in Bar Harbor, Maine, a semi-apologetic waiter explained to my wife, "I'm sorry, the chef is serving the salmon rare tonight." Since my wife cannot put raw fish into her mouth, and I cannot abide a chef who is not competent or willing to prepare animal flesh cooked to order, the whole family rose from the table and returned to our car.

That's because we not only believe in the theory of evolution, we approve of it, and the fact that our teeth have evolved to eat cooked meat and cooked fish is, in our view, the last word on the matter.

I Could Never Do It

So when I watch Bobby Flay's friends comment on the dishes prepared by contestants other than Flay, I admire their perspicacity and learn from their judgments. But I also watch them put into their mouths ingredients so vile that I would have to sterilize my kitchen counter after having those items laid out on it.

I have come a long way from being the child so finicky that I didn't taste fresh strawberries until I was in my twenties, because "strawberries are so bumpy." Some of my childhood food phobias survive.

After having been forcefed cornmeal mush and wheat mush (by parents who had known real hunger during the Great Depression), and after having been nauseated by chancing upon regions in Jell-O that had gelled too hard, I gag at certain textures and have to spit them out.

I have never tried grits because they look like mush. I don't eat gelatin desserts, which means I could never claim Utah as my home state, since Utah consumes more Jell-O per capita than any other state. In fact, if I ever go to church pot-luck suppers, I eat only the food my wife and I brought, because if somebody saw me sample another family's cooking and then gag and spit it out, I could lose friends.

That's why I never, never, never accept a meal invitation in someone else's home. I simply do not eat what looks unappetizing to me, and almost everybody prepares dishes that have something about them that I cannot abide.

Yet I watch the cooking shows and see marvelous combinations of fresh ingredients and sometimes I even jot down notes, thinking, I have to try that sometime.

But, as with notes with ideas for future stories, I set them down somewhere and never see them again. My wife is an excellent cook. And I prepare foods to my own taste reasonably well. We have favorite restaurants and eat out frequently -- but only at restaurants that can cope with our special requests.

As for judging a cooking show? There is not one episode of any cooking show I've seen -- not even Guy Fieri's Triple D -- where I would willingly eat any of the dishes as shown. They always do something unconscionable.

And here in the South, they do things like adding nonfood items like kale, collard greens, or okra to the plate. I, too, can scrape out the inside of a rotary lawn mower, but I don't imagine that I am discovering a salad.

And okra? I can detect no difference between putting okra in my mouth and licking the pavement behind a snail on the sidewalk. I've had so many southern cooks look heartbroken and say, "That's because you've never had my fried okra or my mom's or my memaw's," to which my reply is a smile, and the unspoken thought, "No, the reason we're still friends is because I've never had your or your mom's or your grandma's okra."

A man who can't eat at his friends' homes is a man who could never judge a cooking show. As a child I made the vow that, if I lived to be a grownup, I would never ever eat:

Lima beans, navy beans, mushy peas, liver, heart, tongue, country ham, fatty ham slices, chicken-fried steak (or any meat breaded so I can't slice out the fat), skin-on chicken, skin-on fish, fish with the head still attached, raisins, prunes, dates, any other wrinkly fruit, dried fruit of any kind, cooked fruit (except canned pineapple or mandarin oranges, which are fine), frozen banana, underripe banana, any meat that oozed red fluids, anything with tentacles (sorry, calamari), oysters, clams outside of a brilliant clam chowder, any undercooked whitefish, wilted lettuce, cabbage outside of cole slaw, guava jelly, anything grainy that I expected to be smooth, and ...

You get the idea. I'm a grownup now, and I absolutely rule what goes into my mouth. I try to be polite about declining to eat something, regarding "no thank you" as a complete explanation. But when a friend in a Japanese restaurant insists that I accept the eye of the fish as a delicacy, saying, "Parts that move give strength," I am able to decline with no explanation and no defense. "No thank you" is all that needs to be said in polite company.

You won't ever see me as a judge on a cooking show. Unless you find a show entitled, "Cooking for Incredibly Finicky and Childish Diners." Then, just maybe, you'll be able to see me sample haute cuisine well-cooked without wine.