As the couch cushions groan with the growing audience for cooking shows, celebrity chefs are beginning to acknowledge that they might need to look at their own weight and what they're telling others to eat.
It is as the Food Network's Alton Brown explained to Time magazine:
Celebrity chefs are the high priests of the food craze that is partly responsible for the fattening of America. We helped people get into this mess. I don't see why we shouldn't help get them out.
It's nice to know that chefs are considering their own health in the context of what they're making for shows and cookbooks. Because the culinary world takes a lot of cues from celebrity chefs. Guy Fieri has a big impact on America through T.G.I. Fridays, just as Thomas Keller has been at the forefront of the slow food movement.
The cynical side of me views this as part of a cyclical process in which chefs are just following what's trendy, the same way a car salesman recently asked whether I was interested in the "green movement." If so, it would appear that we are headed for a slate of chef cookbooks about losing weight, similar to the influx of diet books (Zone, South Beach) earlier this decade. In fact, Brown mentions that he is considering a book about the 50 pounds he's lost in the last six months.
It sounds like the next cooking reality show we can expect is a combination of Top Chef and The Biggest Loser -- The Biggest Chef? All this time we thought it was the camera that adds 10 pounds.
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