In order to cut costs, my family recently decided to save $60 a month by cancelling cable. It’s supposed to be shut off in a few days, and I keep turning on the TV just to see if we still get reception. It’s like trying to spend every waking minute with your high school girlfriend before she flies off to college. I’ll miss you (*whimper*), cable.
In this age of technology, though, we won’t be missing much. Between hulu, Netflix, and amazon streamed through the blu-ray, we should be able to watch all of our shows, with a few notable exceptions: AMC, Food Network, and Travel Channel. Don’t get me started on AMC. Only three more episodes of The Walking Dead this season, and I’m about to lose my feed?!?! Rick vs. the Governor? Woodbury vs. the prison? I can’t miss that! Thank god for $2.99 episodes on amazon.
But the real topic of this post is the Food Network and Travel Channel. Of all the cable networks, these get the most air time on our tube. Sometimes selected by my wife and me, but mostly requested by our son. He LOVES the Food Network. Some of his favorite shows are Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives (is that show always on?), Chopped, and Iron Chef America. Then there’s the Travel Channel, with shows like Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern and Man v. Food with Adam Richman. These food-related shows are some of my son’s favorites. At the beginning of the first grade, the kids filled out a survey (without their names) and hung it up in the halls for open house night. It was a test to see if parents could identify their children. We found our son’s right away because under “Favorite TV Show” he put “Food Network”. Not a show, but the entire cable station.
He loves seeing foods made and eaten. He loves the creepy stuff on Bizarre Foods, and arguing about what each of us in the family would and wouldn’t eat. He loves what they can make on Chopped, and making guesses about how he would combine the foods. He loves rooting for Adam Richman, and seeing what that man can stuff into his mouth, even if we are concerned about his blood pressure and risk for diabetes.
I didn’t have a love or an awe for food growing up. My parents weren’t the best cooks (if they read this blog, believe me, they’d agree), so dinner was always a mystery. It was some sort of food with some sort of meat. Usually something that wasn’t that good, but we had to eat it. We weren’t very well-off growing up, so we almost never went out to restaurants. Therefore, I had a very limited palate and a very limited understanding of food. At one point, when I was in my teens, my mom designated a day of the week to each of the four kids, and we were in charge of making dinner for the family. It was an utter disaster. I’ve never seen a family eat so much frozen pizza and mac ‘n cheese. It was sad because we were put in charge of meal planning, but never taught how to cook. We weren’t taught the wonders of food and the skills of preparation.
So, I offer up this post in honor of the Food Network and Travel Channel, as they have helped round out my son’s love of food. Of course, most of the credit for his love of food goes to my wife, the expert chef of the house. But these channels and their shows have opened up the world of food culture to him. Through them, he can see the various ways that food is prepared, enjoyed, and revered in other parts of the county or other parts of the world. He sees that food can be fun. It can be an experiment. And that the art of cooking is full of successes and failures. That chefs constantly try to make something better.
I’m glad that his experiences with food have expanded with the help of these networks, and we’ll certainly miss them when the cable goes out. Until then, Guy Fieri will grace our screen.