Like most of Food Network’s catalog, Worst Cooks in America is meant to be watched on a hotel TV during the lull between check-in and your evening plans in a new city. It occupies a niche in the genre of guilty pleasure reality TV, with a slightly unique premise that situates it somewhere between Chopped and Cutthroat Kitchen. As opposed to more professional shows on the channel, Worst Cooks’ gimmick is to bring on amateur cooks who are horrendously bad at cooking. To kick off Season 10 Episode 1, entitled “A Decade of Dish-asters,” a voiceover plays while we see clips of contestants making exclamations of disgust and bewilderment: “every year, the nation’s worst cooks are drafted into the most intense culinary boot camp in the country.” Judges Anne Burrell and Rachel Ray are tasked with teaching these contestants the skills they need to become “kitchen masters.” Ten episodes, one winner, $25,000 grand prize.
Worst Cooks is not subtle with its editing, with liberal application of zany sound effects and chopped up dialogue that assert the editors as the true molders of the show’s narrative. In this way it encourages the audience to make snap judgements about the contestants’ failures and infrequent successes and buy the values the show presents alongside the shouting, flames, and improper knife handling. Over the course of its constructed narrative, Worst Cooks reflects dominant cultural ideas around good and bad taste and pulls out contrast between the two to create dramatic, funny, cringey television. The show also subtly encodes ideas around patriotism and feminized labor that are disappointing to recognize.
Military rhetoric and patriotic theming is everywhere in the show. The competition as a whole is referred to as boot camp, the fast-paced and grueling atmosphere presented as being the most efficient way for these cooks to improve their skills. The judges and narrator refer to contestants as “recruits,” giving them a subordinate status to the judges both metaphorically and physically, as Burrell and Ray shout criticism at them from a raised vantage point. Contestants are sorted onto either the red or blue team, national colors, after the baseline challenge, and for the rest of the show compete not only as individuals, but on a team against the other half of the contestants. As leaders of the teams in boot camp, Burrell and Ray take on the role as culinary quasi-generals that foster a tough-love environment in judging their team.
In the first challenge of Season 10’s first episode, the contestants are tasked with making a signature dish to “put themselves on a plate” for Burrell and Ray to judge, revealing their and the show’s anti-condiment tastes. The judges chastise Mandy and Laura directly for their overuse of ketchup, and the editing team frames Buffy’s love of mayonnaise as undesirable with a close zoom of the dish in progress. Lester’s tuna surprise is similarly coded as disgusting, though this is as much for the addition of raspberry jam as it is for the amount of mayonnaise he adds to his tuna salad variation. The judges view the use of these condiments as a crutch, a barrier to learning how to build flavor from other, varied ingredients. At the same time, the show views ketchup and mayonnaise as a stand-in for the entire category of processed foods, judging all of it to be simply bad. It’s not a coincidence that Mandy declares her love for ketchup in the same confessional that she admits to making only “pre-packaged and premade” food for her child at home.
Much of the food presented at the end of the baseline challenge ends up looking less than appetizing. Presentation is a common criteria in food competition shows, and is something Anne Burrell and Rachel Ray have spent their careers mastering. But the home cooks on this program do not consider the presentation of their dish to the same degree, as is clear in the results of the first challenge. Jetta’s “chef surprise” is a chunky stew of okra, black beans, and sardines scooped on top of plain pasta, with four shriveled hot dogs arranged like Lincoln Logs. Burrell says it’s a “terrible combination,” with which I am inclined to agree given how it looks on the plate and with my own culinary knowledge. We don’t see either of the chefs taste the dish. When it comes time for the judges to pick the contestants for the other judge’s team, Rachel Ray’s first pick for Anne’s team is Jetta, calling her “the worst of the worst.” Food that looks bad in the show usually tastes bad as well, and the cooks that produce bad looking and tasting food are punished by the structure of the show by being sent home. Jetta redeems herself enough in the second challenge of the episode so that she is not eliminated, but Lester with his homogenous and lightly pink sweet tuna salad is sent home at the end of the episode.
Learning to cook is an important skill for personal self-sufficiency, but Worst Cooks in America promotes the development of cooking skills along gendered lines, encoding the idea that cooking is a woman’s responsibility in the home. Of the contestants in Season 10 Episode 1, Buffy is the only woman who does not describe her motivation for joining the show as related to familial or romantic pressures. Mandy wants to learn to cook for her daughter and “learn how to provide,” while Maria is embarrassed that she relies on her mother-in-law to cook for her family, saying “who in the hell can’t feed their own kids?” When she voiced this, I wondered why Maria’s husband doesn’t step up to cook and thus leaves cooking to be an act of feminized labor in their home. The male contestants are more varied in their motivations for coming on the show, but Jeff also furthers the narrative of domestic cooking being women’s work, telling us in the confessional that he realized that he should cook for his children only after his wife began working full-time. Both Brittany and Matt want to learn to cook in order to find a husband or girlfriend, respectively, something that the show hams up with Matt, but not nearly as much with Brittany. The consistent jokes and jabs about Matt’s future dates characterize his dorkiness and chronic singleness as a point of humor, flattening his personality for the consumability of the television show. Matt is breaking the norms and flipping traditional roles around to a greater degree than Brittany, and the editors of the show make fun of him for it.
When I watch Worst Cooks in America, I’m thankful that my parents and to an extent, other Food Network shows, taught me enough about food and cooking that I can be confident in the kitchen. The show is captivating for the moments when contestants put “40 dollars worth of saffron” on their “frugal” omelet, moments when things that I think are common sense are revealed to not be held in common by everyone. I find the first episode of the show the most entertaining for moments like this, for the sheer volume of mistakes. In future episodes of the season the contestants develop their skills and master knowledge of ingredients and techniques, learning from the demonstrations Burrell and Ray give and challenges they set. And as they hone their skills, I find myself less interested in the challenges and interpersonal drama because the contestants are never going to fuck up as badly as they do during that first baseline challenge. Even though I enjoy the zany energy of the contestants and their baffling, sometimes dangerous culinary choices, the military framing and gendered commentary present within the show make Worst Cooks in America difficult to fully believe.
