Review of a Show You've Never Heard of and Don't Care About

I was excited to see the new show "Future Food," on Planet Green. If you don't get Planet Green, it's a station that ostensibly only deals with eco-friendly stuff. So of course it's a channel that I don't watch much but always feel like I should.

"Future Food" sounded promising. It's a reality show, of sorts, about a cutting-edge Chicago restaurant that uses unconventional, scientific means to create new foods. They'll use liquid nitrogen, for example, to see if they can make watermelon into a passable substitute for tuna. You know, that kind of thing.

I'm a big fan of food. I'm addicted to it, really, eating it almost every day. I'm not so into quantity as I am into quality. And I love trying new, weird foods. That's adventure for me. Put me in an El Savadoran/Norwegian hot dog-flavored ice cream place and I'm happy as a clam with butter sauce. Some people go climb mountains or drive racecars or beat sharks with a bat or whatever they do -- I go to exotic restaurants and try food from countries that I didn't even realize had food.

So eating at this Chicago restaurant of "Future Food" would be a dream come true for me. Watching the restaurant's chefs screw around, unfortunately, was not. Like too many chefs, they're overly intense and competitive, perverting cooking, this ancient and inherently beautiful art, into an opportunity to high-five each other and scream obscenities.

They awkwardly stuff competition into everything they do. In one episode, they made some unusual crepes and then challenged this very nice and respectable Frenchman, an acknowledged crepe master, to a crepe-off. These schmucks talked a lot about "kicking his ass" while the nice old Frenchman smiled gamely. I felt ashamed for America.

And then there's the fact that these guys are really, really, dweeby. When Goldberg and Mick Foley scream obscenities and high-five each other after "beating up" the Undertaker, you're kinda like, "OK, that's dumb, but look at them. What else are they supposed to do?" But when pencil-thin, googly-eyed dorks scream obscenities and high-five after making some really tasty crepes, you're kinda like "Oh c'mon now. You're not fooling anyone. Go home and do play some D&D like you're supposed to. Another high-five and you'll probably injure yourself."

Side topic for a second -- is it still OK to high-five? I mean, if you're Joe Mauer and you just hit a ten-run home run to beat the Yankees in the World Series, yes, high-fiving makes sense. But are mere mortals still really allowed to high-five? I can't really think of an opportunity in which it would be a viable action for me. But I could be wrong about this one.

At any rate, I also worry that this is the first step in Planet Green slipping away their main mission, a la the History Channel. In case you didn't hear, the History Channel does not actually show anything remotely relating to history nowadays. It's kinda like how MTV doesn't show music videos. The History Channel instead shows reality shows about people with weird jobs -- ice road truckers, ghost hunters, shark-beaters-with-a-bat, that kind of thing. These "Future Food" folks were trying to devise ways to waste less food or buy less food that had large carbon footprints, so there was some eco-stuff in there. I'm just worried that a few years from now Planet Green will be showing "Ghost Truckers," a show about people who investigate haunted trucks and discover that when they pulled him from the twisted, burning wreck, he looked like ... this!