Diverging off the topic of engineering dramas for a moment...

...but staying on TV.

I love to cook and try new recipes. I love to watch the Food Network, especially "Good Eats", "Iron Chef", and "Unwrapped". My favorite PBS shows are the cooking ones with Julia Child, Jacques Pepin, Martin Yan, and the America's Test Kitchen. For some reason, I also enjoyed "Supersize Me" and "Fast Food Nation".

There is a show on the Food Network called "30 Minute Meals" dedicated to showing us how to cook a good healthy meal in the time it takes to finish one show. It's not hard to cook and eat healthy.

Now hear me out. I think the reason why we (collectively, as a consumer society) love fast food so much is not because it tastes good or we were enticed by the toy.

No, the reason we love fast food and restaurants and junk food so much is we hate to clean. Of course it's easy to cook a healthy meal in little time. It's a pain in the butt to clean all the dishes, pots, and pans afterward, especially if you just spent another hour entertaining your guests/friends/family. Have you tried cleaning the pot in which you've just made caramel? Now try it in a non-stick pot and come back in a week when it's clean.

Therefore, IMHO, food shows should be more realistic. "30 Minute Meals" does a respectable job, since the hostess Rachael Ray actually does a fair amount of chopping, cutting, and cleaning during her 30 minutes.

The food show I'd design would last maybe an hour, and in this hour, my host (not me, goodness no, I only have 10 fingers to sacrifice on camera) would do all food prep, cooking, and cleaning. The camera would cut out while people ate the food, then cut back in for the cleaning.

On a vaguely related note, my ex-roommate N and I came up with another food show concept: "grad student cookery". The food prep and dish cleaning are all in there, with an added twist: nearly everything is prepared in the microwave. Occasionally we would use the stove to boil something. Hah, let's see Emeril make something of that.