Channel surfers with a penchant for the historic side of television are sure to agree that we've seen now perhaps the complete arc of the Food Network with regards to quality and relevance. The Food Network may certainly reinvent itself, surely, but that would be another arc, another interpretation. While we have maybe seen the ideological failure of this project, it comes at its economic and popularity zenith--an odd paradox that cannot be disregarded. We shouldn't simply climb on our high horses and surf on over to the Travel Channel or likewise, but instead look deeper at why abandoning and almost knowingly ostracizing its original viewers was what really made it a success. And in this lesson we can find the reason why there has yet to be a successful show about wine on any of the networks, cable or otherwise.

The abandonment of high cuisine in favor of low appeal has been noticed by the likes of The New York Times and lambasted by the king of culinary rabblerousers, Anthony Bourdain (check out the comments to this blog entry for an interesting display of where the line is between snob and non-snob and exactly how blurry it can be). Bourdain asserts that food shows are about aspiring to something above yourself and that the new look of the Food Network inspires viewers to nothing. There can be no doubt that the Food Network has abandoned the sophisticates among us, but their actions are not nefarious even though they lack any and all altruism. They did it for the money and they obviously achieved what they set out to do. While most readers might place themselves firmly in the category of the learned or at least the wannabe-learned, we can see this arc of the Food Network as a parable.

Oddly enough, the Food Network's successful cabal against the sophisticated and the discerning was really a cabal against the image that it, and media outlets like it, created. In the aforementioned New York Times article, Bill Penzey, a spice purveyor, is quoted as saying, "When did food magazines start talking down to their readers? And when did they start having ads for diamonds and Gucci instead of baking powder?" Mr. Penzey is here supporting the Food Network's decision to bring the level of discourse down to the everyday cook. Whether or not the world needs a Home Cooking magazine in television format is up for discussion. But he does raise a good point. In the many years I've been working in and around the food industry I can say that I haven't known too many people that can afford diamonds or Gucci, so why do many food magazines gear their marketing towards that set? And why did the Food Network when it first set out? Is what we're seeing here a grand mistake in marketing? Is cooking with fine ingredients (even simply) the sole realm of the wealthy? Why has the Food Network so grossly underestimated its viewers? While its marketing continues to appeal to the young adult crowd (where most of its viewers are) why do its constantly pander to tired middle-agers that just want to get something, anything, on the table?

So what did the Food Network do wrong exactly? At first it seemed to do something right. That thing it did was to realize that there are two major classes of viewer. The first is the gourmands of the world and the second is those that don't cook strictly out of necessity, but view food as a more a pedestrian pursuit who would never be willing to undertake some of the mammoth tasks put before them by the early Food Network personalities. What the Food Network then did wrong is simply look at the issue as two sides of a coin which they decided to flip. They saw a larger audience (and thus higher ratings and advertising dollars) in the latter set and simply decided to eschew all appeals to the former set. While this movement brought them money, one doesn't need to be particularly bright to see that the two sets have more in common than the Food Network believed them to.

Here Bourdain's point about cooking shows being an aspiration to something new, something not yet attained, is particularly salient. Why can't we learn how to make complicated 5-hour prep time meals and how to make a super-fresh and simple sandwich out of a few nice ingredients? Are these two things mutually exclusive? Of course not. What's odd is that the Food Network's financial success is absolutely reliant on its pandering to the lowest common denominator without ever suggesting a brighter better food world. The reason for this lies in the Food Network's second large mistake: They allowed advertisers to run their network and put the advertising cart before the horse. To be blunt, food suppliers like Kraft don't make anything that's good. To sponsor a show where the host promotes the use of finer ingredients is to essentially promote anything but Kraft and their ilk's products. Upon launch, the Food Network advertised to the wrong people. They pandered to a phantom set of people that cooked gourmet meals every night, ate at only 4 star restaurants, and drove Mercedes. Yet this wasn't who was watching. Instead of going out and appealing to advertisers that fit their viewership--granted, a sector of business that was not used to advertising nor savvy at it--they went after the advertisers with the biggest bucks and let those advertisers throw away their viewers in exchange for a totally different set.

I bring up this quandary because wine publications find themselves in the same boat as the Food Network, only they haven't yet made any revelations as to how to appeal to a broader audience. In a way, our project here at Banish Care is up against greater odds. After all, it's really not above anyone to make a cheez-whiz and triscuit casserole, but it's above pretty much everyone that drinks wine to be able to make any sort of wine. So much of the process lies shrouded in mystery and technicality and chances are that will never change. While wine has never been so hopelessly technical to make as it is now, it was never simple or accessible to those outside of the major wine-growing regions, yet how did wine consumership survive for more than 6000 years? Furthermore, most sectors of the wine industry are trying to push their wines upmarket into some vague luxury set, whether they deserve to be there or not. How will wine connoisseurship continue to survive in the future? How can we resell the idea of wine as a pedestrian and wonderfully pleasurable drink to the masses when the Marvin Shankens of the world appear only at top echelon tastings, seem to always be wearing a tuxedo, and continue to pump their magazines full of ads for products that most of us can never attain or for wines that obviously have higher marketing funds than they have winemaking sense? Wine consumership in the US continues to witness very strong growth. Yet as the body of people that drink wine multiple times a week grows, so too grows the divide between the hopelessly effete and the hopelessly intimidated. No new major media undertaking concerning wine can succeed without heading down the quizzical path (and ultimately the path to failure, in my view) of the Food Network without first figuring out how to bridge that gap.

The wine industry also suffers from a similar condition as food: good independent winemakers are not accustomed to being savvy advertisers. In a way, the onus of sophistication lies with the media. After all, winemakers have their noses hopelessly stuck in the immediate tasks at hand (i.e. making wine--and who can blame them?) to see the bigger picture. They need to be convinced that a small investment in honest marketing not only will see returns to them in increased name recognition, but will also see a raising up of the general populace by promoting media endeavors that will teach people what is important and why. Otherwise we'll be pumping the intimidated set with the notion that what's easy and cheap is best when what's really true is that for real enjoyment you can have something easy, even something cheap, but rarely both at the same time. We need to set up the wine media such that people are brought up into understanding and that that understanding will in turn fuel the honest parts of the wine industry. In a way we are lucky that no one has tackled the tough task of popularizing wine enjoyment with any major TV media outlet. We need now caution and a healthy discussion and perhaps a few more glasses of wine to clear our heads if we are to be the Pied Pipers of the wine world.