In 1962, Andy Warhol would forever enshrine an avatar of everyday Americana as a lasting icon of modern culture. His serial work Campbell's Soup Cans made its debut, a series of 32 canvases, each devoted to a different variety of the ubiquitous canned soup that the company sold at the time. Those screen-printed paintings put the emerging Pop Art movement on the map, displaying the artist’s nonchalance about what subjects were fit for artistic glory. As Warhol explained his choice at the time, Campbell’s soup was what he ate for lunch every single day. Viewed from a certain angle, Warhol might even be described as America’s first “foodie.” Warhol seduces with the appeal of the familiar in his vision of a ubiquitous American staple. Today the paintings bring connotations of Depression-era thriftiness, post-war 1950s “time-saving” meals and suburban kitchens. However, the same year that Warhol unveiled his seminal Pop Art pieces saw the beginnings of another revolution in how Americans would come to regard what they ate, marked by another sort of self-awareness about food. The medium was not the gallery wall; it was beamed into American homes. This revolution was televised. 1962 was the year one of the authors of the recently published Mastering the Art of French Cooking turned up on Boston public television show I’ve Been Reading and astonished the grumpy book-reviewing host by turning out a perfectly made omelet with the hot plate, giant whisk, and a few eggs she had brought along for her guest appearance. Afterwards, dozens of viewers wrote to WGBH wanting to see more. After taping three pilot cooking shows in 1962, The French Chef on the air the next year and Julia Child began her journey into the kitchens and hearts of television viewers. That pioneering chef would have turned 110 this very month (hat tip to Lane Doss and her Broken Palette newsletter for the reminder and for summing up Child’s achievements better than I could):
Child’s initial series ran for ten years, winning the first Emmy for an educational program and a Peabody Award. With almost twenty books and countless series over her lifetime, she didn’t put down her whisk until age 85, after her last program in 1998, Julia Child & Jacques Pépin: Cooking at Home. A towering cultural figure, literally at six feet two as well as metaphorically, she was lampooned by Dan Aykroyd in an unforgettable 1978 Saturday Night Live! skit that made us love her even more. Julia was so tickled that she used to play a videotape of the segment for her dinner guests, shouting, “Save the liver!”  Julia moved beyond the confines of educational TV with appearances on ABC’s Good Morning America, bringing wide exposure in those pre-cable-network days. From these appearances spring all of today’s food-stuffed television landscape, with both traditional network and streaming slates awash with culinary “content” and a generation of star TV chefs. — and eventually, an entire cable channel devoted to cooking. And they just keep on coming, from Selena Gomez’s popular Selena + Chef on HBO Max (with a parade of bold-face-name chef guests like Marcus Samuelsson, Roy Choi, José Andrés and Rachel Ray) to Bravo’s Top Chef (now filming its 13th season in London) and its many imitators to The Great British Baking Show which has just announced an American iteration produced by Roku with Ellie Kemper and Zach Cherry as hosts. Child herself has been much celebrated on screen. Meryl Streep earned one of her multitude of Oscar nominations for her portrayal of Child in the 2009 Julie and Julia. She has been lauded with documentaries and is currently the subject of an HBO Max narrative series Julia starring British actor Sarah Lancashire, which is now readying its second season. And decades after Child made food preparation a topic of popular fascination, the restaurant kitchen is also the unexpected setting for this summer’s unsettlingly edgy Hulu hit, The Bear, and the upcoming black comedy horror film The Menu starring Anya Taylor-Joy and Nicholas Hoult fending off a scary chef played by Ralph Fiennes, premiering next month at the Toronto Film Festival. It’s a glut of foodie content, fragmented from Child’s singular vision into a hundred directions. But for the larger story of how Food TV aligns with the changes in American culture, the arc of history comes down to three household names: Julia, Martha, and now, I would submit, Ree. Though Child widened her focus and came to embrace other cuisines, the title of her first book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking says it all. In the ‘60s, American culture had an extended love affair with all things Gallic. There was a Francophile First Lady in Jacqueline Kennedy. In New York, the apogee of fine dining in the U.S. was a group of mannered French restaurants that included Lutèce, La Côte Basque and La Caravelle, a Kennedy favorite. (California was but a culinary backwater.) In the first season of The French Chef, Julia exhorted her viewers to make duck à l’orange, chicken livers a la Francaise (with Madeira sauce) and crepes suzette for their dinner parties. Child helped usher in a new appreciation of cooking, but it was a cooking devoted to a singular vision of haute cuisine, in imitation of the great gallic gods. In the next decade, that would change with the arrival of a new American food doyenne, with a more homey sense of what cooking could be. Martha Stewart’s first book Entertaining was published in 1982, which grew out of the former model and then stockbroker’s Connecticut catering business. Stoked by frequent newspaper publicity and appearances on the shows of the time – Oprah Winfrey and Larry King Live – she published a book every year for the rest of the decade. In 1990, Time came calling and her self-named Martha Stewart Living and circulation peaked at an incredible 2 million in 2002 before changes roiled the print world and and the long slide began (it ceased publishing in print with the May issue this year). She debuted her housewares line at Kmart and then later a more upscale effort at Macy’s. Stewart also began a weekly half-hour television program and was a contributor to the various morning shows. We were all in thrall; I myself remember specially ordering a variety of seafood from the Fire Island Pines grocery one weekend (including cockles) to make her version of paella from the magazine. Eventually, Martha became something else: a brand. Commonplace today, it was head-turning when she consolidated all her television, print, and merchandising ventures into a new company, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. When the stock went public, she became the first female self-made billionaire in the United States. Julia Child could hardly have dreamed of where being a TV chef could land you. Martha is still going at it at a well-tended 81, with her own “Martha’s Chard” chardonnay, Martha Meal Kits, her just-opened The Bedford restaurant on the strip at Paris Las Vegas (modeled, said Eater on her own 1925 country farmhouse in Bedford, New York where she served part of her felony prison sentence in her 2005 stock-trading imbroglio) and her line of CBD edibles — and of course another just-announced streaming series, this time on Roku. Amusingly, though Martha seems a perfect example of the “coastal grandmother” fashion trend, she categorically rejects the label as she told The Washington Post in a review of her restaurant (“a caviar-topped crowd-pleaser,” they wrote.) “Look at my pictures from Vegas. Do I look like a coastal grandma?” she huffed. “I wear Valentino (who made the yellow feathered frock she wore to the opening). I wear Balenciaga. I wear Brunello Cucinelli. I’m no coastal grandma.” Even the food at her new restaurant tends to high-style classics like salade niçoise, oysters Rockefeller, roast chicken carved at the table and upside-down lemon meringue pie. But if each era gives us the lifestyle queen we deserve, Stewart and her would-be successor in the cooking-fueled lifestyle sweepstakes could not be more different. Which brings us to Ree “The Pioneer Woman” Drummond. If you’re not familiar with her, let’s get you up to speed. Drummond has been climbing the ranks at the Food Network for the last ten years, all from her countrified ranch kitchen just outside Pawhuska, Oklahoma. Her husband, Ladd, who she euphemistically refers to as “Marlboro Man” is somewhat at odds with Ree’s “homey” vibe since their share of the famiiy ranch empire totals a massive 433,000 acres, making them the 23rd largest landowners in the country. Unabashedly retrograde in matters of romance, she claims he wouldn’t marry her until she was able to make his favorite breakfast, Eggs in a Hole — and her version is a dish made with at least a half-stick of butter. That’s the other thing about Ree: her recipes are larded (never has the word been more appropriate) with butter, bacon, sour cream, mayonnaise and cream cheese. Her flagship cooking show, in constant rotation on Food Network’s weekend schedule features fare like fried mac-and cheese ball appetizers, individual sausage breakfast casseroles and Frito chili pie. So, to continue the story, a couple of weeks ago Ree made a big step up to prime-time, as a Food Network host with Big Bad Budget Battle, which is produced by her the network’s biggest draw, the portly good ‘ole boy with a trademark stand-up shock of white hair, Guy Fieri. (The series is also streaming on Discovery+, reportedly soon to be combined with HBO Max in David Zas’s post-WB/Discover merger cutbacks.) Battle is a purposely low-budget entry — not in terms of production values but in its promise of economic family dinners, conceived, no doubt, to capitalize on the current daily news headlines about inflation (though that now seems to be cooling down a bit). The network predictably touted Ree’s down-home persona as a key component in a debut press release, citing her “easy relatability and wry sense of humor that makes everyone want to pull up a chair in her kitchen.” It may seem like a stretch but that’s what got me thinking about Warhol and his soup cans. In the first of the six hour-long episodes, the three contestants were each given just $20 to make it through a trio of cooking challenges. In the final round, dad cook Asa picked the condensed cream of mushroom for a sauce for his version of Swedish meatballs — a Ree-approved “super shortcut” to take the prize trophy and a year’s worth of groceries. In truth, despite its budget-busting ballyhoo, Battle didn’t deviate much from Food Network’s prime-time recipe for programming, which mixes one part competition show with a dash of the hinterlands, and often finishes off with some singularly unpalatable ingredient. The formula doesn’t vary that much between cornerstones like Chopped, where sets of competing chefs have to construct three courses out of a hamper with a surprise; Beat Bobby Flay, in which the former New York restaurateur tried to best a regional chef’s specialty with his often needlessly gussied-up version; and Guy’s Grocery Games, a mainstay of Fieri’s sizable chunk of FN real estate, including Supermarket Stakeout and the long-running Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives reality show and debuting next week, his new food-themed celebrity quiz show, Guy’s Ultimate Game Night, with upcoming guests like actress Vivica A. Fox, magicians Penn Jillette and Teller, comedian Cheech Marin and musician Carnie Wilson. (There was also some offscreen mano-a-mano drama late last year when Fieri, often called the face of Food network, re-upped with a three-year contract worth an eye-watering estimated $80 million which caused rival Flay to announce he was leaving the network after 27 years; but in the end Discovery and FN coughed up enough dough – a rumored $100 million – to keep him onboard. There’s some big bucks here.) If Ree is a newcomer to television evening programming and its eventual rich rewards, it’s just a matter of playing catch-up since she already commands a considerable commercial empire from that Oklahoma ranch kitchen. Besides starring on The Pioneer Woman since 2011, Drummond also turns out a cookbook every year or two, following her first bestseller, The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Recipes from an Accidental Country Girl, published in 2009, and extending to two children’s series, Charlie the Ranch Dog, based on her own Bassett hound. That stands alongside home goods, cookware and women’s wear, all exclusively at Walmart (cloying florals predominate from throw pillows to a patterned Insta-Pot to Ree’s signature “flowy” peasant tops. Drummond’s fans can even get a taste of the lifestyle with a stay in Pawhuska at the Drummond-owned lodging and sampling their retail-restaurant complex. Last year she also logged her first role in, appropriately, her own Yule movie, Candy Coated Christmas, for Discovery+, playing a small-town bakery owner. Drummond takes up the domestic-arts lifestyle mantle in a much different, more fragmented time and probably can never achieve the total media renown of Stewart. With her long, apparently happy marriage, farmhouse setting and brood of grown children who she often features on her cooking show, Ree’s a bit of a rube and she’s OK with that. Her jarring red hair, backcountry voice timbre and jokey manner is probably as beloved by her fans as it seems ridiculous to the “city folk.” Though the Oklahoma native actually went to college at USC, it doesn’t seem to have rubbed off. It’s tempting to speculate on The Pioneer Woman’s politics – as well as the appeal of the whole Food Network — with the lineup of mostly male, prime-time hosts (though it must be said, the various shows are populated with a diverse slate of contestants and the network also features “daytime” cooking shows with a more diverse background, like Delicious Miss Brown and Molly Yeh of Girl Meets Farm.) But it can be said, the network seems unfazed by the battles that have roiled the food world, with issues of equity and representation that led to the resignations of Bon Appetit editor Adam Rappaport, The New York Times columnist Alison Roman, the editor of the Los Angeles Times food section and others. Is it just me, or does Drummond’s assertive homeyness and blithe quantities of rich comfort foods seem tailor-made to anesthetize a hypothetical red-state audience that wants to keep the clock stopped in the past, away from the boogie-man issue today like reproductive rights, the push for diversity and changing sexual mores? Maybe in the end, Warhol had the right idea. It’s a mistake to try to poke behind the curtain, everything we need to know is on the surface. One thing’s for sure though. It’s been a long time since anyone ate a bowl of canned soup for lunch every day.
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