I was going to wait until the end of the season to go to town on the Bravo cooking show Top Chef, but I'm so astounded...no, apoplectic that I have to start now.  And I really like this show.   Tonight's challenge is to create a frozen FAST FOOD item based on Bertolli's Mediterranean Style Frozen Dinners.  Okay, so already there are at least three things wrong with this right off the top.

And I want you to know that I interrupted the drafting of another post about chopped chicken liver in order to publish this one immediately!

First, product placement.  Enough already because I'm beginning to think that something is really stale with this show and I'm not apologizing for the cheesy kitchen metaphors.  Who is claiming ownership here?  Is it the creative cooking minds who want their 15 minutes of fame and a good push into their own business or corporate minds cooking up ways to further subvert Americans and their hard earned dollars?  Or maybe the producers have somehow managed to run out of ideas for challenges.  If that's the case, then I've got plenty of local ideas. And I don't buy the whole food science aspect of this challenge.  Of course food science is critical, but you demonstrate this by asking the chef's to create frozen FAST food while selling us stuff? First freezing meals is a whole other level of food science expertise that most chefs do not possess and please, stop using us and all of these poor young chefs.  What's the next challenge going to entail...an infomercial or guest spots on QVC?

Secondly, tonight's episode includes Chef Rocco DiSpirito as a guest judge who has the temerity to introduce the challenge by saying that this placed product gives people the sense that they are cooking a meal themselves.  Excuse me?  What is the consumer cooking? Isn't it more like heating something up? And this coming from a chef who gained some measure of fame by showing how he ran a restaurant.  We won't say where he actually ran it into, but that too could be the result of a producer's poetic license.

All of this brings us to the real kicker which is the prize of a trip to Italy for the winner of the challenge.  So let's break this down.  Chefs are demonstrating their expertise in making a Mediterranean inspired meal using modern day frozen food technology and the winner's prize is a trip to Italy, the home of the Slow Food movement?  Huh? The irony here is too much.  Carlo Petrini, the founder of Slow Food in none other than Italy, created the movement in an effort to protest the opening of a McDonald's in Rome.  Slow Food is a celebration of local, homegrown foods lovingly prepared in your own kitchen (from scratch) and eaten leisurely at the family table.  It is meant to remind us where our food comes from and to instill an appreciation for the land.  Farm to table in simple, time-honored steps. So, in the end the winner of a FAST food challenge gets to go visit the home of SLOW Food?  Carlo Petrini, please meet the winners at Fiumicino and take them in hand.

Top Chefs, NBC bottom feeder producers...whomever are the brains behind this--we really are smarter than you're treating us.  And no, I don't think that the producers are imbedding an in joke.  Leave the frozen foods, product placements, gastriques, foams and amuses-bouche alone already and embrace Slow Food and Go Local.

Celebrating the land is cooking with a 21st century mind.

To learn more click Slow Food International, Slow Food USA and Slow Food NYC.