There is a lot of talk being bandied about these days concerning the "Uranium One" scandal. There is a consensus that a lot of people are getting suckered on this. But there is a lack of consensus as to who specifically is getting suckered. Conservatives think the suckers are liberals and the general public. They argue that the Clinton people are pulling the wool over everybody's eyes. And, of course, the main stream media, who are in the tank for Hillary, are actively cooperating with the wool pulling. First, though, a quick look at what the ruckus is all about.
Uranium One was (it no longer exists) a mining concern headquartered in Toronto Canada. They controlled a lot of mining assets in the U.S. and elsewhere and one of the things they mined was Uranium. Uranium is a "strategic material" because it is the key component in nuclear bombs and has other military uses. So any important change in ownership must be approved by the U.S. Government. In 2013 the Uranium One company was sold to a subsidiary of Rosatom, the Russian government Uranium monopoly. And, of course, for this to happen the U.S. Government had to approve the sale, which they did.
So why is this a scandal? Because supposedly Hillary Clinton put her thumb on the scale to make sure the sale was approved. She did this back when she was Secretary of State. If true, this would constitute some kind of scandal. Before going into the rest of the details of the "scandal" let me back up and address whether the "liberal media" is actually in the tank for Hillary. And to do that I want to start by going all the way back to the '60s.
President Kennedy was a lady's man. He had a number of one night stands. His most famous conquest was the actress Marilyn Monroe. None of this came out at the time because there was a "gentleman's agreement" (and at time we are talking about the "gentlemen" of the press were almost all men) that this sort of thing was none of the press's business. It all eventually came out but there was a decades long delay.
Fast forward to 1984. By this time the rules had changed. A Senator named Gary Hart was running for President. As with the Kennedy case, people in the know knew he played around. But now the press saw it as their jobs to tell the public about this sort of thing rather than covering it up. So the press asked Hart about this and he adamantly denied it. He in effect challenged the press to prove he was fooling around. Well, they did. They unearthed proof that he entertained a lady not his wife on a boat named "Monkey Business" of all things. And this revelation sunk Hart's campaign.
Fast forward again, this time to 1992. Now Bill Clinton is running for President. And people in the know knew he played around. The press geared up for a repeat of the Hart play book but Clinton outfoxed them. He admitted to playing around without actually saying so. He professed to being a sinner and asked forgiveness. Without an outright denial the press were stymied in their ability to knock him out of the race and they were very unhappy about it.
But this turned out to be the first of a long list of "Clinton scandals". The shorthand name for the whole list is "Whitewater", the one that came next. "Whitewater" is the name of a real estate development the Clintons invested in. Whitewater was supposed to be a classic "pay for play" deal. The plan was the usual one. Insiders would be let you (in this case the Clintons) in on the ground floor of an investment opportunity with the intent of giving you a risk free way to make a nice quick and apparently entirely legitimate profit. You would then owe the insiders a favor to be redeemed later. The problem is that things did not go according to plan.
Whitewater never got off the ground and the Clintons lost over $20,000 on the deal (a lot of money for them at the time). So since they didn't get paid they didn't have to play (dole out a favor to be named later). All of this came out fairly quickly. But the very same press that is supposed to be in the tank for the Clinton's gave Whitewater wall to wall coverage for literally years.
You can often find patterns in people's behaviors. The press should have quickly abandoned Whitewater because as a scandal it was fatally flawed by the fact that the Clintons lost money on the deal. They should have lain in wait for a different pay for play example that went as planned. But they didn't. They continuously recycled Whitewater for years. And if they had in fact been in the tank for the Clintons they should have made excuses for the Clintons from the very beginning and then promptly dropped the whole thing. This is the opposite of what they actually did.
And there is an even more confusing aspect to all this. There was an actual successful pay for play deal that went completely according to plan. And it surfaced during the height of the "Clinton scandal" era. Hillary (she was the moneymaker as a very successful lawyer while Bill made chump change as the Governor of Arkansas) invested in something called "cattle futures" exactly once in her entire life. Through a brokerage firm in Little Rock she bought a "futures contract" tied to the price of cattle. She sold it a couple of weeks later and made a tidy profit.
Obviously she knew nothing about the futures market for cattle (or any other commodity for that matter) so how did she make a nice profit in such a short period of time? Most likely because the fix was in. There is something called "front running" that can be applied to transactions like the one Hillary made. A number of transactions are typically handled at the same time. And there is often some price variation even though the transactions are supposedly "simultaneous". Front running consists of giving the lowest purchase price and the highest sale price to the transaction belonging to the favored customer. This is likely what happened here. And the people running the brokerage rang up a future favor.
As I said all of this came out right in the middle of the years long season of "Clinton scandals". Yet many people I talk to who were paying attention at the time are completely unfamiliar with this event. And the reason is simple. This successful example of pay for play never got much coverage. It didn't even get much coverage in conservative media. So what we see is tons of coverage of a failed pay for play "scandal" and almost no coverage of a successful example of pay for play. It would have made sense to devote little coverage to the former and a lot of coverage to the latter but that's not what happened.
And These are just two of the several "scandals" that occurred while Bill Clinton was running for President or in office. And most of the "scandals" were entirely made up so they had even less substance than Whitewater. The last in line was the Monica Lewinski affair. Clinton had an affair (but not sex in the biblical sense) with her. Still it was a bona fide scandal. The press, liberal and otherwise, used the fact that this affair was a real scandal to justify all of the coverage heaped on the other not so real (and in some cases completely fake) "scandals". But the unmistakable conclusion to be drawn from all this is that the liberal press in definitely not in the tank for Clinton.
But wait, there's more. And, of course the "more" is the Clinton email server "scandal". This came to dominate coverage of Hillary's Presidential run to the exclusion of pretty much everything else. Various studies indicate that twice as much of the time devoted to covering the Clinton campaign was spent on emails as was spent on pretty much everything else. And we got headlines about "new email revelations" for week after week after week. But interestingly enough while pretty much everyone else's email server was hacked the server Hillary used wasn't. And the 30,000 emails that were made public showed a competent and careful person going about the day to day business of being Secretary of State and doing it well.
But the coverage in the liberal media was based on cherry picking nits and nats that could be taken out of context to make her look bad. And the FBI did manage to unearth some emails that weren't turned over but they all were initiated on some other mail server and would not have been in the archive of the Clinton mail server. And a couple of emails contained classified information. The classified information consisted of pictures of damage done in Pakistan by drone strikes. At the time the emails were sent similar pictures could easily be obtained from unclassified sources. And the fact that the pictures were classified was not obvious and all of them were buried deep in reply chains where they were easily missed.
So, while it could be argued that laws were broken, the violations were minor. That's why the FBI concluded what they concluded. And meanwhile various much more serious email scandals were breaking out all over the place. These other scandals have seen far less coverage in the press, liberal or otherwise. And the coverage of Hillary's email "scandal" was essentially the same in the liberal and the conservative press.
So if there was a juicy Uranium One scandal the liberal press would be all over it. But they aren't. So let's dive a little deeper into the conservative coverage of Uranium One, whatever it is, and see what we can find there.
Uranium One is supposed to be another pay for play deal. Hillary was paid through one of the Clinton charities, The Clinton Foundation or the Clinton Global Initiative. Later, the theory goes, Clinton "played" by making sure the Uranium One deal got approved. But there are major problems with both the "pay" part and the "play" part. Let's look at them in order.
The Clintons are rich. They are now worth millions of dollars. But they are not fabulously wealthy. They own a large nice but not all that fancy house in upstate New York. It certainly wouldn't meet Trump's standards. And they only own the one house. They also own no boats, helicopters, airplanes, or other toys of the truly wealthy. They are certainly not hurting financially but neither of them is driven by the need to accumulate fantastic amounts of wealth. We know this because we have access to decades of Clinton Income Tax returns.
If they had tried they certainly could have milked their charitable opreations for large amounts of money but they haven't. I'm sure they get handsomely reimbursed for Foundation related expenses like travel and lodging costs. But none of the Clinton family draws a salary from the Foundation (the Clinton Global Initiative is a subsidiary of the foundation). And the Foundation's books are audited annually so any large kickbacks to the Clintons would be obvious.
We can see where they get their money by checking their tax returns. They get it from book sales, speaking fees, remuneration for sitting on boards where they are not expected to put in much time or effort, and that sort of thing. For better or worse you can make a lot of money doing that sort of thing if you have the right kind of name recognition. So there was no straight up bribe-type "pay". How about something more subtle?
The Clinton Foundation is a charitable operation, one that is very well thought of. It routinely gets top marks from all the "charity watch" type organizations. Very little of the money goes to overhead. Most of it is spent on things like medicines in Africa that result in doing good but also in good publicity. In a certain sense you can call the operation a money laundering operation.
If you have a bad reputation and want to get your name associated with some kind of "do gooder" program it's hard to beat the Clinton Foundation. They actually do good. But they also make sure that the people that give them money with which to do good get lots of positive publicity. And the Foundation has a reputation around the world of being effective. People think their programs work well, are sensitive to local concerns, etc. They have a reputation for running a first class operation in an area where there are a lot of fly by night operators.
This has allowed the Foundation to raise and spend about $2 billion over its lifetime. If you are say a Russian Oligarch who has done a lot of shady deals an obvious way to burnish your reputation is to go into partnership with The Clinton Foundation. And various Russian Oligarchs including those associated with Uranium One have done just that. And so have other shady people like Saudi princes. And so have lots of good upstanding people. It's what the Foundation does.
And there is no kickback to either the Clintons or to the shady or otherwise people making the contributions. That's where the Foundation differs from a standard money laundering operation. In a standard money laundering operation the point is to launder dirty money into clean money then return the clean money to the original "investor". A fee for service is taken along the way but most of the dirty money put in is supposed to come back as clean money. As a money laundering operation The Clinton Foundation is all "fee" and no "return". All the investor gets out of the deal is good will. That's worth something. The question is how much?
Various investigators have identified $145 million in contributions to the Clinton Foundation on behalf of various people who had an interest in the Uranium One deal. That is lot to pay for good will. The standard pay for play calculus starts with you kicking in the $145 million. Then the sweetheart deal happens. Then you make way more than $145 in additional profit (the clean money) down the road. Set that aside for a moment and look at the timing however.
$131 million of the total came from one guy, a Canadian named Frank Guistra. But he sold the company in 2007. If it made a ton of money after 2013 then he wouldn't make a dime on the deal. Another $1 million came from another Canadian associated with the company. So most of the so called bribe money actually came from Canadians, not Russians. But let's now return to the "play" part.
Supposedly Hillary did sneaky underhanded things while Secretary of State to get the deal to go through. But the deal had to be approved by nine different agencies of the Federal Government. They all did. Let's skip the whole "she secretly corrupted all nine agencies" idea and go to the most fundamental one. Was there a reason why the deal needed a boost to get approved? To answer that question it is useful to look at the history of Uranium mining.
Before World War II no one cared about Uranium. So no one spent much time trying to figure out where it could be found. Then Einstein wrote a letter to President Roosevelt and the Manhattan Project got under way. All of a sudden the government needed a bunch of Uranium. But the whole thing was ultra-top-secret. So efforts to locate Uranium had to be done very quietly. As a result of this the impression was built up at the time that Uranium was very hard to find.
Then Hiroshima happened and the secret was out. And a nuclear reactor for powering submarines and later electricity plants was developed. And all of a sudden there was a market for Uranium And so mining companies started looking for it. And it turns out it is all over the place. Uranium is a commodity. People will buy it from whatever source that is cheapest of the sources available to them. As mining companies looked around they found Uranium in lots of places so the race was on to find places where it could be mined very cheaply.
Most of the mining in the immediate postwar period in the U.S. took place on or near the Navajo Reservation in Arizona and New Mexico. These mines have since all been shut down not because they ran out of Uranium but because they are not cost competitive against mines located in other places in the world.
To my knowledge Uranium mining is or has taken place in the U.S. (obviously), Canada (home of Uranium One), Europe (to support the German effort during World War II), South Africa (to support the bomb program they later abandoned), Russia (successful bomb program), China (successful Chinese and North Korean bomb programs), Brazil (bomb program that was abandoned before the first bomb was built), and Central Africa (remember the "yellowcake" Saddam was supposedly importing into Iraq). I don't doubt that it can also be found in lots of other places.
And then there are the ups and (mostly) downs of demand for Uranium. There was essentially no demand before World War II. Then the market for bomb grade Uranium opened up. It was quickly followed by the opening up of the market for reactor grade Uranium. Then the U.S. and Russia started signing nuclear arms reduction treaties. That dried up the bomb grade market (at least in the U.S. and Russia). Then the Three Mile Island happened in 1979. All of a sudden we were building no nuclear power plants in the U.S. and construction also slowed down in the rest of the world. Then Chernobyl and later Fukushima happened. There is now almost no market for reactor grade Uranium any more. The market for Uranium peaked many decades ago and has been on a decline ever since.
But it's worse than you think. Above I mentioned "bomb grade" and "reactor grade" Uranium. I need to drill down on them a little. Uranium comes in "isotopes". The important ones are U-235 and U-238. Natural Uranium, the kind that comes out of mines, is composed of about 99% U-238, 7/10 of 1% U-235, and traces of everything else. To make reactor grade Uranium the percentage of U-235 needs to be "enriched" to 6%. This is a difficult and expensive process. But roughly 9 pounds of natural Uranium can be enriched to make 1 pound of 6% U-235 Uranium and 8 pounds of "depleted" Uranium. The enrichment level of bomb grade Uranium is classified. But it is rumored to be 90%. Making 1 pound of bomb grade Uranium is fantastically difficult and expensive. But the point is that a whole lot of depleted Uranium is left over. And the stuff is pretty useless so it tends to just sit around.
Reactor grade Uranium still has a market. But as disarmament has kicked in a lot of bomb grade Uranium has become surplus. Using the 90% figure to make the math easy, if we start with 10 pounds of bomb grade Uranium it contains 9 pounds of U-235. If we "downblend" our 10 pounds of bomb grade Uranium with 140 pounds of depleted Uranium (assumed to have no U-235 left in it, again to make the math simple) we end up with 150 pounds of reactor grade Uranium. My point is it doesn't take much bomb grade Uranium to make a lot of reactor grade Uranium.
The U.S. has decommissioned thousands of nuclear weapons.. The Russians have decommissioned a similar number. That's a lot of surplus bomb grade Uranium available with which to make a whole lot of reactor grade Uranium by downblending it with depleted Uranium. And then there is Iran. They made a bunch of Uranium that was enriched to 20% U-235. It all went to the Russians as part of the nuclear treaty we did with Iran. That's still more enriched Uranium that can be downblended to make still more reactor grade Uranium which can then be flooded into the already shrunken reactor fuel market which depresses prices and demand still more.
My point is there isn't a lot of money in the Uranium mining business and there hasn't been for a long time. And part of the deal the U.S. signed off on when it approved the Uranium One deal guaranteed that the U.S. would continue to have access to all the natural Uranium it traditionally had access to.
But this is not very important because Uranium is a commodity. We are good as long as we can get as much as we need from somewhere. And we have lots of somewheres to pick from. There was never any reason to block the Uranium One deal. All the agencies did their due diligence and decided there was no reason to block it so they all signed off on it.
With no "play" needed there was no reason for any of the participants to "pay". The deal was absolutely non-controversial at the time. So there was no reason for Hillary to interfere. And all evidence indicates that she didn't.
Of course, in some circles it is sometimes useful to gin up yet another Hillary controversy so you can stoke up your base. So the suckers in the Uranium One story are the conservatives who are buying the snake oil the conservative media and conservative politicians are trying to sell them. The market for this sort of snake oil, unlike the market for Uranium, is strong and getting stronger.
Friday, December 29, 2017
Saturday, December 16, 2017
Chopped
Think of this as a holiday piece. I usually have something serious to say. Not this time around. This is a totally frivolous piece. No great analysis. No deep meaning. Just fun.
"Chopped" is a TV show I have gotten into. I think with me it's a fad and at some point I will lose interest and drop it. But at the moment it fascinates me. From a business perspective, it's anything but frivolous. It has had 35 "seasons" (they seem to constitute 13 episode blocks), has aired continuously since 2009, and is getting close to broadcasting its 500th episode. It normally airs on Tuesday evenings on the Food Network and, as far as I can tell, its popularity remains strong. So I expect it to continue on long after I have tired of it. And that's fine with me.
"Chopped" is nominally a cooking competition show. But the emphasis falls heavily on the competition aspect. It requires superior cooking skills to be competitive but its format seems tailor made to guarantee that the food produced will often be mediocre at best. That's why I say it is mostly about the competition and not so much about the cooking.
The maser of ceremonies is Ted Allen. He gained fame by being one of the "fab five" on a show called "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy". Ted and the rest of the band were out gay men before that was common. In each show they would help out a straight guy with a problem by applying their "queer eye" to, for instance, help him throw a party or redecorate his apartment. Each of them had a specialty. One of them was a decorator. One of them was a fashion guy. And Ted was the food guy. The show was ground breaking, very popular at its peak, and introduced a lot of Americans to gay men being gay men. Ted's "foodie" credentials on "Queer eye" led him to the job at "Chopped"
The show has an extremely tight format. There is little or no variation from show to show. Think "Jeopardy!" but with food. Four contestants are judged by a three person panel typically consisting of working chefs. Each contestant has to prepare a course while a clock counts down. After each course a contestant is chopped (i.e. kicked off the show), hence the title. The line "if your dish doesn't cut it you will be chopped" is repeated frequently. After three rounds, typically, Appetizer, Entrée, and Dessert, three contestants have been chopped and we have a single "chopped champion" left who receives $10,000. (We are told the other contestants get nothing but apparently their expenses are covered and they get a $1,000 gift certificate.)
What makes this so tough is that for each round the contestants are presented with identical baskets containing four "mystery ingredients". All four ingredients, which are revealed when they open their baskets just before the clock starts, must be incorporated into the dish. And the ingredients are selected so that they do not go together. There is also heavy emphasis on the exotic. The show is filmed in New York and it is hard to imagine it being filmed anywhere else.
The producers must come up with 12 mystery ingredients per show. Over the run of the show that means about 6,000 different ingredients. (I'm sure they occasionally repeat an ingredient but this does not happen often.) There is rarely a round in which I even recognize all of the mystery ingredients, let alone have any idea what I would do with them. New York with it's many ethnic enclaves with their own specialty shops is almost a necessity when it comes to finding enough different items.
On the other hand the producers do provide a nice cooking setup for the contestants. Each contestant has their own station consisting of a work area in front and a stove behind. They are provided with a wide assortment of coking utensils and equipment. Off to the side is an area containing additional equipment that can be used on a "first come - first served" basis. This area houses a hot oil fryer, blast chiller, ice cream machine, and many other devices. It is common for more than one contestant to want to use say the fryer or the ice cream machine. Contestants are expected to not hog a machine but there are no formal rules about sharing.
And the "no formal rules" part is also true of the judging. There are almost no formal rules governing how the judges decide who gets chopped. Contestants are supposed to stop cooking when time is up. Contestants are expected to produce a dish that contains all four ingredients. But if a contestant omits an ingredient it does not automatically result in getting chopped. But a hard rule is that if a contestant omits an ingredient from some but not all plates (shorts a plate) all the shorted plates will go to a judge.
Besides the two areas mentioned above (and the area occupied by Ted and the judges) there is a pantry area that contains a wide assortment of ingredients commonly found in a well stocked commercial kitchen. Industrial refrigerators are stocked with ingredients that need to be refrigerated like milk, butter, etc. There is also a section for fruit and other fresh foods. The selection is seasonal but broad. How broad? It seems to contain edible flowers a goodly amount of the time. There are also a section with dried staples (sugar, flour, taco shells, etc.) and another section with a broad selection of spices. (Contestants get a tour of this area before taping starts so they know what's available here and get an idea of where things are located.)
It is possible to prepare very good meals in this environment except for a couple of things. You have a very short period of time to work with. The actual cooking must be done in 20 minutes for the Appetizer, and 30 minutes each for the Entrée and Dessert. For some particularly difficult baskets a more generous time limit (i.e. 30 minutes for the Appetizer or 45 minutes for the Entrée) is used.
But the biggest problem is the mystery ingredients. They are selected to be incompatible with each other. And one or more of them often normally takes a long time to prepare properly. As an example a cut of tough meat like those used by barbeque restaurants might be included. Normally it would be cooked over show heat for as long as 12 hours. But the contestant has to figure out a way to deliver a tender and flavorful "do" on this ingredient (and the rest of the basket) in the 30 minutes allotted.
What we as viewers see is a 60 minute show (44 minutes, if you ignore the commercials). It has been edited down from actual events. Various online sources indicate that it takes 12 - 20 hours to shoot an episode. Needless to say, even allowing for "prep" time and other "behind the scenes" activity, a lot of what goes on ends up on the cutting room floor. We get more of a "highlights from" that an accurate picture of what actually goes on. But one thing that is apparently portrayed accurately is that contestants have less than a minute between when they find out what's in the basket and when the count-down clock starts ticking.
Anyhow, as indicated above the show follows an extremely rigid format. Everybody is introduced. The first basket is opened. The contestants cook. They are then lined up in front of the judges. Each contestant must prepare four plates. Each judge gets one and the fourth goes under a cover. In turn each contestant describes what they have prepared, the judges sample and comment on it and we move on to the next contestant. The contestants are then herded into a holding pen and Ted and the judges confer. The contestants are brought back and Ted removes the cover and displays the dish of the chopped contestant. A judge explains their combined decision, the contestant exits, and we move on to the next round. Or, in the case of the final round, the winner is given a check for $10,000, is declared to be a "chopped champ", and makes a few short remarks. Roll credits.
Somewhere along the line the contestants are interviewed fairly extensively. They are asked to discuss their decisions and the thinking behind them or to react to events such as getting chopped. Portions of this are laid into the audio track or inserted into footage of the action.
The whole show is built around a countdown clock. During the timed portions of the action we are frequently getting shots of the countdown clock telling us how much time is left. A clock motif is used to get us into and out of the commercial breaks. Ted starts the clock counting down with "Clock starts now". When the clock runs out he announces that "time's up - step back". And, of course, dramatic and suspenseful music is playing in the background of a goodly part of the show.
If that's not enough Ted is often heard shouting out how much time is left. And then he ostentatiously counts the last ten seconds down. This is to a chorus of shouts from the judges giving useless encouragement and generally making a ruckus as the contestants rush to put the finishing touches on their plates. If I was trying to finish something tricky up I would not want a bunch of maniacal people shouting at me. But apparently this is common behavior in commercial kitchens so it really isn't out of line.
The judges do provide an actual service to the viewer. They engage in what writers call "maid and butler dialog". This is when the maid tells the butler (or vice versa) something they both already know as a vehicle for the author telling the reader something they need to know. In the context of the show judges will frequently discuss an ingredient or technique that many audience members (i. e. me) are unfamiliar with so we know what it is and how it might be used in a dish. They also will suggest how two ingredients might be combined to harmoniously create something.
But there seem to be rules as to how far they can go. With all the rushing around it is common for a contestant to lose track and burn something. The judges seem to always confine themselves to a general statement like "I smell something burning" rather than a specific statement like "the rice at Joe's station is burning". It is also not clear whether the contestants can even hear what the judges are saying in these cases.
I suppose that at some level this show can teach you something about cooking. I don't cook and have no interest in learning. So that sort of thing is wasted on me. But what I think it is terrible at is showing people how to put dishes together that taste really good.
The contestants are forced to compromise. It is possible that two or three ingredients can be combined harmoniously. But there is always at least one ringer. Yet the contestants are supposed to create a single dish in which all four ingredients can be tasted. But often the best thing that can be done to enhance the flavor of a dish as a whole is to omit completely one or more of the basket ingredients. But that comes close to being a chopping offense. If done deliberately it would probably result in an automatic shop.
Another approach would be to make one thing with some of the basket ingredients and another completely different thing with the others. Then present them as completely separate components on the dish that are to be eaten separately. This is frowned upon and substantially increases the probability of a chop.
Some tricks are permitted or even encouraged. A contestant can, for instance, create a soup containing some ingredients that goes to the side while the rest of the ingredients are in the preparation on the main plate. But the flavor of the soup should compliment the rest and it should be possible to combine a bit of soup with a bit of the rest when the judges taste the dish so they end up with a single integrated harmonious bite.
Another permitted trick is to, for instance, make a rub or coating for your meat or fish that uses a problematic ingredient. Or you can make a sauce that is smeared elegantly on the plate before the other ingredients are added or drizzled on top of your main preparation. But it is expected that the judges will combine these components into one "bite" and taste that. If the result works then you are a winner.
But it is often not possible (or it is beyond the capability of the contestants for one reason or another) to create a single dish that combines all the basket ingredients and still tastes really good. So what happens most of the time is the contestants strive for balance, a dish that is neither too sweet nor too sour, neither too bland nor too spicy, neither too this nor too that. If an ingredient is too bland you try to spice it up. If it is too spicy you try to tamp the heat down. If it has little or no taste you try to amp it up somehow. The result is a dish in which all four flavors can be detected but the dish is not much of anything and particularly not too delicious.
And my personal tastes tend toward the simple. I like good quality ingredients that have not been messed with much. Let the quality and taste of the original ingredients shine through. But the judges expect each basket ingredient to be transformed. So an ingredient might be an apple pie or ice cream or something else that already tastes great. Contestants, however, are not supposed to leave it alone. So, for instance, a contestant can use ice cream from the basket to make a different kind of ice cream or as a component that goes into something entirely different. A contestant could turn a strawberry pie from the basket into a strawberry rhubarb pie. But in no case should an ingredient just be left alone.
I don't know what the dishes the contestants end up with actually taste like. I would be a terrible judge for many reasons. The biggest one is that I am a picky eater and my food preferences sound peculiar even to me. So there are lots of basket ingredients I wouldn't eat no matter what. But I suspect that if I did get past my hang ups I would find most of the dishes mediocre and some tasting actually awful. It is so hard to not make the combinations taste not awful that the best that can be achieved most of the time is mediocrity. So there's that.
Then there's the fact that the judges sample four dishes in the first round, three in the second, and two in the third. So that's 36 basket ingredients plus whatever the contestants have thrown in along side the basket ingredients. The result is that for the most part the judges don't eat all of what's on the plate. They just take a taste of this and a taste of that. It's like wine tasting. Judges take a little sip, evaluate it, and spit it out. They miss out on a whole lot of very good wine. But that's the job.
As far as I can tell, the "Chopped" judges don't spit anything out. And I think in many cases they are being asked to taste something that came out badly. So they aren't missing out on that much great food. But I suspect they don't eat anything that isn't part of the tasting on show days because if they did they would be stuffed by the end of the day. And even if a dish starts out pretty good it may sit around long enough to get cold before it's time for the judges to taste it. The whole process is not conducive to the production of tasty food.
And something that bothers me personally is that a good portion of the food that is prepared for the judges goes to waste. And the contestants are not required to use all of the ingredient that is in the basket so they usually don't. They are often given a large piece of meat, say a leg of lamb, for instance. Only a small amount of it will end up on a plate. The rest gets thrown away. As is whatever portion of the ingredients taken from the pantry that didn't end up on a plate. As is the plate of food that goes under the cover.
And what happens to all the perishables the pantry is stocked with that don't end up getting used? I suspect they are given away to a food bank but the official web site is silent on this and much more. I find myself musing on the wastage as I watch the show.
That said, the show does suck me in. And the contestants are incredibly talented. Putting something, anything, on the plate in the time allowed and under the conditions they have to work in (all of the above plus a bunch of roving cameras poking everywhere) is incredibly impressive. But they do. And it is obvious that they are very skilled at the business of cooking.
A lot they do is the sort of thing where even somebody like me can tell if they are an expert or not. And they are experts. They also are very articulate about what they are doing and why they are doing it. This comes through very clearly in the commentary included in the broadcast. I can't tell based on my own personal expertise if they are making the right choices because I have no personal expertise in this area. I am forced to rely on the opinion of the judges for that. But the commentary tells me that, right or wrong, there is intention behind their actions. And I respect that.
And the whole countdown/contest element totally works. I'm sure that most of the contestants most of the time could prepare better dishes if only they had more time. But everybody knows this going in. It's speed chess not tournament chess so adjust your game accordingly. Lots of good cooks have gotten chopped by managing their time poorly or trying to do things that can't be done in the allowed time. Nobody thinks they are the one that is going to make this mistake. But it happens regularly. And that's one of the guilty pleasures of watching the show.
Someone is going to get chopped even if all the contestants prepare great dishes (except see below). But on the flip side if all the contestants prepare crummy dishes at least one of them will survive. The judging is relative. So it doesn't matter how good or bad you do. It matters that you do better than at least one of your competitors. It must be extremely frustrating to do well but get beat out by someone who happened on that day and at that time to do better.
And there is definitely a luck factor involved. You can make your own bad luck by forgetting to plate an ingredient for whatever reason. Or you can drop something or lose track and let something burn. But the worst bad luck is to get cut. Good chefs use incredibly sharp knives. And this very sharp knife, incidentally designed to cut meat, is flying close to your hand while you are trying to keep track of a million things. A hard and fast rule on the show is when you get cut you have to stop. There is a first aid person on site. That person needs to make sure your cut is cleaned and bandaged before you can continue. And any food you have bled on can't be eaten. And what can't be eaten can't be judged.
But in most episodes none of that comes into play. The judges still have to come up with someone to be chopped. And the process is entirely subjective. If we were there to see the food and if we could taste it then this might make their decisions may seem less arbitrary. The judges evaluate every dish. But most of what goes into their evaluations is either not available to us (i.e. how the food actually tastes) or ends up on the cutting room floor.
If we had all the video it might make the process seem less arbitrary. I also think the commentary is edited together with the intention of making it hard for viewers to determine who did well and who did badly. All contestants in a particular round seem to either do poorly or do well, if you go by the commentary we see. This makes for more drama and excitement, better TV. But it also makes it harder for us at home to tell if the judges chopped the right person.
Good reality TV (from a viewing perspective) is not reality. It is artificial in that it has been manipulated. We want drama, lots of drama. And the manipulation often goes far beyond the "just show us the exciting parts" kind of thing. In a typical "follow a bunch of people around" show like any of the "Real Housewives" shows, situations are manipulated and the participants are manipulated. "Did you hear what so and so said about you?" The participants would have to be pretty dim to not realize what's going on. But most of them are smart enough to know that a lot of conflict and drama, a lot of shouting and carrying on, is what is going to make the show a success. And they want the show to be a success and their part in the show to be significant. So they go along.
It is well known that on "The Jerry Springer Show" people will manufacture a shocking and mostly fictitious scenario to sell to the producers. The producers know this is going on. But they are adept at being appropriately oblivious. All they care about is if the group is good enough to maintain "plausible deniability". "We had no idea they were pulling the wool over our eyes, honest." Everybody ends up happy. A bunch of people make it onto TV that otherwise wouldn't be able to. The show gets good ratings. The group may let their friends know that the fix was in but they do what they can to not spoil a good thing for the next group coming down the block.
I am not a fan of the "Real Housewives", "Jerry Springer", etc. school of reality shows. But I am okay with the kinds of manipulations Chopped does. And I'm sure the producers carefully evaluate potential contestants looking for those they think will carry themselves well on TV. But its a show that takes real skill to succeed at and none of the contestants are being the least bit deceptive. The only real surprise contestants note is that it is much harder to win than they thought going in. And you probably have to be a little bit crazy to want to appear on the show so that bit of self deception is probably for the good.
"Springer, "Housewives", and similar shows need villains, the more hiss-able the better. The Chopped producers are happy if the audience likes and roots for everyone. Someone must be chopped. But the judges aren't being villainous when they chop someone. They are just doing their job. Similarly, a contestant is not a bad person because they lost. It's just that someone had to be chopped.
Finally, in one round of one episode the judges only said nice things about all three contestants and didn't chop anyone. But they announced at the time that this had never happened before. And they then proceeded to chop two contestants in the final round so there was only one winner in the end. So in the world of Chipped and for one round it is possible for everyone to win. And that's a nice place to leave things. Happy holidays.
"Chopped" is a TV show I have gotten into. I think with me it's a fad and at some point I will lose interest and drop it. But at the moment it fascinates me. From a business perspective, it's anything but frivolous. It has had 35 "seasons" (they seem to constitute 13 episode blocks), has aired continuously since 2009, and is getting close to broadcasting its 500th episode. It normally airs on Tuesday evenings on the Food Network and, as far as I can tell, its popularity remains strong. So I expect it to continue on long after I have tired of it. And that's fine with me.
"Chopped" is nominally a cooking competition show. But the emphasis falls heavily on the competition aspect. It requires superior cooking skills to be competitive but its format seems tailor made to guarantee that the food produced will often be mediocre at best. That's why I say it is mostly about the competition and not so much about the cooking.
The maser of ceremonies is Ted Allen. He gained fame by being one of the "fab five" on a show called "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy". Ted and the rest of the band were out gay men before that was common. In each show they would help out a straight guy with a problem by applying their "queer eye" to, for instance, help him throw a party or redecorate his apartment. Each of them had a specialty. One of them was a decorator. One of them was a fashion guy. And Ted was the food guy. The show was ground breaking, very popular at its peak, and introduced a lot of Americans to gay men being gay men. Ted's "foodie" credentials on "Queer eye" led him to the job at "Chopped"
The show has an extremely tight format. There is little or no variation from show to show. Think "Jeopardy!" but with food. Four contestants are judged by a three person panel typically consisting of working chefs. Each contestant has to prepare a course while a clock counts down. After each course a contestant is chopped (i.e. kicked off the show), hence the title. The line "if your dish doesn't cut it you will be chopped" is repeated frequently. After three rounds, typically, Appetizer, Entrée, and Dessert, three contestants have been chopped and we have a single "chopped champion" left who receives $10,000. (We are told the other contestants get nothing but apparently their expenses are covered and they get a $1,000 gift certificate.)
What makes this so tough is that for each round the contestants are presented with identical baskets containing four "mystery ingredients". All four ingredients, which are revealed when they open their baskets just before the clock starts, must be incorporated into the dish. And the ingredients are selected so that they do not go together. There is also heavy emphasis on the exotic. The show is filmed in New York and it is hard to imagine it being filmed anywhere else.
The producers must come up with 12 mystery ingredients per show. Over the run of the show that means about 6,000 different ingredients. (I'm sure they occasionally repeat an ingredient but this does not happen often.) There is rarely a round in which I even recognize all of the mystery ingredients, let alone have any idea what I would do with them. New York with it's many ethnic enclaves with their own specialty shops is almost a necessity when it comes to finding enough different items.
On the other hand the producers do provide a nice cooking setup for the contestants. Each contestant has their own station consisting of a work area in front and a stove behind. They are provided with a wide assortment of coking utensils and equipment. Off to the side is an area containing additional equipment that can be used on a "first come - first served" basis. This area houses a hot oil fryer, blast chiller, ice cream machine, and many other devices. It is common for more than one contestant to want to use say the fryer or the ice cream machine. Contestants are expected to not hog a machine but there are no formal rules about sharing.
And the "no formal rules" part is also true of the judging. There are almost no formal rules governing how the judges decide who gets chopped. Contestants are supposed to stop cooking when time is up. Contestants are expected to produce a dish that contains all four ingredients. But if a contestant omits an ingredient it does not automatically result in getting chopped. But a hard rule is that if a contestant omits an ingredient from some but not all plates (shorts a plate) all the shorted plates will go to a judge.
Besides the two areas mentioned above (and the area occupied by Ted and the judges) there is a pantry area that contains a wide assortment of ingredients commonly found in a well stocked commercial kitchen. Industrial refrigerators are stocked with ingredients that need to be refrigerated like milk, butter, etc. There is also a section for fruit and other fresh foods. The selection is seasonal but broad. How broad? It seems to contain edible flowers a goodly amount of the time. There are also a section with dried staples (sugar, flour, taco shells, etc.) and another section with a broad selection of spices. (Contestants get a tour of this area before taping starts so they know what's available here and get an idea of where things are located.)
It is possible to prepare very good meals in this environment except for a couple of things. You have a very short period of time to work with. The actual cooking must be done in 20 minutes for the Appetizer, and 30 minutes each for the Entrée and Dessert. For some particularly difficult baskets a more generous time limit (i.e. 30 minutes for the Appetizer or 45 minutes for the Entrée) is used.
But the biggest problem is the mystery ingredients. They are selected to be incompatible with each other. And one or more of them often normally takes a long time to prepare properly. As an example a cut of tough meat like those used by barbeque restaurants might be included. Normally it would be cooked over show heat for as long as 12 hours. But the contestant has to figure out a way to deliver a tender and flavorful "do" on this ingredient (and the rest of the basket) in the 30 minutes allotted.
What we as viewers see is a 60 minute show (44 minutes, if you ignore the commercials). It has been edited down from actual events. Various online sources indicate that it takes 12 - 20 hours to shoot an episode. Needless to say, even allowing for "prep" time and other "behind the scenes" activity, a lot of what goes on ends up on the cutting room floor. We get more of a "highlights from" that an accurate picture of what actually goes on. But one thing that is apparently portrayed accurately is that contestants have less than a minute between when they find out what's in the basket and when the count-down clock starts ticking.
Anyhow, as indicated above the show follows an extremely rigid format. Everybody is introduced. The first basket is opened. The contestants cook. They are then lined up in front of the judges. Each contestant must prepare four plates. Each judge gets one and the fourth goes under a cover. In turn each contestant describes what they have prepared, the judges sample and comment on it and we move on to the next contestant. The contestants are then herded into a holding pen and Ted and the judges confer. The contestants are brought back and Ted removes the cover and displays the dish of the chopped contestant. A judge explains their combined decision, the contestant exits, and we move on to the next round. Or, in the case of the final round, the winner is given a check for $10,000, is declared to be a "chopped champ", and makes a few short remarks. Roll credits.
Somewhere along the line the contestants are interviewed fairly extensively. They are asked to discuss their decisions and the thinking behind them or to react to events such as getting chopped. Portions of this are laid into the audio track or inserted into footage of the action.
The whole show is built around a countdown clock. During the timed portions of the action we are frequently getting shots of the countdown clock telling us how much time is left. A clock motif is used to get us into and out of the commercial breaks. Ted starts the clock counting down with "Clock starts now". When the clock runs out he announces that "time's up - step back". And, of course, dramatic and suspenseful music is playing in the background of a goodly part of the show.
If that's not enough Ted is often heard shouting out how much time is left. And then he ostentatiously counts the last ten seconds down. This is to a chorus of shouts from the judges giving useless encouragement and generally making a ruckus as the contestants rush to put the finishing touches on their plates. If I was trying to finish something tricky up I would not want a bunch of maniacal people shouting at me. But apparently this is common behavior in commercial kitchens so it really isn't out of line.
The judges do provide an actual service to the viewer. They engage in what writers call "maid and butler dialog". This is when the maid tells the butler (or vice versa) something they both already know as a vehicle for the author telling the reader something they need to know. In the context of the show judges will frequently discuss an ingredient or technique that many audience members (i. e. me) are unfamiliar with so we know what it is and how it might be used in a dish. They also will suggest how two ingredients might be combined to harmoniously create something.
But there seem to be rules as to how far they can go. With all the rushing around it is common for a contestant to lose track and burn something. The judges seem to always confine themselves to a general statement like "I smell something burning" rather than a specific statement like "the rice at Joe's station is burning". It is also not clear whether the contestants can even hear what the judges are saying in these cases.
I suppose that at some level this show can teach you something about cooking. I don't cook and have no interest in learning. So that sort of thing is wasted on me. But what I think it is terrible at is showing people how to put dishes together that taste really good.
The contestants are forced to compromise. It is possible that two or three ingredients can be combined harmoniously. But there is always at least one ringer. Yet the contestants are supposed to create a single dish in which all four ingredients can be tasted. But often the best thing that can be done to enhance the flavor of a dish as a whole is to omit completely one or more of the basket ingredients. But that comes close to being a chopping offense. If done deliberately it would probably result in an automatic shop.
Another approach would be to make one thing with some of the basket ingredients and another completely different thing with the others. Then present them as completely separate components on the dish that are to be eaten separately. This is frowned upon and substantially increases the probability of a chop.
Some tricks are permitted or even encouraged. A contestant can, for instance, create a soup containing some ingredients that goes to the side while the rest of the ingredients are in the preparation on the main plate. But the flavor of the soup should compliment the rest and it should be possible to combine a bit of soup with a bit of the rest when the judges taste the dish so they end up with a single integrated harmonious bite.
Another permitted trick is to, for instance, make a rub or coating for your meat or fish that uses a problematic ingredient. Or you can make a sauce that is smeared elegantly on the plate before the other ingredients are added or drizzled on top of your main preparation. But it is expected that the judges will combine these components into one "bite" and taste that. If the result works then you are a winner.
But it is often not possible (or it is beyond the capability of the contestants for one reason or another) to create a single dish that combines all the basket ingredients and still tastes really good. So what happens most of the time is the contestants strive for balance, a dish that is neither too sweet nor too sour, neither too bland nor too spicy, neither too this nor too that. If an ingredient is too bland you try to spice it up. If it is too spicy you try to tamp the heat down. If it has little or no taste you try to amp it up somehow. The result is a dish in which all four flavors can be detected but the dish is not much of anything and particularly not too delicious.
And my personal tastes tend toward the simple. I like good quality ingredients that have not been messed with much. Let the quality and taste of the original ingredients shine through. But the judges expect each basket ingredient to be transformed. So an ingredient might be an apple pie or ice cream or something else that already tastes great. Contestants, however, are not supposed to leave it alone. So, for instance, a contestant can use ice cream from the basket to make a different kind of ice cream or as a component that goes into something entirely different. A contestant could turn a strawberry pie from the basket into a strawberry rhubarb pie. But in no case should an ingredient just be left alone.
I don't know what the dishes the contestants end up with actually taste like. I would be a terrible judge for many reasons. The biggest one is that I am a picky eater and my food preferences sound peculiar even to me. So there are lots of basket ingredients I wouldn't eat no matter what. But I suspect that if I did get past my hang ups I would find most of the dishes mediocre and some tasting actually awful. It is so hard to not make the combinations taste not awful that the best that can be achieved most of the time is mediocrity. So there's that.
Then there's the fact that the judges sample four dishes in the first round, three in the second, and two in the third. So that's 36 basket ingredients plus whatever the contestants have thrown in along side the basket ingredients. The result is that for the most part the judges don't eat all of what's on the plate. They just take a taste of this and a taste of that. It's like wine tasting. Judges take a little sip, evaluate it, and spit it out. They miss out on a whole lot of very good wine. But that's the job.
As far as I can tell, the "Chopped" judges don't spit anything out. And I think in many cases they are being asked to taste something that came out badly. So they aren't missing out on that much great food. But I suspect they don't eat anything that isn't part of the tasting on show days because if they did they would be stuffed by the end of the day. And even if a dish starts out pretty good it may sit around long enough to get cold before it's time for the judges to taste it. The whole process is not conducive to the production of tasty food.
And something that bothers me personally is that a good portion of the food that is prepared for the judges goes to waste. And the contestants are not required to use all of the ingredient that is in the basket so they usually don't. They are often given a large piece of meat, say a leg of lamb, for instance. Only a small amount of it will end up on a plate. The rest gets thrown away. As is whatever portion of the ingredients taken from the pantry that didn't end up on a plate. As is the plate of food that goes under the cover.
And what happens to all the perishables the pantry is stocked with that don't end up getting used? I suspect they are given away to a food bank but the official web site is silent on this and much more. I find myself musing on the wastage as I watch the show.
That said, the show does suck me in. And the contestants are incredibly talented. Putting something, anything, on the plate in the time allowed and under the conditions they have to work in (all of the above plus a bunch of roving cameras poking everywhere) is incredibly impressive. But they do. And it is obvious that they are very skilled at the business of cooking.
A lot they do is the sort of thing where even somebody like me can tell if they are an expert or not. And they are experts. They also are very articulate about what they are doing and why they are doing it. This comes through very clearly in the commentary included in the broadcast. I can't tell based on my own personal expertise if they are making the right choices because I have no personal expertise in this area. I am forced to rely on the opinion of the judges for that. But the commentary tells me that, right or wrong, there is intention behind their actions. And I respect that.
And the whole countdown/contest element totally works. I'm sure that most of the contestants most of the time could prepare better dishes if only they had more time. But everybody knows this going in. It's speed chess not tournament chess so adjust your game accordingly. Lots of good cooks have gotten chopped by managing their time poorly or trying to do things that can't be done in the allowed time. Nobody thinks they are the one that is going to make this mistake. But it happens regularly. And that's one of the guilty pleasures of watching the show.
Someone is going to get chopped even if all the contestants prepare great dishes (except see below). But on the flip side if all the contestants prepare crummy dishes at least one of them will survive. The judging is relative. So it doesn't matter how good or bad you do. It matters that you do better than at least one of your competitors. It must be extremely frustrating to do well but get beat out by someone who happened on that day and at that time to do better.
And there is definitely a luck factor involved. You can make your own bad luck by forgetting to plate an ingredient for whatever reason. Or you can drop something or lose track and let something burn. But the worst bad luck is to get cut. Good chefs use incredibly sharp knives. And this very sharp knife, incidentally designed to cut meat, is flying close to your hand while you are trying to keep track of a million things. A hard and fast rule on the show is when you get cut you have to stop. There is a first aid person on site. That person needs to make sure your cut is cleaned and bandaged before you can continue. And any food you have bled on can't be eaten. And what can't be eaten can't be judged.
But in most episodes none of that comes into play. The judges still have to come up with someone to be chopped. And the process is entirely subjective. If we were there to see the food and if we could taste it then this might make their decisions may seem less arbitrary. The judges evaluate every dish. But most of what goes into their evaluations is either not available to us (i.e. how the food actually tastes) or ends up on the cutting room floor.
If we had all the video it might make the process seem less arbitrary. I also think the commentary is edited together with the intention of making it hard for viewers to determine who did well and who did badly. All contestants in a particular round seem to either do poorly or do well, if you go by the commentary we see. This makes for more drama and excitement, better TV. But it also makes it harder for us at home to tell if the judges chopped the right person.
Good reality TV (from a viewing perspective) is not reality. It is artificial in that it has been manipulated. We want drama, lots of drama. And the manipulation often goes far beyond the "just show us the exciting parts" kind of thing. In a typical "follow a bunch of people around" show like any of the "Real Housewives" shows, situations are manipulated and the participants are manipulated. "Did you hear what so and so said about you?" The participants would have to be pretty dim to not realize what's going on. But most of them are smart enough to know that a lot of conflict and drama, a lot of shouting and carrying on, is what is going to make the show a success. And they want the show to be a success and their part in the show to be significant. So they go along.
It is well known that on "The Jerry Springer Show" people will manufacture a shocking and mostly fictitious scenario to sell to the producers. The producers know this is going on. But they are adept at being appropriately oblivious. All they care about is if the group is good enough to maintain "plausible deniability". "We had no idea they were pulling the wool over our eyes, honest." Everybody ends up happy. A bunch of people make it onto TV that otherwise wouldn't be able to. The show gets good ratings. The group may let their friends know that the fix was in but they do what they can to not spoil a good thing for the next group coming down the block.
I am not a fan of the "Real Housewives", "Jerry Springer", etc. school of reality shows. But I am okay with the kinds of manipulations Chopped does. And I'm sure the producers carefully evaluate potential contestants looking for those they think will carry themselves well on TV. But its a show that takes real skill to succeed at and none of the contestants are being the least bit deceptive. The only real surprise contestants note is that it is much harder to win than they thought going in. And you probably have to be a little bit crazy to want to appear on the show so that bit of self deception is probably for the good.
"Springer, "Housewives", and similar shows need villains, the more hiss-able the better. The Chopped producers are happy if the audience likes and roots for everyone. Someone must be chopped. But the judges aren't being villainous when they chop someone. They are just doing their job. Similarly, a contestant is not a bad person because they lost. It's just that someone had to be chopped.
Finally, in one round of one episode the judges only said nice things about all three contestants and didn't chop anyone. But they announced at the time that this had never happened before. And they then proceeded to chop two contestants in the final round so there was only one winner in the end. So in the world of Chipped and for one round it is possible for everyone to win. And that's a nice place to leave things. Happy holidays.
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