Hell's Kitchen

Ever watch that show “Hell’s Kitchen”? It’s basically typical, sensational, reality-TV-trash. But I find myself watching it from time to time anyway. Chef Ramsey intrigues me. He’s so blisteringly harsh, and yet he has an unexpectedly sharp ethical compass. Not that he is a great model of Christian principles, but just the same, he seems to detest waste, and not just because it is bad for business. He will often make his chefs sort through garbage to remind them of just how wasteful they can be. Another thing that I admire about him is that he has a keen sense of where food comes from. Chicken is not just slabs of meat that you buy at the grocery store. It comes from a living animal that had to die so that we can consume it. On tonight’s episode, he had the chefs catch chickens… and I actually thought he was going to make them kill them to demonstrate his point. They didn’t actually have to do it; I’m guessing this was a decision made by a Fox executive to avoid animal rights activists protesting. I was actually a little disappointed. Not because I was thirsty to see chicken blood, but because I think that I too suffer from an unhealthy disconnect from the food that I eat. I take it for granted that an animal had to die so that I could eat it.