Alton Brown talks shop
The Good Eats host on the ego of chefs (cooks?).
For 10 years, Alton Brown has played the nutty professor of the Food Network, employing elaborate homemade props, puppets, puns, and pop culture in the service of food education on his Peabody Award-winning cooking show Good Eats. Brown also brought his affinity for food science and history to the Iron Chef America stadium as a commentator, took it out on the road for his Feasting On Asphalt and Feasting On Waves miniseries, and put it onto the pages of several books. As Good Eats enters its second decade on the air—a milestone that will be celebrated with a live, variety-show-style episode on Saturday, October 10—Brown is revisiting each episode via a trilogy of cookbooks: the first, Good Eats: The Early Years, was just released. Before heading off on a string of book-signings—in his own, self-piloted plane, no less—Brown schooled The A.V. Club on keeping food user-friendly, how his show is like Barney Miller and South Park, and why you should never trust someone who calls himself “chef.”