PLANET GREEN
One of the shows I was most looking forward to on Discovery’s new Planet Green network was Emeril Green. Not because I’m a huge fan of Emeril Lagasse—actually, I liked his original cooking show, The Essence of Emeril, but then Food Network turned him into a catchphrase-shouting gastrotainer. Still, the guy knows his stuff, people like to watch him, and food is the area of life in which people become most intimately involved with the environment. Through food, you literally take in the outside world, and whether you’re concerned about internal effects (what pesticides are doing to your body) or external ones (what factory farming is doing to the ecosystem), eating is the perfect subject for an environmental show. You are what you eat, and you inhabit it as well.
So I watched Planet Green’s marathon debut of Emeril Green to see what kind of information it would offer about food and the environment. Maybe it would explain a little something about what types of seafood are being overfished and which are more sustainable? Look at the importance of eating locally vs. eating organic food from far away? Talk about the amount of petroleum involved in big agriculture? Or the health benefits of organic veggies and grass-fed beef?
Not so much.
The show begins with Emeril appearing over opening credits that flash environmental buzzwords—”healthy … fresh natural solution … free-range … grass-fed… organic.” In each episode, he meets with a regular person who has a kitchen “problem” (one woman wants to impress her husband, who is an accomplished cook). He takes them to a Whole Foods grocery store, and they prepare a meal together.
And… that’s pretty much it. I watched two episodes of Emeril Green, and the sole bit of food information I got about anything environmental was that organic carrots do not need to be peeled. And that was in a screen caption—I didn’t watch the entire marathon, but I didn’t hear a bit of eco-info come out of Emeril’s mouth. The cooking segments themselves were worthwhile enough; notably, Emeril seems to have dialed his showboaty personality back considerably. But the entire eco-message of Emeril Green seems to be: Just shop at Whole Foods! The rest will take care of itself!
Actually, the entire show had the feel of something that had been repurposed, as if Emeril were shopping a cooking show in which he would partner up with regular people, and in order to get it on Planet Green, agreed to let them throw some buzzwords in the credits. The “green” in the show isn’t integrated into the content; it’s just thrown on the side as an afterthought garnish, like a sprig of parsley.
I wrote a column criticizing some of Planet Green’s eco-celebrity shows a few weeks ago, so I probably sound I’m obsessively beating up on Planet Green here. But the very reason I’m interested in this channel is that I think this stuff matters: I belong to a food co-op, buy organic fruit, and I’m aware that a vegetarian diet puts less strain on the Earth’s resources than meat-eating—though that doesn’t keep actually me from eating steak and grilling bratwursts. I feel properly bad about it, though.
When you criticize a well-intentioned cable channel, some people will argue that you’re picking on the wrong guys. Planet Green is at least trying to make shows about an important subject, so why not cut them some slack and criticize shows that don’t even try to have redeeming social value?
But to me, a show like Emeril Green is a perfect example of how vaguely “raising awareness” by throwing on a veneer of buzzwords isn’t enough, and in a way might even be worse than doing nothing. The fact that “green” has become a popular term and subject of interest has been good for the environmental movement, but the problem now is that the term has become vague and confused in the popular mind, associated with anything that somehow makes you feel healthy or in touch with nature, whether it’s any good for the environment or not.
And a show like Emeril Green—in which “green” is somehow nebulously connected with including a few vegetables in your menu and shopping at a high-end grocery store—isn’t exactly clearing up the confusion. If I snack on a Granny Smith apple raised with pesticides instead of a bag of potato chips, am I being “green”? I mean, the apple’s green, isn’t it?
That’s not to say that Emeril Green needs to be some kind of sanctimonious lecture, just that it could easily work in a few sentences of information here and there, the same way Lagasse would as a matter of course explain what linguica is when preparing a recipe. The job of any host on a cooking show is to impart information entertainingly, without alienating the non-hardcore viewers, and that’s what Lagasse is good at. But instead, he leaves pretty much the entire green message of the show to the product placement and the graphic design.
As it is, Emeril Green would have been a decent enough general cooking show. But as an example of putatively “green” TV it is a paradox: recycled, and yet a waste.