Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook Read Free Page B

pretty good television.
    I have to admit, I grew to like this life—roaming the globe in search of nothing more than food and kicks. I also came to enjoy the new-to-me process of telling stories with the help of an all-new chest of toys: cameras, editing boards, sound editing—and really creative professionals who knew how to use them. I like making things. And I like telling stories. I like going to Asia. And this TV gig allowed me to do all of those things
    I got sucked in—not by fame or money (of which there was precious little). I’d long ago had all the cocaine I’d ever wanted. No sports car was ever going to cure my ills. I became seduced by the world—and the freedom that television had given me—to travel it as I wished. I was also drunk on a new and exciting power to manipulate images and sound in order to tell stories, to make audiences feel about places I’d been the way I wanted them to feel. I was increasingly proud of some of the episodes I and my partners, camera people/producers Chris Collins and Lydia Tenaglia, were making—and how we were making them. I began to appreciate what editors and sound mixers and post-production people can do. Making TV was becoming… fun , and, in more than a few cases, actually creatively satisfying.
    I wrote the book and yet continued filming. The tail now wagged the dog. I was hooked on travel, on seeing the world, and on the terms I was seeing it. Simply put? I didn’t want to share. The world had become, on the one hand, a much bigger place, but, on the other hand, it contracted. Like a lot of travelers, I started to turn inward from the view out the window, started to see what was going on out there through an ever-narrowing lens. When I’d set out, I’d see a sunset or a temple and want, instinctively, to turn to my right or to my left and say to somebody, anybody, “Isn’t that a magnificent sunset?”
    That impulse quickly faded. I felt proprietary about the world. I became selfish. That sunset was mine.
    I was on the road for the better part of two years, during which time everything in my life changed. I stopped working as a chef—a job whose daily routines had always been the only thing that stood between me and chaos. My first marriage began to fall apart.
    Sitting down in the Food Network’s corporate offices back in New York, I was a guy with very different priorities than the ones I’d left my kitchen with. For better or worse, I now had the ludicrous notion that this television thing could be “good” and even, occasionally, “important.”
    On a recent book tour in Spain, I’d been introduced to Ferran Adrià—and, amazingly, he’d agreed to allow us to shoot him in his workshop taller and in his nearly-impossible-to-reserve restaurant, El Bulli. Adrià was already the most important and controversial chef on the planet—and his restaurant the most sought-after reservation. More significantly, no one to date had ever filmed what he had agreed to show me and my crew: full access to his creative process, to him, his chefs, his favorite restaurants, his inspirations—and, finally, to eat and film the entire El Bulli tasting menu in the kitchen with Adrià himself at the table, explaining things course by course. It had never been done—nor has it since, as far as I know.
    But while I was away, something had happened.
    Suddenly they weren’t so interested in “foreign”-based shows anymore at Food Network. The executives who’d enthusiastically taken us on and supported our more self-indulgent and racy endeavors didn’t seem to have the pull they’d once had. Or the interest. When we told them about what Adrià had agreed to do, they were indifferent. “Does he talk English?” and “It’s too smart for us” were both mentioned as factors in their eventual refusal to pony up for such an episode—or any episodes outside the United States, it now seemed.
    A sour-faced network lawyer became a regular participant at “creative”