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Bread and circuses

In a nation where food is abundant, television chefs are the new gladiators.

When the Baal-worshiping Roman emperor Heliogabalus wanted to kick it up a notch, he would have his cook toss precious jewels into the vegetables. To impress friends, he'd order platters of flamingo brains and parrot heads. Like a lot of ancient rulers, Heliogabalus was a creep, a cruel and gluttonous despot whose excesses shocked even third-century Romans. But he was on to something. He knew food could be great entertainment, and he had the power and wealth to follow his gastronomic bliss.

Heliogabalus would have loved the Food Network. An evening spent tuned in to Emeril Lagasse with his trademark bam! style of flicking herbs at his creations, followed by the campy extravagance of Iron Chef or the macho grilling of Bobby Flay, is a night of voyeuristic pleasure. It is reality TV without the artifice of mindless babes and hunks "competing" against one another on desert islands. It is drama without the histrionics of the World Wrestling Federation. And it is far more doable (potentially, at least - hey, this is television) than one of Norm Abram's dadoed and dovetailed hutches.

Eighteen centuries after Heliogabalus, food-as-theater has moved from the emperor's pavilion to Everyman's household. There's a technology connection here. It has to do not just with the invention of cable TV, important as that has been to mankind's progress, but with a century of innovations that severed the preparation of food from its messy, onerous roots and allowed cooking to take its place at center stage. And it does that, whether in the dramatically lighted "kitchen stadium" of Iron Chef samurai, the Tonight Show-like set of Lagasse, or at bustling, open-grill restaurants or dazzling $100,000 home kitchens where people are invited to ooh and aah as a meal is performed.

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin saw this coming. In 1825, Brillat-Savarin wrote the groundbreaking gastronomic text, The Physiology of Taste, in which he argued that taste is such a dominant sense and food such an important human need that dining inevitably "rules over" a mortal life. Even more than does sex. Without food, after all, the ability and desire to fool around flags. And food is frequently a prelude to canoodling. It was Brillat-Savarin who noted that the truffle "is not exactly an aphrodisiac, but it tends to make women more tender and men more likable."

He was a food snob who would have had no truck with moderns who unthinkingly wolf down a Big Mac and a Coke. Those who are careless about what they eat, he wrote, are those "whom heaven has not touched with the sacred flame; to them, all food comes alike, and meals are but a part of the day's work; as the oyster bank to the oyster, so is the table to such as these."

Of course, Brillat-Savarin was from the upper class. He does not appear to have cooked. He had a cook and could afford to dine out at the restaurants that were being established in Paris at the time. If gastronomy is art, then it can occur only after basic needs have been met. For most of history, the middle and lower classes of the world viewed food not so much as pleasure but as desperate need. To them, a Big Mac would have been a marvel, especially the way it is handed across the counter cheaply and with no apparent butchery or baking involved.

When Fannie Farmer and Maria Parloa were advising housewives on cooking in late 19th-century Boston, preparing a meal was a daylong task that required battlefield logistics and backbreaking effort. To make corned beef, for instance, Parloa called for a piece of beef weighing 10 pounds to be boiled in 2 gallons of water for six hours. Just getting the oven ready for baking the day's bread could take an hour or two before dawn. And without long-term refrigeration, almost everything that was cooked had to be consumed in two or three days.

The work was so messy, so large-scale, and had such disgusting aspects to it - slaughter, waste, odor - that it was carried out far from the family dining area. The idea of cooking as spectacle would never have occurred to "Miss Parloa's" students.

Even with refrigeration and gas stoves, the first half of the 20th century was no picnic for most blue-collar cooks. Two world wars and the Great Depression saw to that. The baked bean sandwich and sugarless, eggless cakes come from this era. Bread made with wheat was a luxury. "Better eat war bread now than the black bread of Germany later" was the slogan for "liberty bread," which was made from potatoes, rice, cottonseed meal, or just about any wheat substitute.

And then came the postwar boom, which brought not only abundance but a wealth of new, ethnically diverse foods and tastes. In the past 55 years, food in all its forms and at prices that almost everyone can afford has flourished, while food preparation has slipped more and more behind the scenes. An oven roaster from Stop & Shop is ready to bake, no beheading, no plucking needed. And even baking a chicken seems adventurous to cooks who rely on precooked nuggets.

Whether you cook or merely watch the cook, food is great entertainment. That may explain our fascination with it now. The ingredients come in neat packages. Playing with them in a sharp-looking kitchen is a tactile, visual, and aromatic treat, especially at a time when more of us are staring at computer screens during our waking hours. Plus, cooking is easy to master. You don't need athletic prowess or artistic genius. You just need to know how to follow instructions and then - with a little showmanship - how to go bam! with the parsley. It's not just emperors and the high born and prime-time cooks who can follow their gastronomic bliss. You, too, can be touched by the sacred flame.